居家美學 Instagram 上著名的英國住宅，以輕鬆的極簡主義為特色

今天在Homeworthy,我們要來探討 創作者和作者Sarah Laiming的偶像家 她的Instagram帳號是 a home to make you smile 她的Instagram帳號是 有超過一百萬的追蹤者 多謝她的簽名 relaxed maximalism style and inviting layered aesthetic 在我們旅行的舒適房間中 她給我們瞭解 平靜的真實生活 背後的瘋狂照片 enjoy You're watching Homeworthy where we believe every home has a story To shop items inspired by this and other Homeworthy episodes be sure to check out the product links below for amazing furniture accessories and more Hi Homeworthy I'm Sarah Laiming and welcome to my home in London Here we are Welcome to the hallway which is the central focus to the house and it is so unusual for a London home to have a hallway that stretches the length and breadth and that's one of the things that really first drew us to the house I also really love the fact that it is almost a room in itself and so as you walk in it's really welcoming There's a chair over here It's a really old and battered chair that came from a French flea market hundreds of years ago but the dog Twiglet usually sleeps in there and keeps guard of the house from there for us I love vintage furniture and furniture with stories and heritage things that have soul because they've been passed down through generations so a lot of the things you see in here I have bought over our travels or over our time just hunting for pieces of furniture that I love and that absolutely talk to me so both the rugs that you can see I bought in Morocco in Fez sort of about ten years ago maybe even more I got some from a carpet shop and then really amazingly we were really lucky when we went there because friends of ours were living there and had a Riyadh and so they took me to the junk soup which is outside the city walls and there was a man in an old tin hut who literally had his rugs hanging over the hut and beating them clean and dry and he had been to the markets in the Atlas Mountains and he had the most incredible selection so I think this rug came from him this rug came from a carpet shop this chest is one that I got from Ardingly Antiques Market which is a very famous antique market in the UK you have to get up really, really early to get there to get the good buys but this was one that I found and was actually incredibly cheap I'd seen them online for a lot more the lamp here comes from Singapore we were really lucky and spent four years living in Singapore when I was in my twenties early thirties and I picked up loads and loads of pieces when we lived there it's when I really started falling in love with antiques particularly Asian ones and their character so that is an old Chinese lamp with a modern Pukie lampshade on top and the medicine chest that you see here is another object that came back from Singapore with us I spent years saving up for them they're really famous old Chinese apothecary chest where they stored all their herbs and their medicines and I saw one and I knew that I absolutely really wanted one and I had to save and save and save for it but it's got hundreds of little drawers which they used to put their herbs and things in so it's actually one of those chests that we never put anything in because we would never be able to find it again so if you open a drawer there might be an old receipt an old coin you never know but nothing of any value My picture here that was bought online actually from eBay I think I love old vintage art and when we were decorating the house I spent hours and hours hunting on eBay for pieces so that was bought from there My statues down here they came back from Singapore with me again we got engaged when we lived in Singapore and these two statues are a married couple and they're a symbol of good luck so they're a really nice thing that we brought back with us The mantelpiece is I guess the star and the heart of the hall and the star and the heart of the home It's only ever So the fire's only ever really lit in there at Christmas but it's always beautiful when it is with the Christmas tree and it's a really sort of traditional English feeling when you have Christmas in here Again my two Staffordshire dogs picked up at a vintage antiques emporium down on the south coast I'd wanted one of these for ages they come in a pair and they're very very English very old fashioned but they're getting a new lease of life and I think they're really cool This is what my son who's just been travelling in Southeast Asia He bought me that back from Vietnam because he knew I'd like it so that's a little thing So I guess what I'm trying to say is when I'm building a home and thinking about the things that I put in it everything I put in it is chosen with a lot of thought but also a lot of love and I always buy or put things in it that are really personal to me or have stories associated with them which have a history and so when I look at them they always evoke a memory of a time that they were bought or a place or an emotion that I felt at the time and that's my whole thing behind my Instagram account of building a home that makes you smile that's really about you and then styling it around it so it's not cluttered but it's beautiful So I absolutely love pieces of furniture that come to me with a story to tell and my friend Anna gave me who is the person who started my Instagram journey because she was the one who told me that I should start posting pictures of my house anyway a couple of years ago after her granny had died she said to me I think this table and chair would be perfect for your house I don't know what to do with them from my granny would you like them and I said yes I absolutely would so pieces of furniture find their way to me that's what I wanted to say in stories in so many different ways so much so that friends' grannies end up giving them to me so this really beautiful old chair and old table have found their perfect new home we moved into this house in 2005 we moved from a much more central London location which I absolutely love we