What is making your interiors look blah? (And how to bring them back to life)

If your dining area is in your kitchen, it’s particularly important to pay attention to the lighting to ensure you can create some sense of atmosphere in the evenings. A combination of low-hanging pendants and wall lights, like Emma Ainscough has chosen for this London house, is often the best solution.

Dean Hearne

Your lightbulbs are too harsh

Cold white light bulbs flatten and wash out an interior scheme, and they are not remotely flattering to the humans who occupy it, so always make sure to go for a warm bulb, and interior designers tend to agree that the warmer, the better. If you want to get technical, temperature is measured in kelvins, and the higher the kelvin number, the cooler the light will be. Full daylight tends to come in at around 6000k, while a standard ‘cool white’ bulb is likely to be around 4000k, and candlelight is more like 2000k. The well-known lighting designer Sally Storey of John Cullen Lighting explains it thus: ‘I will usually use a relatively cool 2700k for my architectural highlights, i.e. the downlights and spotlights, and even picture lights. I would never go cooler that 2700k as for residential applications – it’s cold enough. For decorative lights that come on in the evening, I would use 2200k to ensure a nice warm light.’

Furniture (or anything) that is too small

‘Don’t be afraid of going large with the scale when selecting patterns or the size of your furniture,’ says Alidad. ‘If you want to make a small room feel bigger or higher, fill it with over-scaled patterns and furniture.’ Lucy Hammond Giles agrees: ‘Don’t think that a small room needs small furniture. It might feel counterintuitive, but bigger furniture will make the room feel bigger in turn.’ The example of putting a four-poster bed in a small room is a good one – it can give the space a feeling of grandeur and generosity, where a less imposing bed might make the room feel mean. ‘There’s nothing worse than mimsy furniture. If it goes through the door, it’s the right size,’ concludes Joanna Plant.

It’s not only the scale of furniture that you need to think about. Adding in a large piece of art can be transformative for many rooms, rather than piling up small pieces on the walls. Cushions are a very common culprit too – nothing makes a sofa look sadder than a couple of small, flat cushions sagging in the corners. Many designers suggest that 50x50cm square cushions are a good size for a standard two-seater sofa sofa. ‘Anything smaller tends to get lost,’ says Carlos Garcia. Equally, don’t go madly oversize – ‘remember that these are cushions, not beanbags.”

A good furniture layout is perhaps even more important in smaller homes. This sitting room of London flat designed by Uns Hobbs feels considered, convivial and not at all cluttered – and by pulling the sofa away from the window, she has created space for a table behind it with a pair of lamps and a vase of flowers.

Astrid Templier

Furniture that is poorly laid out

Shoving all of your furniture to the edges of the room, especially the living room, does not tend to make for the most interesting interior (although, of course, in very small rooms it might be necessary). Brandon explains that ‘a well-crafted interior should have a foreground, middle ground and background, just like a well-crafted painting’, the idea being that you should add in enough elements ‘to make sure the perimeter of the space feels full and regularly obstructed by furniture’. For example, if you pull the sofa out from the wall, you might have a narrow console against the wall behind it, with a mirror or a picture over it. And Nicky Haslam suggests that for corners, you ‘make freestanding shelves or something you can use to store objects and books’. This also allows for more opportunities to display things, from photographs to vases of flowers. We’re also partial to a half-height bookcase for those spaces where a full-height set of shelves might be a little too much – they’re a very efficient use of space and provide another surface on which to display your favourite things.

Everything is new

We would bet heavily that every interior designer who has ever featured on our pages would advise that antiques and old things in general are an essential component of a good interior. ‘Such pieces help create that lived-in, collected-over-time look,’ says Henriette von Stockhausen of VSP Interiors. ‘They are also a sustainable choice and generally better quality than something new you can buy for the same price. If you buy everything new, you will never manage to achieve that comfortable, collected, lived-in feel that is so essential.’ Alidad agrees, explaining that choosing things in a variety of styles and from various periods is key. ‘If you look at the interiors of stately homes, they are always filled with inherited furniture from different generations creating an evolved look.’