She's done her house in everything I loath...

[whycantIbestylishtoo]

...and yet my heart sank when I saw it all, because it looks AMAZING.

I shouldn't be surprised really. A close friend of mine has moved house and has redecorated from scratch. It's only a small place, but this is the third house I've known her in, and all of them she decorates beautifully in a way I can only envy.

I like to be modern. I like to be up to date. I like fashionable colours and modern furniture. Matt finishes only. I am loving the trend for brushed brass and dark green. My friend, she doesn't. She likes old things, second-hand furniture, pretty much anything that's out of fashion, her only rule is that the colours of the things within a room have to match on a room-by-room basis.

She's had the ceilings in every room papered in woodchip. Prior to this, they were painted and very cracked in places. The walls in several rooms have been covered in tongue & groove, and in the rooms which haven't been done like that it's raised-pattern paint-able paper. She's had an old-fashioned style coving around the top of every room. All the skirting boards and doors have been changed, again for something very old fashioned which I thought would look horrific in a 40ish year old house. The doors, frames, and skirtings have all been painted in white gloss. The walls, ceilings, and coving painted in brilliant white silk emulsion. And then to this she has brought in all her own style with dark carpets, curtains, soft furnishings and throws, plus the dark wood of most of her furniture.

It sounds hideous written down, and it's everything I would never dream of doing. Yet when I leave her house I feel so depressed that I don't have the courage to like what is not fashionable, the skill to search charity shops and facebook market place for inexpensive 'tat' which I wouldn't look twice at, and the vision to bring it all together. There are no words to describe how beautiful her home now looks. How do some people do it?

Homes with personality are much nice places to be than bland identikit show home type houses but there is absolutely no way wood chip is ever going to look good on a ceiling. Never. I refuse to belief it…can you even buy it any more?

My house has a few ceilings with art deco
style anaglypta on and it looks ok. We plastered over the wood chip.

Well, at least it isn't Artex. My DParents go to great lengths to find Artex-specialist plasterers so they can leave a trail of white icicled destruction behind them wherever they go: :)

I think your taste sounds great by the way. I way prefer the dark green and brass to the depressing light grey that was everywhere until recently.

I mean do you really like dark green with brushed brass handles or do you like it "now"? Laughing at this as I have a friend who has just described the new kitchen she is about to install as exactly this. She is someone with an amazing eye though so I imagine it will look fabulous in her place. I think so much in interior decoration is about rooms that are more than the sum of their parts. So while I'd probably draw the line at wood chip on the ceiling, I think overall what you probably see in your friend's house is the colour of the paint and the paintwork which just melts into the background as it's all white and allowing the rest of the furnishings to take centre stage - interesting light-fittings, striking rugs, cushions, pictures, mirrors. So much about what makes interior decor great in a real home though is about having enough space for everyone to sit down comfortably, somewhere to put your mug of tea of glass of wine, not having to sit and stare at huge piles of clutter (which is why I think all those homes knocked into one vast open space will be the decorative no-no of our time - beautiful when swept clear for a photo shoot with an artfully placed vase of flowers and bowl of lemons, but in reality always looking a bit of mess with nowhere to retreat from the washing up and the laundry and stuff that people have left out on the kitchen side).

Do Artex plasterers still exist? I’d have thought it was an entirely obsolete skill, like building penny-farthings!

I absolutely cannot fathom paying someone to put wood chip on the ceiling, then paying someone to add coving, rather than doing it properly and getting a plasterer to re-skim the ceilings. I even think the plasterer would have been cheaper.

But, if she likes it that’s the main thing. Presumably (hopefully) she’s not planning on selling any time soon.

I'm afraid so. Mum was very keen to have it on the ceiling of her new bedroom 😳

The last one they found was quite old and a bit of a jack of all trades. His Artex was immaculate, if you like that kind of thing! I imagine he probably had more clients who wanted Artex skimmed over than clients who wanted it put back. :)

There are plenty of people who wouldn’t be remotely bothered by it.

It’s because she has developed her style over a period of time. You follow trends. They’re different, as you’ve discovered.

Are we married to the same man?! My husband does the same and l rarely want to do anything that radical

The woodchip sounds grim and dated lm afraid. Your friend can have our hall and stairs as it's covered in it. It's hard wearing but dated

My house is a bit like this. Most of my furniture is dark wood or painted. I actually have the same colour walls throughout my entire downstairs but also have wallpaper in places. I am literally about to put anaglypta on my kitchen ceiling..

My house isn't boho though, it's generally described by people as light and calming. It's just that I like picking up stuff in charity shops/on eBay etc to furnish it. Things don't necessarily match but they all "go" together - e.g. all of my wine glasses are completely different but they are all crystal from charity shops.

The downside of this sort of style though is that you generally have to build it up very slowly over time.