could walk into Soho and the river but it was so urban and so we've just moved this few extra miles out to a much more villagey part in London still very central though and we get that green space and a garden and much more space in the house than we could otherwise have had so we fell in love with this house when we moved into it because it's so unusual for a London home in that it's two floors and it's very wide and it's laterally spaced whereas often I think in London you go up and up and up and you have rooms on different floors but this house was built in 1905 I want to say maybe 1908 for the doctor who lived in the village and I think what we loved about it like I said when we came in was the space that you get with it and the feel it's also an arts and crafts house so the craftsmanship and the detail that goes into everything is extraordinary and that's what we love and that's what we've tried to change as little as possible so if you can see just the carving on things like the mantel pieces or as we come over here the carving on the divider between the hall and that very sunny morning room that we call it so yeah it was incredible detail incredible workmanship that's gone into it and we've loved so much so now I'm going to take you into our kitchen which is very bright and cheerful welcome to the kitchen which is obviously quite a heart of the home in this house it was a really dark space when we first moved in it was divided into two rooms and it really struggles for light it faces north and it faces onto a side alleyway as you can see so I have tried various colors in here to try and make it into a cheerful and not dark and gloomy space it's yellow at the moment it could well change again soon but at the moment this is good if you look around the kitchen behind me you can see my yellow saucepan again that I picked up at a vintage flea market and above there along the shelf is actually the wood carving I don't know what they call them but they are for our wedding invitation so when we got married my husband was very keen that we didn't have a traditional wedding with kind of white wedding invitations with gold writing and so on so he had a friend of his make us a really cool book for our wedding my favorite poem is the owl and the pussy cat and so he made us a little book which we sent to our guests which we can see which invited them to the wedding and they got this instead of an invitation so that was really fun I guess one of the things that I've learned about myself over 20, 30 years of styling houses is that I kind of never want my house to look like anybody else's I want it to be a house that's about me and you can tell that it's me that lives here when you walk in or my family that lives here not designed by an interior designer or like a trend that you see so I tend to try and always look for ways of doing things that I love and when we did this kitchen I suddenly decided that I really wanted a concrete worktop they weren't a thing at the time Do I love it now? I'm not sure because it's quite cold and it's quite hard but I like it Up here's some of my favorite things, really special because they came from my mum when we cleared out her house after my mum and dad passed away and I kept some of the things that I really love so these are her old coffee jugs and a biscuit jar that I remember from my childhood and another jug and round the corner which we can get to again is a green velvet chair that my dad spent all of his time sitting in and I've kept that and he would watch sport on Sunday afternoons or whatever from his green chair so I love having that there as the memories for them and those inherited pieces I've got pigeon lights up there they're a very modern, funky design by I think I want to say they're Tom Dixon but I might double check that but anyway they were bought in Liberty's department store along when we did up the house 16 years ago so they're harder to get now but I really love them they're cool and they're fun and they add a bit of quirkiness and character to the room without being too dominating which I think something that I'd like to say about decorating my home is that I like to add a little bit of whimsy or a little bit of quirkiness to a room but not so that it not so that it becomes too much but just so that it draws your eye a little bit or you notice something as you're going along so you just add a bit of interest without making a kind of crazy home I like doing things like that I've set the table especially for us today because tablescaping is one of the things that I really love to do and I think it's actually so easy to create a really beautiful table without too much trouble I haven't even got a tablecloth on here I was debating it because sometimes I do but again I really like the worn patina and the history and the stories that this table tells with its patina it came back with us again from when we lived in Asia and it's been with us and we've eaten around it and had Christmas around it for over 20 years so it's had a lot of love and a lot of life and if you look closely you can tell but I love collecting vintage tableware as you can see from my shelves and I've put some on here as well so I like mixing it in so this is an old Portuguese Cabbage leaf bowl that I found and this one I'm really pleased about because it had the actual salad servers to go with it which are really charming and lovely although I don't actually let anyone eat out of this one or use the servers ever but they look nice sometimes I'll put lettuce in it and then I've got French wine glasses the green stemmed wine glasses they're so easy to find and I think they're so jolly on tables but a little bit of hunting and they're really not expensive which is the same so I mix them in with these pink ones as well again, old French I think from the 60s, 70s with their pink stems again, easy to find and not expensive some vintage candle holders always