What’s the most important quality you can bring to your home? Personality. Without introducing your own style, taste, humour and unique touches to your home, it may never truly feel like it’s yours. Bringing a sense of you and who you are into the design of your rooms is a fantastic way to make it a cosy, personal space with that warm feeling that only comes from feeling at home. Combining this with the best sofa for you can make your property feel vibrant and full of life.
Over the years, we all collect piles of stuff, be it souvenirs from holidays, presents from loved ones, and at times, things we can’t even remember ever buying or receiving. In the majority of cases, the things we accumulate carry real sentimental value, harking back to happy memories, treasured moments and people we love spending time with. Some might see it as clutter, but it’s our clutter, and it tells the story of who we are and where we’ve been.
Don’t feel pressured into discarding what might amount to thousands of pounds’ worth of clutter. These are the little touches that you can actually use to bring warmth and personality into the home. Use your personal items to style each room, helping to create the perfect atmosphere.
Picture this
Photographs rank among the most emotive keepsakes people have. With that inherent ability to evoke happy memories, they’re also some of the best items to use to personalise your home. Give your rooms that extra boost of personality with pictures of family and friends and happy times. Try to add a touch of variety in the types of photo on display too – different scenes, a range of poses and different sized photos can bring your photo wall to life and give it some added punch.
If you’ve got a lot of pictures, there are a number of clever ways of displaying them. Instead of just having lots of framed photos placed on window sills and worktops, hang them on the wall to make a feature or gallery. Hang the photos a little randomly, or in a range of sizes, to create a more unique look without uniformity.
Using photographs to make custom items is another great way to display your memories. Have a treasured photo turned into a large canvas to hang over the fireplace, or alternatively, adorn your sofa with some personalised scatter cushions printed with reminders of your happiest moments. A colourful sofa like the Alchemist, bright and on trend, would look great with some personality thrown into the mix.
Get inventive with storage
One of the easiest ways to bring your personality into your rooms is to simply put your favourite things on display. Whether it’s an ornament you bought on a beloved family holiday, treasured hand-me-downs that remind you of loved ones, your all-time favourite books or a particularly hideous trinket that makes you, your friends and family laugh – showing them off just makes your rooms feel all the more personal.
Buy yourself a new set of shelves to stick in that one bare corner of the room, or get a few mismatched shelves that you can arrange seemingly randomly on the wall to give the room a little bit of a unique look. However you choose to do it, putting your memories on display is a great way to feel at home.
Organise by colour
Colour matching is a neat trick that you might like to try. It’s a clever way of bringing everything into line so it looks easy on the eye and well ordered. Try organising books on bookcases by colour, lining them up so that outward facing spines are grouped together.
If you’re re-arranging rooms, match your personal effects in the same way. In the living room, for example, the sofa is likely to take centre stage, so any items of a matching colour can go in this room. A sofa like the Cubos is totally modular, giving you the chance to mix and match colours across the sofa – allowing you to build around a themed colour scheme.
Turn paperwork into mood boards
We might be living in a digital era, but paperwork can easily build up in the average home. Letters, invitations, thank-you cards, promotional leaflets… it’s too easy to pile these up in a corner somewhere until the mound gets bigger and bigger. Instead, turn these into a personal feature by creating a large notice board as a focal point. Throw out what you don’t need and put anything that creates a happy memory on here. Making a display of drawings from the kids, ticket stubs from sports events and concerts and little notes can add a lovely personal touch to any home.
With a few simple twists and touches, it’s really easy to transform a house to a home by bringing your personality to each and every room. Start with a focal point of a sofa you love, and use your personal items and clutter in a clever way, sprinkling your character all over your living spaces.
