The Ultimate Kitchen Inspo Pictures You Have To See: Pure Scandi Meets Murals Wallpapers

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Two years ago I wrote a post on this blog all about a kitchen company who had blown me away when I had seen their kitchen unit drawer and door fronts used in projects across Pinterest and Instagram. I’d never seen anything like it - there were baby blue doors with polished gold handles, scalloped cloud-front patterns and deep green units teamed with gold metal splashbacks. The company was Naked Doors, a Norfolk based kitchen supplier and part of the Naked Kitchens group, who have since been featured in every decent newspaper ‘Home’ supplement and interiors magazine going. Yet, it wasn’t just the interesting designs and coloured fronts which made Naked Doors so appealing, it was the fact that they sold good quality replacement cabinet doors and drawer fronts for existing kitchen units (or, off the shelf IKEA unit carcasses). You didn’t have to purchase a whole new kitchen to achieve the very desirable, contemporary kitchen you’d pinned to your ‘kitchen inspo’ board.

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Picking The Perfect Bunch Of Gifting Flowers With Marks & Spencer

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If there is one thing that I love just as much as interiors (not counting my child and y’know…gin..) it is fresh flowers. My home does not feel complete without fresh blooms perched in the middle of the table or presented on the mantle. People often ask me what is the quickest and most budget-friendly way that they can make a room feel inviting and homely and I always tell them to invest in a beautiful vase brimming with blossoming new stems. What is even better than buying your own flowers is having someone gift you them, so I was delighted when Marks & Spencer popped round with a number of their new gifting bouquets for me to review, as well as give advice on what bouquets are perfectly suited to certain celebratory occasions throughout the year. It is important to remember that flowers are very personal, so you should always pick the right bouquet that will match your recipients personality as well as the occasion. If this all sounds very confusing then don’t worry, read on for my top tips for picking the perfect bunch….

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My Prediction For The Big Interior Trends of 2019

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A few weeks ago I attended a bloggers dinner at the Miele London showroom to talk all things interior trends for 2019. Before the event all the bloggers were asked for their predictions beforehand and it was quite surprising to see that we were all pretty much on the same page to what we think is ‘over’ in interiors, and what we think will be the next thing that everyone will be doing in their home.

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From Basic To Bespoke on a budget - How You Can Easily Transform An Ikea Kitchen

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I will forever bang-on about how paint can cheaply transform a room. Take a room and paint it a colour which really complements it and it will feel like a completely different space. However, what do you do when you need to transform or create a kitchen on a budget? It is not as easy as just painting the walls when there are the units to consider. This is why many of us now own or are tempted to install a kitchen from purse-friendly flat-pack giants IKEA. Base or wall units from IKEA can come in at less than £100 each, where as a made-to-measure kitchen will set you back thousands upon thousands of pounds (most of that money will be spent on crafting the carcass of the units - the bits you use but don't actually see). The problem here is that you end up with a budget-friendly but very plain, generic-looking kitchen.

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Behind The Scenes On My Video for B&Q!

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If you had told me two years ago (when I started this interiors blog) that it would lead to me presenting some video content for B&Q to be hosted on the Mail Online, I would have laughed you out the door. Yet, a couple of weeks ago that is exactly what happened! A full film crew from The Mail rocked up at my house, and we spent the day filming a short video all about how the viewer can inject some colour into their home with a few selected products available to purchase at B&Q.

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Kohler Celebrates Clerkenwell Design Week & Chelsea Flower Show 2018 With New Floral Sink Collection

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Sometimes there are interior and home products that I see that make me elated and go "YES! That is RIGHT UP MY STREET!!" A visit to the the Kohler Experience Centre today on my tour of Clerkenwell Design Week 2018 made me do just that. In the week where London celebrates the best of horticulture with the Chelsea Flower Show, alongside the best in architecture and design with CDW, it was the perfect time for Kohler to unveil in the UK their new collection of Dutchmaster sinks. Big, bold, dramatic florals on a dark and moody background cover the entire surface of the washbasins, with two separate designs that come as a circular or rectangular model.