little pots and lots of flowers along with fresh flowers these are my bowls that I recently got from Anthropologie who always do lovely tableware so I really like mixing the old and new so you're not overdosing on anything you've just got a mix of things that you love I think keeping your colours really simple on a table again, I do so this one's greens and pinks with and then just doing a tablescape I really love is having candles both tea lights and of course in candle tapered in their vintage candle holders and fruit is so simple to just elevate that table space to that different level so just lemons that are literally falling out of bowls and almost you just let them roll onto the table to give that really casual effect I guess if I'm having friends for dinner I want it to be casual that's kind of how I feel about my house it's welcoming, it's casual it's not formal I'm relaxed and I really want you to be relaxed so an abundance of fruit or blueberries here again that are falling over overloaded the pots and again with the tables having the different heights so you're going up and down up and down so your eye is drawn all along and little vases of flowers pots of flowers, pineapples obviously you always need a pineapple on your table one other thing on the tablescape while we're here is I was talking about colors and keeping it really simple to say two colors like pink and green with some neutrals but what I really love doing and I talk about this a lot in my book is adding a pop of an accent color and in my house I use a lot of yellow so here that's why I've got the lemons I always think the yellow here and that the jug as well is that pop of an accent color just again to add that bit of interest without being too over the top but just gives it a little bit of something to look at and then up here is a collection of a vintage tea services there's a couple of amalgamated, a colorful one and then some old black and gold and cream ones that I've picked up over the years they aren't used very often but I really love having vintage tea sets on display, I think they work almost as a painting on a wall in a kitchen they give you a bit of art here is a little tiny weeny block that my friend who's an artist paints she's called Sarah, she'd love it but yet she painted that especially for me for my birthday so that's something that I love and my teapot lights again they came when we did the house and I had that whole whole thing of looking for things that were stylish and cool and a little bit quirky but not too over the top and we spotted these teapot lights and I thought they would be a really fun addition to the dining room table and to a kitchen because they capture the essence of English tea drinking which I do a lot of let's go now into what we call the library this is a what we call the library it actually was a corridor in the house before in fact it was a really dark downstairs cloakroom and larder that you couldn't see so we wanted to open it up because we wanted to get the view from the house into the garden and also because this hall was really dark so we wanted to let all the light in so we did get rid of the two tiny little rooms and made this space and we didn't know what to do with it and I think anyone who knows me will know that I absolutely love reading there are books all over this house there are books all over my social media channels always left on sofas or by beds and I'm always reading so it was really lovely to have a space to put all my books so first of all to the bookshelf design those were specially made by a wonderful carpenter friend of ours called Jake he literally made them and then attached them to the wall so they've got the lovely cross design that you can see here so it just makes it a little bit more interesting and then we followed it around the room we painted it dark because we wanted it to be a really cosy comforting space and the light was filling it from the garden so it could get away with it again the ceiling is it's all sort of it's all black or really dark blue so it kind of comforting room some of my favourite things in here bookshelves I really love a bookshelf and one of my favourite things is styling bookshelves and I think that people would say that traditionally you have your books on rows maybe done by alphabetically or theme or something but I think my husband would say that I never have our books like that so our bookshelves I think are just another way to display things that you love so these ones are colour coded some people don't like that I really do and then interspersed so you get the sort of 3Dness of them so you're looking you're looking into them so you get the depth so hanging a picture on the front of a bookshelf is one of my absolute favourite things to do again adding some interest making it into a feature there's a couple of pictures putting ornaments lights, candles there you go and you can just make a really simple reading look with a bookcase, a chair and a little table and you've just made a really cosy corner for reading adding a couple of lights or a light and some greenery but let's talk about some of the things here and I guess two of my absolute favourite things are this wicker elephant from the 1970s UK and my Paddington Bear both of which I absolutely love the wicker elephant I had a search going on eBay for about a year till one came up it did come up I drove from London to Brighton to pick him up I got home and Twiglet our dog who was a puppy at the time but is now 13 literally the first thing she did was chew his trunk to pieces so I decided that to be true to myself I would have to not mind because every piece of furniture tells a story and that was Twiglet's story to the wicker elephant so I've lived with that ever since but the second piece is my Paddington Bear who again I found at an antiques market 10, 15 years ago and I absolutely love him I started sharing my home in 2019 on social