Nesting is a growing collection of stories, hacks, and tools for making the most out of your life at Nation. Each edition features a different guest and a different focus, but always with the goal of enriching your domestic bliss.
This week we’re joined by Alex Gilmore-Johnstone, Head of Interior Design at Coronation Property. With her laser focused attention to detail, Alex is committed to helping new developments transcend conventional apartment living.
In this feature, Alex shares some of her best tips for bringing out the you in your new apartment.
Our homes are our sacred safe places, where we rest, nourish, and prepare ourselves to take on the day. This is why it is important that you create it in a way that makes you feel like it's yours. That could be through stacking your favourite novel collection for show, family photos on the fridge, grandmas’ ornaments placed on a windowsill, a treasured vase sitting on the dining table, or your favourite colour used in an everyday items such as dinner plates.
If colour is not your thing, layering can truly add to the warmth of a space and a comfortable home. Imagine every texture in your home, the floor is hard but textural, the walls are also hard and matt, the glass hard but shiny and reflective. These can be balanced through alternative textures and levels of reflectivity. A throw rug, a painting, a soft warm table lamp, a vase with flowers. Consider if something it matt or shiny, rough, or soft, tally or short, when placing it in your new space.
Don’t forget your other senses in your home, which add great depth to our experiences of space; where or not we pay attention to it.
Like a heater or warm jumper on a cold day, the level of light in your home can also attribute to your sense of comfort. Allowing natural light to flood the apartment during the morning and day can breathe new life into an apartment, whereas in the evenings the use of warm coloured table and floor lamps create a sense of winding down.
Find smells that you associate with freshness or comfort, for example lavender in the bedroom can be calming and lemon myrtle for a fresh bathroom creates a feeling of cleanliness. This can be used through air diffusers or scent sticks.
Having background noise in your space also adds ambience, whether it’s the sound of the city buzz or the local bird song, a symphony or your favourite band, having a speaker in the home changes the atmosphere to your mood.
Self-watering pots, with hardy indoor plants at first if you don’t feel you have the green thumb, can drastically transform your space. It could be one tall plant, like a rubber leaf tree, or a small hanging succulent from a high shelf, maybe a leafy peace lily in the living room.
When moving in, placing everything you own in it’s new location can take time. Hot tip - buy some drawer dividers and shelf organisers before moving in. This can help arranging items in a more ordered way, meaning easier to keep the place feeling tidy, always knowing where things go, instead of creating the dreaded “everything” drawer. Clean house clean mind.
When trying to understand where to place things in the home, think of it like the daily routine, consider how you like to wake up, what should be near you and why. Where you walk in the home, the pathways you take most regularly should be free from clutter or items on the ground. There should always be a balance, to create flow in the home, if something is high it may need something low to balance it our nearby – for example a floor lamp and a low side table, a large painting and two small candle holders.