10 Beautiful Rooms

Happy Monday to you all – at least to those that are reading this on a Monday. For the rest of you – hi! Are you ready to take a stroll through 10 beautiful rooms – the pick of the week on instagram and some of my favourite feeds that you might want to follow.

Talking of instagram; if you are reading this on the morning of Monday 18th and are visiting any of the London Design Festival, I will be at Chelsea Design Harbour this morning doing a talk on instagrammable interiors with the photographer Paul Craig, whose words have graced these pages before and who photographs interiors for a living.

If you can’t make it (rsvp to [email protected] to see if there are spaces) then let me know in the comments if you would find a post on this subject useful.

Now then, these ‘ere rooms. I received a press release from Tom Howley Kitchens this week, which said that last year 50 per cent of his orders requested the colour Tansy, a cool grey. This year, however, he has noticed a sharp increase in orders for black, in particular for his colour Nightshade, leading the writer to quip that black is now the new black.

Actually I rather like that I might “borrow” it.

Now as I have said before, trends take about three years to arrive and filter through to the mainstream which is why, I think, they become popular – because we look at them for a long time in magazines and, ahem, on blogs, before we actually start thinking about doing them ourselves by which time we have become completely used to the idea.

When we bought this house eight years ago, I told/suggested gently to my husband that we should/ I wanted/we were going to paint the floorboards white. “We’re not doing that,” he said. “Everyone has white painted floorboards.”

“Who?” I demanded. And we worked out, when we stopped to think about it, that we didn’t actually know any real people who had painted their floors white, but that we had seen it a lot in magazines. So we did it. On the basis that we weren’t actually copying anyone in real life that we actually knew or who might come round.

Now, of course, you see it a lot and the real trendsetters (of which I have never pretended to be one) are painting their floors dark or installing parquet. In my dreams.

And so it is with the trend for dark kitchens. We’ve seen them for a while on instagram and online but most people have stuck to white as it’s a big investment and they don’t want to get bored. But gradually the trend seems to be seeping through and this is the first report – that I have seen – from a kitchen manufacturer – acknowledging an increase in orders for a dark colour.

So. Will you?

Dark walls, on the other hand have been around for a while now and those who are ahead of the curve – and that doesn’t mean you have to be/should be/or should take any notice are swinging back towards lighter and brighter colours. Which the colour psychologists may tell you is a sign that we are yearning to move out of the dark times and I reaching towards the light. That was certainly the thinking behind the Dulux Spiced Honey revelations last week.

I find it all completely fascinating and while I would deny that all this brings any weight to bear on the colour of my walls, it probably does play into the subconscious if you read about it enough.

So here are some lighter rooms to give you food for thought. As you know I have a mix of light and dark in my house and that’s – still – the way I like it. But there has definitely been a move towards paler walls recently. Mind you, perhaps that’s the contrast with the rush of dark kitchens that everyone is ordering.

So you know what this all means don’t you? Find your own style and decorate your house that way. And just as your taste in clothes may change over the years according to age, mood and circumstance, so your taste in interiors may also change from dark and moody to pale and interesting.

It has to be said though that this white bedroom with its dark wood antique dresser is definitely calling to me at the moment. I have never been able to decide if I want a dark bedroom to be cosy at night or a light one to get me up in the morning. Currently it’s a mix of pale grey and dark green, which seems to be working. This combination of light walls and dark furniture is also working.

Finally a pale timber clad sitting room contrasted with a fabulously dark bathroom. Both have floorboards but one is modern rustic while the other is more glam luxe. It’s a hard choice so, as ever, when it comes to your own homes pick the elements that will work with your style and your architecture and create your own space  that is just for you regardless of trends and fashions. After all, as Coco Chanel said: “Fashion comes and goes but style is forever.”

And with that I shall leave you to mull over your own style.