Me neither! We loathe woodchip - we've bought several houses with it, including one (2000 sq ft) where it was not only on almost every wall and ceiling, but on the tops and undersides of shelves inside a Victorian built-in linen press! Couldn't wait to remove the hideous stuff. Blown vinyl/anaglypta reminds me of my parents' house - I didn't know you could still get that or woodchip, tbh.

Fortunately our current 200 year old cottage - whilst not having so much as a single original architrave (or anything else from the period it was built) left inside - didn't have the dreaded woodchip. Sadly, there are artex ceilings in some rooms which will soon be skimmed over.

Each to their own though - it's their choice and they have to live with it.

I imagine most people would hate our eclectic decorating/furnishing style. I distinctly recall a neighbour who was about our age, coming into a house we owned about 20 years ago and commenting that it looked like his grandma's house because we had vintage/antique brown furniture and Art Nouveau ornaments.

😀

I think that’s the key thing the OP is feeling wistful about — her friend is confident enough in her own likes and dislikes to slowly collect furniture online or in junk shops or auctions etc over many years, in the knowledge that she’s not going to suddenly hate it all within twelve months, or decide that in fact what she really likes is Scandi chic, so it all has to go.

Someone I know is always bemoaning that her living room doesn’t look like ours even though she copied the strong wall paint colour, but it’s because everything in our room from the rugs to the paintings are things we’ve bought or pulled out of skips or been given over 30 odd years, whereas she will go into a shop and buy the whole ‘look’. Which makes it look like a showhouse or the result of one of those staging companies.

A visitor to my friend’s lovely, tiny old house said ‘It will be very nice when you do it up’, apparently under the impression that she’d just inherited it with contents, and would immediately be stripping out and knocking through. Another friend liked the way that the fresh plaster had dried in a mottled, dramatic way across a crack in her living room wall that she decided to leave the walls unpainted. I thought it looked wonderful, but her visiting cousins were baffled and discreetly offered her money to finish it.

The good thing is that if you do need to pull a similar look together quickly then although it takes a lot more effort than just popping into Ikea or The Range, the individual pieces tend to be far cheaper than new furniture so its less of a problem if it doesn't quite work and you need to switch something out. I have picked up mahogany sideboards for £40 for example.

There are pieces in my house that have lived in 4 different rooms since I've moved them around until I find place where they work.

100%, agree I don’t think OP has bad feelings but instead she’s disappointed in that she feels she’s not able to do something similar. Basically no confidence unlike her friend, to give things a go and have a strong vision and then make that a reality by having the ‘eye’ and judgement to source and buy the often second hand complimentary pieces and despite her eclectic choices, she has a superior judgement that just pulls it altogether so that despite the individual choices not being to OPs taste, the final look is something she very much admires.

I’d love to have a friend like this - sound very inspiring and motivating to (quite literally) get your own house in order!

OP, my last house went up for sale recently and had been completely redecorated in a very different style to mine. It was very elegant and sophisticated looking and I felt bad for about an hour or so. Until I reminded myself I would not want to live in that kind of style of house, that people regularly tell me they like my style and that it is not permanent. They main thing is to go with what you are drawn to and not do too much at one time.

It sounds hideous written down

No it doesn't, it sounds great to me and just the sort of thing I would really like. Can you send her over please?

Funny you mention past homes we have lived in, as a flat I sold in 2001 has recently sold again in 2023. Those selling bought off my buyer, according to the sales history on Rightmove. Looking at the photos, just about everything looks as though it had been changed, save for the kitchen units which I had replaced when I moved in, in 1997 (subsequent owners have seemingly replaced the worktop, sink, and appliances), and following on from what I said about not being the best at designing homes, I had someone plan and design this kitchen for me as I was totally clueless.

Anyway, for all the changes that were made in the 22 years since I left, I was beyond thrilled to see that the two glass dish-shaped flush ceiling lights in the living room were still there! I remember "saving up" to buy them (the price of the kitchen had wiped me out), at a whole £9.99 each from Argos - I bought two dark green lights for the living room, and a dark blue one for the bathroom. I must have got them late 1997 or early 1998, I know I got them fairly soon after moving in. Some people must have liked them as much as I did, no matter what fashion came & went in between.

I think every room needs something ugly 😂

Not joking!

It's like having vinegar on chips. Without it everything is smooth so there's nowhere for your attention to start. The ugly thing makes the space unlike anyone else's. Often it's there because you want it to be for a personal reason not just to look stylish, and that makes it yours.

Some of my best home design decsions were the result of having to find a way to make a non-negotiable loved or structural thing look intentional.

Textures and layering are how to avoid blandness, wouldn't buy something ugly for the house.

That's a shame. But we all have different tastes 😊

Not a shame, we're all different after all 😊.