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Product Review: How To Stylishly Live Sustainably With The Eco Duvet

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Lately I have really noticed a shift towards people wanting to live much more ethically within their own home. Showers and white goods that save water have been around for a good while now, while the introduction of new technology has meant that we can get much more of a grip on how much energy we are using (and money we are spending). However, things seem to be taking a bigger step towards purchasing homeware products that are re-usable, recyclable and cruelty-free. Last month at the Ideal Home Exhibition interior designer extraordinaires 2LG created a 'love/work' space that encompassed the use of vegan leather and worktops made of recycled yogurt pots. The result was impeccably sexy and stylish, a million miles away from what could be considered by some as a 'hippy-chic home'.

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Birds, Flowers & Butterflies: The New Spring Wallpaper Collections From Laura Ashley

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Spring is the perfect time to give the rooms in your home an overhaul, and with statement wallpaper (on all walls, not just a feature wall!) being a key trend in interiors in 2018, why not update your decor with the new wallpaper collections from Laura Ashley? I was recently asked to write a guest post over on the Laura Ashley blog all about my favourite wallpaper picks from the new Spring collection, which you can read and see all the photos in full here.

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Updating The Kitchen: Looking Towards Kitchen Trends With Howdens

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Our oven decided to stop working two days before Christmas. Including us, there were 8 people to cook for on Christmas Day. We ended up making roast potatoes in a frying pan and relied on a lot of boiled vegetables to get us through the meal. Feverishly attempting to purchase a new oven in the Boxing Day sales we found the age-old range installed by the previous owners was a tiny 76cm wide, with the modern standard width being 90cm. The only thing to do was to cut down the existing cabinets and shave back the worktop to make room for a larger cooker. This has now all been done and we have a lovely shiny new oven, but I'm left with half my kitchen units unpainted, plus a missing splashback (they had to remove the tiles to fit the new cooker). I now need to give my kitchen a mini-refresh, and as we are at the start of the year I've been looking towards predictions for kitchen trends in 2018 to give me a bit of kitchen design inspiration.

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Product Review: Leisure Chefmaster Dual Fuel Range Cooker from AO.com

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Our old range cooker was inherited from the previous owners of the house when we moved in three years ago. To be honest, it was always on its way out - one hob never worked and over time it took so long to cook anything I probably could have gone outside and rubbed two sticks together to create fire to boil a pan of water quicker than the time it took to cook a pizza to a decent standard in that oven. So when it finally packed up completely two days before Christmas (we ended up making roast potatoes in a frying pan for Christmas dinner) it was time to start 2018 with a brand new cooker.

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The Best Teal Coloured Paints To Decorate Your Home With

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2018 is all about maximalism, luxury and cocooning comfort. In my blog post last week I talked about how peacocks, and the beautiful teal colours associated with them, are set to be a big thing in interiors and decor this year. A client that I am currently working with wanted their hallway painted in a beautiful teal colour. Because of this, the past few weeks I have been researching and testing out numerous teal emulsion paints. I thought I would share with you the best of the teal colours that I found on my hunt for that perfect teal shade, in case you were thinking of going totally teal in your own home!

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What Will Be The Key Interior & Decor Trends In 2018?

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Once Boxing Day is over I am itching to get all the Christmas decorations down and have a good clear out of all the clutter that has built up over the past month! Don't get me wrong, I love Christmas, but all the extra 'stuff' that takes up space in the house - from the tree and the decorations to the piles of gifts and boxes of uneaten mince pies - starts to bring out a bit of household claustrophobia! The New Year is a new start and once Christmas is cleared away I fill my home with hyacinths, count down to the first days of spring and start to think about how I'll change up my home in the year ahead.

