With the pandemic making homebodies of us all, beautifying our living spaces has become a collective obsession. Monsteras have been bought. Bookshelves have been colour-coded.
It’s understandable. “We spend 90% of our time inside our houses now,” says Monique Vuk, an interior decorator from One Wolf Design who is currently living through Melbourne’s second lockdown. “And we don’t all have north-facing windows. We didn’t consider when we rented our properties that we were going to spend so much time inside.
“We really are affected by our surroundings, so creating a little bit of ownership of them is nice.”
So what are some easy – and cheap – ways to fall a little more in love with the homes we never leave? To find out, we asked four interior designers for the biggest changes we can make for under $100.
Light it up
“For an immediate transformation of a space, a simple, cost-effective thing to consider is lighting,” says Vuk. “A $10 bulb can completely alter the vibe of a room and create dimension and atmosphere.”
Lighting is either “cool” or “warm”, Vuk says. Warm lighting promotes a sense of “calm, cosiness, relaxation,” and works best in the spaces we go to unwind, such as living rooms or bedrooms. Cool light tends to make people feel more alert and is better suited to workspaces such as the kitchen and study.
“Personally, I usually find that bulbs that are too cold leave me feeling a little bit like I’m in a hospital,” Vuk says. “I gravitate towards warmer tones. It helps with the mood lighting and creating a calm, inviting space.”
If this has made you realise you’re currently bathed in a garishly cold light, the good news is you might not even have to spend a buck to fix it – Vuk points out that many of the newer bulbs around today can actually be switched between cool and warm.
And in this WFH era, she recommends using lighting to demarcate your day. Use a lamp with a cooler bulb on your desk during your work hours, then turn it off when you’re done to help yourself mentally transition to relaxation time.
Change one key thing
When Pia Watson from Tom Mark Henry bought her first apartment, there wasn’t much money left over to renovate it. So she looked for little fixes that can make a big impact.
“One thing we did in the kitchen and bathroom was we took the cabinetry off and repainted it,” she says. “We also painted the splashback – it’s amazing how much of a difference a coat of paint on existing joinery makes. It looks like a brand new kitchen.”
You can apply the same philosophy to the bathroom. “A new toilet seat or new taps can refresh an old space and make it a little bit more modern, without having to redo the whole room,” Watson says.
Declutter and rearrange
“Most people have good taste, they just have too much taste,” says Penny Del Castillo of In Design International. Her advice? “Declutter, rearrange what you already own and use the $100 to arrange for a rubbish pick up.”
For Del Castillo, the problem isn’t necessarily that we have too much stuff, but that the stuff we have doesn’t feel cohesive. “If you’ve got stuff that doesn’t work with each other because you just collected it randomly along the way, it might not be too much physically, but it’s too much going on. You no longer have a theme or identity because it’s just a hodgepodge.”
If you’ve got 10 things on a sideboard, she says, pick the three or four that go together and move the rest. You might not even have to chuck that much – just rearrange things.
“It’s about bringing together the things that look like a family by colour, or by material, or by origin,” Del Castillo says. “If you’ve got Balinese masks or something like that it’s like, OK, well the Balinese masks look great. But maybe not next to the Portuguese cockerel.”
Paint a (small) room
If you’re looking for a high-impact, low-cost way to change your home you can’t go past a coat of paint, says Sally Knibbs of Melbourne’s Sally Caroline.
She recommends getting your overalls on and repainting one room in a new colour. “We’ve done a couple of projects where we’ve gone quite bold, in a blue or green, and it looks really beautiful.”
“But even if you feel a bit nervous about a big colour, it could just be a really light shade of grey. And that covering a whole room is a really sweet, slight change from the standard white wall.” Anything oceanic in hue is good, Knibbs says – just avoid reds, oranges and yellows.
This tip applies to smaller rooms such as studies or sitting rooms – Knibbs advises keeping bigger living spaces white or off-white. And last but not least, Knibbs encourages painting the ceilings, skirting boards and walls all the same shade. “I love the idea of embracing and really committing to a colour,” she says.
