Does where you live influence how you style your home?

Before we bought this house I’d lived in a variety of rented homes, all decorated in varying degrees of ‘niceness’…

  • A Studio flat above the pub I worked at: yellow walls with a terracotta feature wall round the original 60’s fireplace. Oh, and green swirly pub carpet left overs. At least I didn’t have to pay rent!
  • A new build town house in Brighton – gorgeously magnolia from top to bottom and they were just finishing laying the cream carpets as we moved in! But we weren’t allowed to do a thing to it, so magnolia and personality free it stayed.
  • A poky flat in Brighton North Laine opposite a comedy club – amazing location but the walls were so wonky that you couldn’t even think of putting shelves up, and the washing machine made its way into the middle of the room every time you used it as the floors were so sloped! We brightened it up with throws and plants but that flat was always freezing and dark, even in the middle of summer!
  • A lovely spacious maisonette right by Brighton station – When I moved in my flatmate and I decorated it, but for some reason we thought light and dark blue walls with a floral runner-whatsit around the middle was a good look! It wasn’t. Thinking back that flat could have been amazing – it had an old school traditional iron radiator and a great tiled fireplace – we were just mid 20somethings with hadn’t developed a taste in interiors!

Fast forward a few years to 2016 when Sam and I fell in love with a quirky extended cottage in Worthing, it’s ancient (1800’s) and it needs a new roof (still!) but it’s ours. We’ve got an original sash stained glass window in the living room (beautiful!) and each bedroom has a huge sash window too, sadly for our energy bills these are also original and single glazed! But we’ve spent time making the kitchen as nice as we can within our budget (painted the veneer doors, laid a lovely floor and tiled behind the sink and worktops) and it’s getting there! We’re in the middle of decorating the living room now that my new lilac sofas have arrived, then we’ll move onto the bathroom (which needs gutting) and plastering the bedrooms and hallways. I think owning a house and keeping it nice is a never ending task, because by the time you’ve finished it all your tastes may well have changed entirely, so you start over again!

Wayfair have mapped out the UK’s homestyle, and it’s an interesting read!

According to Wayfair’s research living on the South Coast I am more likely to be leaning towards a ‘country cottage’ look – and though I do live in a cottage it’s not in the country and the interiors don’t really look like it! Well, we have a lovely dresser in the kitchen that wouldn’t look too out of place in a country kitchen, but that’s where the similarity ends!

I think maybe we’d be more at home in the North West, favouring a modern style… although with two young kids I do find minimalism a bit hard to achieve! But hey, if we were to move up north we’d certainly get more bang for our buck house-price wise anyway!

Are you aligned with the ‘homestyle’ of the area you live in? I’d love to know!

2 thoughts on “Does where you live influence how you style your home?

  1. My goodness, you’ve had some interesting sounding decor in the past! I am in Norfolk but have a very modern kitchen and living room with a lot of industrial touches!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *