House Beautiful

Looking to freshen up your interior decor? JB explores some of the current design trends for a beautiful home.

I’ve been a homeowner for 3 months now (buying? Check out my sage advice here) and have spent the last 12 weeks popping in and out of furniture shops, DIY stores and kitchen concessions – Boyfriend obligingly traipsing behind. While spending every waking weekend hour in Habitat, you start to pick up on the big interior design trends for summer 2014, and I figured I may as well share these with you in case you’re looking too:

Bright bright baby

Accents of neon pink, citrus yellow and royal blue are very a la mode right now: Oliver Bonas is stocking some great bright wire ornaments which you definitely need to take a look at. Team with whites, blacks and greys to bring some much needed colour to our currently drizzly lives.

Pick just one or two key colours and subtly repeat them through the room – any more and you’ll be in danger of looking like a clown threw up in your kitchen.

Scandi crisp and clean

Everyone is loving the Scandis at the moment: their good genes, crime thriller boxsets and minimalistic decor being the main reasons. Neutral colours, worn wood and plenty of space are the characteristic style trends of the nation. Very ‘back to nature’, this is a great feel for a dining room, but should be used carefully in rooms you want to feel cosy and warm.

Picture frame mania

I’m guilty of this. In fact, apologies if you can’t find any frames in IKEA – I bought them all. They cover the back wall of my bedroom: all jaunty angles and black & white. I have rails of them in my lounge where the pictures add a splash of colour to my white-washed floor. In fact, I have too many to hang that they’re leaning up against walls and on every shelf. It’s organised chaos but I’d like to think it works!

Tip: avoid having the same IKEA prints as everyone else by sourcing all your images online (Unsplash is a great site for free high-res beautifully shot scenes) and taking them to a printer (a much cheaper way to fill 50 frames too, trust me).

Vintage tat (I mean that in the best way, of course)

Car boot sales and bric-a-brac shops are bringing in the business as people head off in search of vintage cameras, ladders (for decor, yes, just ask NJ), gramophones, wooden trunks and old arcade game dining tables: to name but some of the stuff that can be found at Wimbledon Dogs’ car boot every weekend from 6am-1pm (get there any later than 10 and there’ll be nothing left).

Other decent London car boots are the Nag’s head car boot, Capital car boot in Pimlico, and the Shepperyon bar boot in the west.

Words by – Jo Birch займы на карту онлайн займ без регистрациизайм с 20 лет на картувзять займ без прописки