Interior design tips - where to start?

[TunipTheUnconquerable]

We're in the process of buying (offer accepted, finance in place, waiting for survey) a house which is going to need complete redecoration (former care home).

It's Georgian, listed, and has lots of nice features (fireplaces, plasterwork etc). Luckily the kitchen doesn't need doing and we're not planning any structural work for now, so it's all about paint colours, carpets, curtains etc.

How would you go about approaching this? Should I get interior design magazines or will they be full of crazy stuff? I don't need it to be fashionable, I just want it to be nice to live in with kids & sympathetic to the history without being obsessively authentic. Also, not magnolia.

Has anyone done a project like this and got any lessons they learned which they could share? Thanks

I moved three months ago from a modern-ish house (70s) to an Edwardian one with big rooms that needs completely redoing. I started at the top of the house and just did my boys rooms neutrally with very plain browny/grey carpet and added colour and interest with blinds and rugs etc. They had had yellow walls and green woodwork so you can imagine what we were up against! For my own room I saw some great Cole and Son wallpaper when I was away and it was so beautiful that I thought I would have some as a feature wall and got paint matched to it. I then went feature wall mad in the spare room and my little girls room but I absolutely love the result.

I bought a few homes magazines, got the Laura Ashley catalogue which is full of great pics of period homes and generally just went with gut feel. I have a friend who paints furniture and we have a lot of crap old pine stuff that just looks wrong in the new house. She has given it (and is booked in for more) a new lease of life with paint and new handles etc and that has helped with budget etc. I too was worried about how my modern furniture would fit with the period of the house. I have got some stuff that just doesn't work and will probably end up sold but other items have just been deployed to different parts of the house such as boys bedrooms for storage etc where no-one is really going to see them! A good website is www.housetohome.co.uk lots of ideas on there. Or try Pinterest if you are on it!

Pinterest and Houzz are my saviours. I'm a little bit addicted to redecorating :P Go on pinterest, create a board for one room at a time, pin anything you see that you like and then go back to it afterwards to see if there are any recurring themes.

I love the idea of 'linking' rooms together so the house doesn't feel mismatched, in our old house I did this by just having the same carpet throughout. In this house we have beautiful wooden floors in each room that don't match, so we considered our colours carefully. In each room we have the same 'accent colours' (white and grey - they go with anything) and then we have one main colour, and a supporting colour.

Everything is down to taste at the end of the day, which is why I think pinterest is the place to start, to figure out exactly what you like. Visit houzz.com and you can pin things from there too :)

btw, your house sounds amazing. good luck with moving and decorating!!

Ooooh, that does sound exciting! I'd say get in there and get acquainted with the place. Don't rush into choosing colour or furniture until you get a feel for the light and the layout. By all means buy interiors magazines, browse houzz and Pinterest, but try to detach from the details and instead focus on what themes might work for you... It might be an odd juxtaposition of midcentury furniture with luxurious textures, or mousy brown with fluoro green... Who am I to judge?

Only problem with houzz.com is that it is heavily skewed towards the American market so often the houses they feature have enormous hallways, massive pantries, mudrooms and all sorts of things we tend not to have on a UK street.

It can be overwhelming!

Find one thing as a starting point for each room - in our bathroom it was a wonderful large print of a Geisha and the sink unit was made with square metal panels behind the handles to look slightly Japanese. No white or blue walls: too cold! Nine years later it's still my favourite room in the house and still looks great, everyone comments on it.

Could be a wallpaper you love, or pattern on a cushion. But I think it helps to try and describe what you are going for so:
"Industrial country" OR
"Retro brights"
"Smart neutrals"
If you keep this in mind as you build your ideas you will see what fits and what will seem out of place.

Flooring next. Maybe you have to live with what you've got. We have original but very unattractive tiles in the hall (that I am just about to start a thread about), but it really helps if your floors tie everything together.

Paint colours important, and much easier if you can find a palette you like. We have a lot of F&B Slipper Satin and it's a lovely warm neutral to live with. It's on most of the kitchen walls, under the dado throughout the hall and in our bedroom. But after a while I added patches of colour. Now it seems a bit 'cream' but I'm wary that grey is on it's way out already (or gone!) and will also be too depressing. A slightly warmer grey tone I used recently is LittleGreene Rolling Fog - not the palest one as that was too cool, but the next one is a very easy mid neutral that looks a bit more uptodate.

I tried to keep a grouping of colours for the downstairs: some deep red on cushions, paintings and sage green on a wall in the kitchen and on a sofa you can see from the kitchen.

Upstairs there seems to be a teal blue theme going!

We're just about to do a major redecorate and this time I will be braver and go darker in some areas to give weight. I think some colour on walls really set off your belongings and artwork.

I like looking in local property magazines / online. It gives me an idea of real houses, not just ones set up for magazine interior shoots! And also sometimes what to avoid - that stark empty look when decluttering has gone too far!

Thank you so much. This is fantastically helpful.
I have taken particular note of:
-neutral bedrooms for kids with colour added by accents. I don't want to have to redecorate in a couple of years when they grow out of the stuff they like now!
-linking rooms together.

Good idea re Laura Ashley catalogue, & thank you for the website suggestions.

BrownSauce - yes, definitely. I need to get to know the place a lot better before I commit to anything (and won't do anything other than ordering free catalogues till the sale is complete, obviously!)
It could all fall through if the survey picks up anything awful but I feel that any effort I put into learning about the process of planning a redecoration won't be wasted because we will have to move somewhere.

Mmmm, Betterwhen, I wondered about the 'starting point' method. We have quite a few paintings that would make good starting points; also, I make patchwork quilts, so quilts I might get round to finishing one day have made could be good starting points for bedrooms.

I am not tempted by grey! I ordered the Little Greene colour cards and they seem to have a special one just for greys

Also if you have large windows then curtains are expensive so spend a fortune on a pattern you will get fed up with quickly.

Just start a ring binder with a divider for each room and pockets you can put pictures / stockists / pictures form magazines in.

I also had a wordprocessing file on the computer that I could copy any pictures I found online and info on stockists price etc. That way I could make a kind of digital mood board and keep everything together.

If when your budget runs out remember you can often find goos cheap furniture at auctions if you are prepared to pick it up and do a bit of alteration.

Also spreadsheets are your scary friend. If you overspend in one area then you know you need to adjust in another.

Oh, the auctions in the town where the house is are amazing! We've been going to them for several years and sighing longingly over the beautiful old furniture that goes for a song but which is too big to fit in our current house.

The windows are massive! Luckily there are shutters in a lot of the rooms so we can at least live in them before we get them properly curtained.

Loving the idea of digital moodboard.

Probably!

Well, this is all very interesting. From the housetohome and Laura Ashley websites I am learning that we are meant to decorate our houses entirely in different shades of grey, but if we want we can have wallpaper with birds and flowers on instead.

Some of the wallpaper is lovely. Now how to convince dh....?

Yes every shade of grey and metro tiles whenever possible... Sometimes it's hard to find anything else. I think the wallpaper sounds like the way to make it yours rather than a copy house !

Oh yes, those tiles

I do rather like them, but they're a cliche now and they're going to date. I'm finding myself rather unexcited by the current fashion - all these neutrals with accent colours which are a great idea for a room you know you'll want to change, like the kids' bedrooms HarrogateMum described, but whole houses done like that just seem a bit much.

Completely agree. Metro tiles just remind me of pub toilets and the underground. Not sure why. But compared to the avocado-ness of this house's bathroom I don't really have the right to object to anything !