Tips for renovating your student halls or first rental
Nadia McCowan Hill is the resident style adviser at homeware website Wayfair. Here she shares simple tips on renovating your flat as a renter
Pick a palette
The key thing is to zone
in on two or three core shades which really make
the look feel cohesive. As a rule of thumb, pick
a neutral colour that underpins the whole scheme, then introduce other tones from the same
family. If you’ve got a cooler neutral, go for blues and greys; if it’s warmer,
choose reds or oranges.
Be smart with walls
When you move into rented accommodation,
you often can’t paint walls and even if you can, it’s a faff. But there’s lots you can do. You can get
temporary wallpaper, which can add character
to a statement wall and once you leave you can
peel it off and leave the walls unblemished. You can also hang prints and posters with sticky strips
which easily peel off when you leave. Ladder shelves that you can lean
against walls provide more storage space and
can leave when you do.
Free-standing shelving units are your best friend
Space is a real premium,
so you need to be thoughtful about your
storage. Free-standing shelving units or ladder shelves are great. They
take up relatively little floor space and they work
with the vertical.
Use styled vignettes and a few statement pieces to avoid making your space look cluttered
If you are not very design-orientated, the temptation is to fill the shelves, crowd them with books and layer them
with lots of different objects – but less is more.
What I tend to do if I’m styling a shelf is to have a big piece at the back and
then layer forward with items of varying heights and sizes. You also want to introduce a material mix: you could stack a
selection of books horizontally and use that
as a plinth for a piece of decor, then at the side run a trailing plant. You’d
be amazed at how setting it up in that way
can bring it to life.
Choose furniture that will last
Put more budget
into long-term investment pieces such as beds and desks. You can get basics, but if
you can afford it, something a bit more classic and less trendorientated will stay with
you a long time.
Don’t be a trend-chaser
Some trends come around repeatedly, whereas others are more flash-in-the-pan. The
1920s art deco style, which Jack picked out
for his cushions, is always going to be a
classic, whereas something like pink flamingos everywhere is
going to feel a bit more dated more quickly. You can’t go wrong if you lean on a period style for the
overall mood: you can always flirt with modern
micro-trends on soft furnishings or accent
pieces.
The one show garden
with lots of primary colour is Finding Our Way: An NHS Tribute Garden, main photo,
designed by Naomi Ferrett-Cohen, above.
A garden to celebrate the amazing work of the NHS was the idea of John Frater of Oxford University, who collaborated with Oxford University
Hospitals and brought Ferrett-Cohen on board
as designer. Fittingly for a celebration, she has used lots of stunning perennials: red hot pokers; Echinacea
‘Magnus’, which has deep pink flowers with contrasting orange centres; stunning dahlias
such as the deep maroon ‘Black Narcissus’ and deep
red ‘Sam Hopkins’; and strident yellow rudbeckia punctuated with grasses, such as Miscanthus ‘Red Chief ’ and Panicum
virgatum ‘Squaw’.
I fell on this garden at the
end of the day (when I had a heel blister) and was
overwhelmed as the allgirl planting team offered
me a chair, chocolate brownies and water while they entertained me with
their build-up stories. Ferrett-Cohen also needed to replace trees and
pointed out a Pyrus cordata (Plymouth pear) that she found at Todd’s Nursery. This rare wild
pear was found in the 1800s. The spring blossom
is charming – but apparently smells foul.