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Colourful Sinks, Gothic Castles & Pretty Porcelain: The Wonderful World of Villeroy & Boch

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Villeroy & Boch are one of those companies that you know and are aware of, even if you don't really know much about them. Their expertly applied trademark stamp adorns sinks and toilets in an abundance of hotels, restaurants and residential properties all over the world. Since 1743 Villeroy & Boch have been producing ceramic tableware, then, later on down the line, bathroom sanitary-ware, and are one of Europe's most valued and celebrated producers of ceramics and porcelain. So, when they invited me to go and stay with them for a few days at their headquarters in Mettlach, Germany, how could I refuse?

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Customise Your Kitchen Cabinets With Bespoke Fronts By Naked Doors

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On my Instagram and under my Pinterest board 'Kitchen Inspo', I had been collecting up and re-gramming these amazing images of kitchens - such as the one below of the most amazing baby blue kitchen with polished gold handles.  It looks so good, right? You'd instantly think it was a completely bespoke, designer-led kitchen costing you 25k plus.

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Want A Stylish London Stay On A Budget? Check Out Cuckooz Apartments

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I prioritise interiors and decor over pretty much all other factors. The food can be great in a restaurant, but if the interiors are awful I'll never go back. I'll always choose a design-led bar over a standard place to grab a drink. Therefore, when it comes to renting a room for a night, the interior stakes have to be pretty high for me to be satisfied! The thing is, unless you can afford one of London's premier hotels, chances are for a decently priced night in the city you'll be stuck in a sterile small white box room with a cheap MDF desk and one bed for company.

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Luxury Vinyl Flooring - What Is It And Is It Any Good?

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My own experience of replacing flooring has been quite limited. The most I've had to do was replace a hallway carpet in my old home after toilet training a puppy for 6 months; while I also had a very inexperienced attempt at painting my wooden floor boards white at the start of my DIY journey - I decided to skip the sanding and priming part, so the paint started to chip after 48 hours! However, I've recently been working with a client on replacing all the floors in a flat she has purchased. She mentioned to me in the initial design consultation that she wanted vinyl and I flinched - vinyl? - isn't that just like the cheap lino of the 80's? Turns vinyl flooring technology has massively advanced since then, and there is now something called 'luxury vinyl flooring'.

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The New Farrow & Ball Floral Wallpaper Collection (+ I'm In The New F&B Catalogue!!!!!!!!)

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OK, so this article is about the new Farrow & Ball wallpaper collection -  BUT!!!  - I have to tell you before I talk about the new floral beauties that a mood board I created around one of the new papers, Helleborus, is featured in the F&B catalogue for the collection. At the start of the year F&B got in touch and asked if I would be interested working with them on promoting the new collection. They would send me a sample of one of the new papers (which was all very hush hush) and asked if I would create a mood board around the paper chosen for me. This would then appear in the new F&B Autumn/Winter inspiration catalogue, sent to customers.

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How To Get A Designer Kitchen On A Budget

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Hate your kitchen? Want to upgrade? Would love a designer kitchen but don't have the cash? Never fear, it is possible, believe it or not, to get a designer kitchen (or your kitchen looking designer) without having to sell one of your kidneys. There are a few tricks out there that can transform your kitchen from bleak and basic, into something much more suited to your style. If you are someone with champagne taste on a prosecco budget (or even a cheap white wine budget) then read on for my tips to get that designer kitchen for less!

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Meet nomi - the stylish, modern high chair that won't ruin your decor

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Just had a baby or due to have a baby soon? Petrified that your beautiful home is going to be hidden behind a mound of brightly coloured baby tat? Well, I know how you feel. Being an interiors obsessive, when I was pregnant and strolling around the baby section of department stores (clutching my extensive list of things I would 'need' to have in the home for baby), I was quietly groaning to myself as I passed piece after piece of baby furniture and furnishings covered in teddy bears, bright green cartoon apples or pale blue or sickly pale pink toweling fabric. 

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