media and I was talking about this the other day because I was actually 50 when I started it so I've been at home I've been looking after the children and I really didn't know what I was going to do and I knew that I had to do something and a friend just said you've got a lovely home why don't you just start posting little snippets of your home on Instagram and so I did and I thought I'm just going to commit to this for a month and I'm going to post every day and as I did it I started to get followers coming in and I really met people through hashtag challenges at the time and I really realised that it was something I enjoyed and that people were interested in my house and so then the pandemic hit and we were all at home for however long each of us was and I had loads of time to put more of my house on Instagram as lots of people did so it grew from then and it was then the introduction of Reels and my window in about 2021 that made my account really grow and that's when I really realised that my Instagram account was becoming not just about a home and little corners of your home and an interior decorating account but it was actually becoming about a home that made you have feelings and that made you feel calm and the windows and the seasons changing through the windows along with my furniture was just appealing to people because they had a sense of peace and those are the messages that I get a lot on my Instagram so it's become it made me realise how I wanted my home to feel was coming across through my Instagram Reels so now I have a book coming out in fall it's called Relax Maximalism I've had the most amazing photographer called Lou Souza who's worked with me on it and she has captured this house just absolutely beautifully and another home that we have by the seaside and yeah, I guess my book came from my Instagram account and the sense of I really wanted to share how it was that you could put so much of yourself into your home and yet not end up with a cluttered looking mess that was full of stuff but was a home that was stylish and beautiful and harmonious and how you could do that through having themes that ran through your home and how you can mix colours and patterns and how to bring it all together in a cohesive way so that you can make a home which is of style not clutter so this is my study it's where I spend a lot of time and do my work and it's where I just spent the whole of the winter writing my book I guess that the main feeling that I wanted to create in this room was to echo the outside in the paint colour so if you look out of the window it's an incredibly green vista especially in summer where the fig tree is dominating and the trees to the front so choosing this green brought that outside in that I talk about and that I love so much with all the plants that I have around which we will come on to and my floral sofas which you will see one here but yeah I do that a lot it's also again colour drenched so that I mean it's such an easy way of decorating but I think it allows what's in the room to pop because I paint everything in the same colour so the window frames the picture rails the skirting boards the fireplace the back of the door are all in this green so what I think that does is it makes you draw you don't lose yourself in the gaps of a white one there where the room seems broken up everything is really harmoniously comes together and then your eye can be drawn to all the things that are in the room here we've got old vintage paintings again that I picked up along my journeys from antique fairs piles of books like I really do just love piles of books I think they are a really good way of styling rooms they're just really relaxing to have around so there's my art propped on piles of books This round table is an 18th century English table I believe which I bought at auction when I was decorating this room because I really wanted to work at a round table in the middle of the room which isn't always practical as you will see because there is somewhere else too but I do love sitting at this table and working we come to here we've got my windows which I rarely have curtains or blinds on as you'll see again because I just love having the light that comes into the room and we aren't overlooked here and one of my many floral sofas, I have four at the last count, they're all slightly different this one again is old vintage found after many months of searching for the perfect one for this corner it's quite neutral and I really do think that floral sofas can be a really neutral thing in a room as opposed to a sofa which is just a big block of colour anyway, I love that and then my windowsill that you'll see all through my house I guess I'm really lucky because I've got really wide windowsills but as opposed to having curtains, I just love filling them with books and plants and the odd lamp to bring a bit of style and colour to the room and then on the floor you've got zebra print rug I love a bit of zebra print I think it can be a real neutral in a room and it adds a real character so yeah, that's my zebra print which anchors the table in the centre of a room I think a table on a rug is really helpful I really do like to have things in my rooms to give that warm feeling so I like bringing the outside in with flowers and I like having rugs and I love having my books around so I do fill my rooms with things like that and yet it's really easy to get that feeling if you do that to be cluttered so I really think about how I do it so one way in which I do it is to keep the colours really limited and really simple so basically there are three colours in this room there's green and there's the colours picked out of the sofa the oranges and then the neutrals now you will see pops of red but that's sort of as an accent so I try and create a really harmonious feeling by really limiting the colour palette and also yeah, by just never dumping anything there but