In normal times, if you’ve really had it with where you live, if there are too many of you and not enough of your home, you move. But with soaring interest rates, higher mortgage payments, punishing rents and whatnot, you can’t move. So in other times, perhaps you’d paint the walls, or throw out old stuff and buy new stuff, but these are choppy waters: in an ideal world, you could create miraculous change on zero pounds.
So what will it take to make you fall back in love with your environment? Primping, idiot: improving the overall look of your home with stuff you already own, by moving it about and maybe dusting it. It’s the interiors version of a date night: small, even minute acts of care and adjustment that flatter the perspective.
Broadly, my problems consist of having no visual sense to speak of, and being quite messy. I just don’t get very much information from my eyes; left up to me, the furniture would all be at the wrong angle (jaunty, not straight-on to the wall), or in the wrong place (side-tables nowhere near anything useful). I can survey the scene of my living room and know that there’s something discordant about it, but tracing that to the random pair of dirty socks on the mantelpiece, or the books stacked on their side, would take me about a year. The living room is by far the tidiest in the house, because it has no TV in it, which wards off the kids like hazmat tape; it also doesn’t reflect the hoarder I naturally am, because literally every time I turn my back, Mr Z throws something away. But you wouldn’t call it visually coherent.
So I called in the help of a stylist, or home stager as they’re now known, Anna Mackie-East. “The biggest thing that makes a difference, if you’re not painting, is to move your furniture,” she says. “That’s the most transformative: rearrange; defamiliarise. It makes you think about your space differently. Turn seating to face each other, instead of facing the TV: that makes it more sociable. Move stuff away from walls; that refreshes the space.”
But what if you think your home is already perfect, because you have exquisite taste? “People think they’ve got really good taste,” Mackie-East says, “but most people haven’t. If you have a flair for knowing what looks good, you’re born with it.” She’s found a fortunate collaborator in me, as I don’t think I have any taste at all, and am unlikely to take offence. The bigger stroke of luck is, you can have no taste, or you can deludedly feel you have all the taste yet only have a small amount, and there are still principles you can follow that will lift your mood and refresh your living space.
A lot of it starts with cushions: Mackie-East instantly turns a small sofa from glorified dog bed into inviting-and-peaceful-resting-spot with the artful placing of two cushions. I want to be honest, these were not my own: the entry level to owning cushions is being the kind of person who goes into a shop and browses cushions. I have never done this. My husband made some soft purchases when he was single because he read, probably in GQ, that women distrusted men whose surroundings were too bare or monastic. So we have some once-expensive, pretty random cushions from the 00s, all of which are stained with either coffee or red wine, because I read, probably in British Psychological Digest, that if you want to lodge your objection to gender stereotypes while expressing completely unreasonable sexual jealousy at the same time, and you don’t want to use words, the best way to do that is by spilling. Mackie-East didn’t want to use any of those. If you mix plain cushions with patterned, that adds interest; and you want to position them in such a way as to look inviting to lean against, not at the jaunty diagonal of the 80s advert.
I’ve got my furniture arranged in the classic fashion, all sofas and chairs against a wall, pointing at each other; but if your typical use of the space is not as eight people with complex PTSD but as two or four people just trying to hang out, you can make life more interesting by creating different zones in the room, what Mackie-East calls “little vignettes”. You can use rugs to zone different areas, or position a single chair by a window, to suggest the activity – a “reading nook”, Mackie calls it at one point, and we all fall about, as if you read from the book pile as she’s styled it, well, you’d have to really like Victorian homily and you wouldn’t want to have a mould allergy, put it that way.
Let me break that down: get one chair, preferably the comfortable one, and put it in a corner. Angle your most flattering light towards it, move a rug. Voilà. “Not sure,” the light of my life says. “When women go into a corner to read, it means men are annoying them.” Finally. “Where’d you read that, GQ?”
The reading matter in this room tends to be heaped in a pile, because all the bookshelves are in another room. “I wouldn’t necessarily stack a lot of books everywhere,” Mackie-East says, “but when they have a lot of character, it brings dimension.” She arranged, extremely artfully, some of those properly ancient books you get in junk shops – you know, with the bevelled spines and foxing and end-sheet marbling – when you’re about to go to university and want to head off the impression that you’re a soulless fraud. I don’t know who collected them between me and my husband, I’m gonna say him.