actually styling where I put it down again, a cupboard that's filled with little pieces that I find on my way to add to my tablescapes egg cups and little sorbet ice cream cups plates for Christmas again, that's a really pretty vintage cupboard the globe that my brother gave me for a birthday but yeah, I think I do try and bring everything into a room to create a sense of warmth but then the styling of it is crucial or you will end up cluttered and keeping the colours really, really simple now I'm going to take you to the downstairs cloakroom this is the downstairs cloakroom it's the most decorated room in my house, I guess because it's got a really floral wallpaper on it but I really love downstairs cloakrooms for that because they're rooms that you don't tend to spend a lot of time in so I think they're rooms where you can really go to town with your decorating and they're often quite small so you can kind of go a bit crazy in them so this is a floral wallpaper designed by Pearl Lowe, a British celebrity and designer now, it's floral so obviously I was going to love it because it goes with my floral sofas it's quite dark but also what it does is it picks out all the other colours in my house basically found in this wallpaper so it's kind of the yeah, the central point that everything flows from even though it's this tiny little room so you've got the green in the study room you've got the blues in the hall you've got pinks which you find in the morning room, very light pinks some neutrals and the only colour that isn't here is the yellow but never mind so yeah, that's this room the ceiling is painted in black all the woodwork's painted in black I never leave white woodwork I just have a thing about it so yeah so this is our TV room sitting room it's a room that we use in the evening a lot hence again it's a really dark welcoming colour it's the down pipe colour that everybody seems to paint their house in about 15 years ago which I did and I've never changed it I think I might but there is just something I still love about this colour but wait for it because one day it might turn light blue anyway yeah again this is a room that is filled with things that have meaning and feelings and are also styled so again the rug was picked up on one of those many trips to Morocco it's a Beni Urein rug designed by the hill tribes the paintings both of these two paintings we bought back from Vietnam there's another painting upstairs from there again when we lived in Asia we spent a lot of time in Hanoi the city we loved going there and it is filled with really amazing artists so we used to spend hours wandering around the old city looking for not very expensive art although it's now got really popular and haggling and spending our time buying some really beautiful pieces of artwork alongside eating amazing Vietnamese food so yeah these paintings both came back from Hanoi and they're mixed in with a lamp which is a designer lamp in the UK so I really do like that I don't just have old vintage pieces in my home I really like the mixing of old and new high street, high end department store I think you can get a really lovely balance of all of it so that light is a nice but expensive lamp another floral sofa that you can see which is from anthropology I worked with them on this so that was nice again my windows are decorated I've got an African drum here that we use as a table that makes me realise as I'm chatting this through of how much history is in my home and how much I do pick things up and I do buy things as I am going along so yet again this table came back with us from when we lived abroad in Singapore I guess what I love having in sitting rooms is lots and lots of tiny little coffee tables so if you can see there's one down there they're my favourite sort of tables you can just plop them anywhere they're kind of spare tables, occasional tables and little round ones just popped in front of a sofa with a vase of flowers on or somewhere to put a cup for a cup of tea or the TV remote control they just are really easy to find and really easy to pop down anywhere I love little tables with lamps on you can see that one over there again that's a vintage lamp a bit too big for the table I like the fact it's almost too big for it but the juxtaposition and just taking up the whole space I like having different loads and loads of lamps in a room I just don't think you can have too many and I really love not using the overhead lights too much so here our room is just lit by little table lamps, the overhead lamps and I really try to layer all the lights on coffee tables, windowsills floor lamps so your eye, particularly on our very long English winter evenings the room is just lit by pockets of a beautiful warm light I really love these patterned lamp shades, so I've got this one here and that one there I have loads of different patterns and I literally treat my table lamps a bit like fashion objects, so come changing the seasons or changing in the weather, I've got different lamp shades that will match all the different lamp stands that I've got and they're like different hats and I pop them on, so I might put a yellow one on there if the sun's out or a green one at a different time of day, they're just really simple ways to elevate it and also I really love fabric lamp shades because I think they give they really add to a pattern, if you're using patterns in a room, they're really easy to intersperse and also they are just beautiful in themselves, the patterns are, even when the light isn't on, I always think that a little patterned lamp shade looks lovely Actually as I'm just leaving this room and I'm going to take you to the next room and I'm having to weave my way out past the big cushion, what's it called, floor cushion that we put our feet on at night and we put trays on which serves everything but one thing I love about rooms what I'm trying to say is that I love the fact that you have to weave your way through them, like find little corridors as it makes them really interesting rooms to be in, so here I am as I weave my way through the sitting room to come out and take you to the next room So this is what we call our morning room, which is quite a grand name, but that's how it was described in the floor plan and the details when we bought the house, so it's stayed ever since, which actually is quite bizarre because it doesn't get the sun in the morning, but it gets the sun at this time of day, so actually maybe it should be called the late afternoon or evening room Yeah, this is my our, everybody's favourite room in the house, I think It is where everything about my styling I think comes together We've got the famous Instagram window here which is always peeping out onto the seasons and which gives us blossom in spring golden autumnal colours in autumn and this carpet of green in summer, in winter it rarely gives us snow, but occasionally it will. So that's the window that everyone loves from my Instagram account with my floral sofa in front of it I remember buying this floral sofa a really, really long time ago, 15 years ago and I was absolutely determined to have one I think I'd seen one somewhere and I had to really hunt for it and then I hunted and hunted for the fabric, which is a Sanderson fabric and which I then had the sofa upholstered in it and it is such a loved piece of furniture and it really has become iconic to my house. There is always a blanket, there's always a book there's usually a dog, but it's too hot for her at the moment, but hopefully she'll come later. There's always someone in front of the window doing something Again having a floral sofa some people I think would worry that it might dominate the room and be hard to mix patterns with but I find it the opposite I think that as long as you've got your neutral colours in it you can put anything on it and mixing it with lampshades and the other flowers We use this room all day, every day and we use it to relax as opposed to mostly we don't watch TV in it mostly we are sitting on the sofa chatting as a family or with somebody else or someone is reading or we are playing backgammon on it, we play cards around this table, we sometimes eat at it. It's a real hub of the house and I think because it's so connected to the hallway you never feel like you are on your own in the house you're always connected to the rest of the house and I think that's just really lucky to have here and of course we literally do sit on this sofa and we really do watch the seasons roll by that is a highlight of everybody's day. I love having a big coffee table in front of a sofa this one came back with us from singapore, surprisingly enough it's an Indonesian coffee table I think that they give a real focus to a room, they give you something to walk around, they give you an idea and a way of styling your little objects or things that you love on them so I always begin styling my coffee table with a couple of piles of books there's usually a little light and then some trinkets some coffee tables frequently I think if you are styling a coffee table, you want things in threes and with a color that matches so that's almost too big but three on that book or you've got a three next to each other you want to vary the heights so you've got tall things and lower things but basically if you put things on books, you'll make you'll give the coffee table a sense of solidness there won't be things floating around in odd places there's always a cup there's normally a cup of tea in it and the rugs, if you look at the rugs in here I've got a bit of animal print which acts as a neutral but it's layered on top of a very rustic creamy rug with bits of brown in it and again I really love layering rugs to add a little bit of texture and if you get your colors right so basically these two rugs use the same colors they're just slightly different sizes and therefore you can add a bit of interest and texture by just popping one on top of the other there's a really big floral painting on the wall here that came from an online poster company and if I'm looking for pieces of art like that, I'll tend to go for the biggest size possible so that it's the painting itself or the poster that makes the impact I'm not a fan of gallery walls dare I say, or lots of little prints all arranged together I really, really like statement pieces of art and I think if you're struggling to find a way of putting a gallery wall together instead just looking online and finding the biggest piece that you can seems to me to solve all those problems and actually I think it makes a real statement so yeah, I really love this and I love the way it echoes the colors in the rooms it's, yeah, a really good piece again, mixing that modern modern and brand new with all the vintage art that I have around, I like to include both all of these tips that I've been talking about like styling a coffee table, mixing patterns introducing floral sofas buying vintage incorporating different eras and styles of furniture putting high street and vintage together are all including the themes like the little themes like bringing nature into your house a personal touch, a sense of history those things are all included in my book so, which is coming out in fall so if you want to see more then there is that too so here is a little secret to this house that I'm about to show you because next to my window onto the garden is a secret door come with me and see underneath the shade of the fig tree and amongst the agapanthus is this little secret old Cambodian rain drum with two rickety old chairs and it's where we sit and have our don't know, early evening drink or catch some sun in the morning but it's the most beautiful shaded spot and it is really at its best at this time of year because the agapanthus are out it's like our secret garden in the heart of London so welcome