Thirty years on, we agree that they look ridiculous, we’re not trying to sell anyone on the idea that we’ve recently read The Faerie Queene, we’re just trying to sit nicely and play Catan. So he replaces the old books with normal books, and then decides all our normal books make us look boring, and plus, what are they doing on the floor, so he puts them back in the other room where they’re fine to be boring. We never actually throw out the old, pretentious books; this, I’m sure, is a component of primping, getting rid of stuff, but it’s not one I’ve ever mastered.
Books are different in bedrooms: it’s a law of physics that you will end up with a huge stack of things you mean to read, right next to your bed, to confront you with your failures moments before you go to sleep. Choose one book that you’re actually reading, Mackie-East advises, and put everything else in another room. “Your bedroom should be clean and crisp and more of a sanctuary,” she says, “but also cosy.” You can square this contradiction by, for instance, hanging a number of small pictures on the wall behind your bed, but keeping the one you’re facing less busy. Given that the bed is prime cushion real estate, it will inevitably end up looking a bit like a boutique hotel, if you’re doing it right; so you want the rest to be quite personal, idiosyncratic.
“One of the reasons I became interested in interiors,” Mackie-East tells me, “is that I don’t care about functionality. I’m only interested in the image.” Weird, I’m the exact opposite. I actively object to things if I can’t see the use-value: any pot with a wide, especially gourd-shaped base and a very narrow aperture, I believe they’re called single-stem vases, kills me – why would a single stem need so much water? I object to any blanket or throw, as if it’s needed it makes the room look like it’s probably cold; and if it’s not needed, why is it there? Nothing offends me more than an empty decanter, and this isn’t a dipsomaniac perspective, I don’t even like most of the drinks that go in decanters.
But when Mackie drapes a blanket across the aforesaid cushions, arranges some objets – chic, single-stem vases I don’t remember buying, a candle – around a totally disused mahjong set (don’t even know the rules), I have to admit it looks significantly better; not just classier but more restful, less chaotic, more deliberate. I have to make my peace with un-functionality in order to make my own character look more functional, I declare, and my spouse says, “Where’d you read that, the British Psychological Digest?” and I want to say, “Where’d you read [insert crass but apropos gender stereotype], GQ?” but I can’t think of one fast enough.
Obviously our stated purpose is not to buy any new stuff, so I pass on just for future reference that you can get wall lights now that don’t need an electrician – you can attach them to a wall and plug them in. If you place some task lighting next to a specific piece of furniture, it’ll create a little pool of light that gives it a sense of purpose; maybe crocheting. Who knows? Mixing up your lighting will complement the furniture rearrangement; swap lamps from one room to another, to change the atmosphere.
I find it confusing to have a dining room that’s not in the actual kitchen, as it’s the stove and stuff that make sense of your purpose in there; around just a table, how do you distinguish your activity from, say, a conference or a mediation session? Make sure the table is pointing in the right direction – we had it parallel to the window, but when pointed towards it the space opened up and felt more sociable. Lighting is still important here, but you want to put the emphasis on conviviality over being able to see, so think about lamps again and don’t forget candles.
If you can clearly see a garden from anywhere, display bulbs rather than cut flowers, which brings the outdoors in. Kitchens and diners are clutter magnets, especially if they’re at the entry point of the house, where they’ll attract post, shoes, coats, bags and dry leaves, on top of all the cooking and eating detritus. I’m surprised mine isn’t a lot more chaotic than it is, to be honest. I can pass on no rule more useful here than “put stuff away”.
How to restyle your home
A mixture of modern, vintage and antique is pleasing to the eye. For a restful composition of objects, arrange an odd number of them – not too many, three or five – at a mixture of heights, with the tallest at the back, but surely you knew that.
Combine textures and materials – hard and smooth, shiny and matte to make things more interesting. Think linen and velvet cushions, a wool throw on a velvet sofa with a boucle cushion, adding a marble bowl and a metal candlestick or trinket box to a wooden sideboard to create a pretty vignette, etc.
There is an emotional component to the nick-nack: bring in personal objects that you like to look at for a reason, but not if it’s a cracked ashtray that reminds you of Cuba in the 90s.