to the landing of our house which again, for London particularly in a big city it's just incredible to have such a big space and again it's one of those features of the arts and crafts movement when the house was built but yeah, this little section is like another room in itself and I really wanted to make a focal point against this wall so it's really simply done there's just a rug an antique bench and the painting above it the painting we bought again a long time ago when we were in Hanoi in Vietnam and she is again one of those pieces that always makes me smile I just love her she's so calm, she's so serene and I love the colours and yeah she is a classic piece of a home to make you smile finding those pieces that have got a story and a soul and a meaning to them that you love yeah again, I guess the pillows on there are again an example of pattern mixing and they I think they'd probably be quite a good way to explain how pattern mixing can work, which is I think if you've got a colour seam you can really mix lots of different patterns if you have a thread of colour that goes through each of them so these cushions are all linked by threads of colour so you can see in here the pink comes through the pink on there, the pink around the butterfly there's some pink in the parrot pinky purple around here and onto the purple of that cushion so all of those cushions no matter that their patterns are so different there's leopard print mixed in there's stripes and then we come to the black and white stripe which obviously doesn't have any colour in it but black and white is really good to have as a neutral in a pattern mix you can put it in anything and it breaks up the whole the whole array of patterns so it doesn't get too much but yeah, pattern mixing if you're wanting to do it keeping that thread of colour going through again you can see there's a lot of yellow in them and the yellow reflected in the painting and that enables you to just keep the harmony when you are mixing your patterns so here we are in the bedroom which is a really beautiful light-filled room and it's painted in a old Farrow & Ball archive colour it's got a great name it's called Potted Shrimp and it really does change colour with the light and it can be very shrimp-like in the darker lights one of the things I love most about this room is the really flimsy whimsical linen mix curtains that I have that blow in the breeze and on Instagram lots of people ask after them and they are truly magical they really do let in light and breeze but they don't actually work as curtains let's be clear on that so behind them I always have a blackout blind so that that actually does the job of a curtain and the linen blend mix curtains just look pretty and float in the wind I've got an antique mirror here which came from France I bought it, there's a really lovely little company near to us who do summer shows and autumn shows called Fabulous Vintage Finds and they go to France every year and pick up loads of stuff so the mirror and in fact the little desk both came from there at one of their summer fairs or artist open houses as did the little bench stool and yeah again the floral theme continues onto my bed cover and my bedding with little cushions again mixing and matching patterns the stripes with the florals or turning over my cushions and adding a bit of yellow with a flower again the window filled with books and flowers and pots of things that are growing I just have such an obsession with having bringing that outside in and really creating a calm and natural feeling room and the curtain is blowing yeah again pattern lamp shades a little chair the mirror is absolutely beautiful but try doing your makeup in it and all the time you realize that buying really old vintage patterned things comes at a cost because you can't actually see yourself so I have to go to my daughter's room to do anything like that but I wouldn't swap it for the world when I think about decorating a bedroom it's really interesting because I think some people decorate bedrooms for night time they go you want a really dark cocooning room because when you're going into it you're sleeping so you are winding down for sleep other people might decorate it for day time but I kind of look at a bedroom and think I'm going to decorate this bedroom for a Sunday morning lie in because that is my favorite time of the day and even if I only get that once a week or sometimes never just that feeling that it gives me so it's got a beautiful warm pink on the walls to give it that sense of warmth and harmony and yet it's still light and bright to give you the sense of it's day time you're not cocooned so I guess I think when I'm designing my bedrooms I always think about that that vibe of when I really love being in it and I think being with my book on a Sunday having a lie in with a cup of coffee and a croissant and the breeze blowing and the curtain blowing is the way that I really love my bedrooms to feel Home to me is a place which is about feelings a house is the structure that's made of bricks and woodwork it's a place to be decorated but a home is somewhere that has that sense of je ne sais quoi that vibe that feeling where you're sitting in a room and it feels like it's a part of you because it's got your stories, your history your connections in it the things that you've chosen and it might be that you walk into a room and you know exactly how the light falls in that room at that particular moment in the day and you think that's where you're going to have your cup of tea or the patterns that you've chosen are the patterns that you've put together over time and with the sense of history that comes with it that's a home, it's all about the person who's created it and the people that are in it and the feeling that that creates thanks for watching be sure to go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content, shopping guides and so much more