Danielle Proud, interior designer and author, should know a thing or two about making her home look beautiful.
However, just like everyone else, the problem of having to display a dodgy gift or two from friends can rather break the ambiance. About one in five only put such gifts out when the specific friend visits, although over half just take the simpler option of pretending that they love it, according to a HomeSense study.
Danielle talks us through how she keeps her home looking beautiful, despite such challenges…
So, how’s the summer looking in the world of interior design?
What I’ve been noticing is a lot of fashion led trends. So there have been real flashes of neon, which I think looks great and also sort of watery florals. The whole kind of blue, pale grey, painterly look looks really good, especially in the living room if you want to update and get a nice, fresh look going on.
What was the last room in your house you redecorated?
I’ve just redecorated my downstairs room; it’s an open plan room, so it’s got the kitchen, dining room and living room all pretty much joined together. I’ve gone for loads of different kinds of new metal finishes. So I’ve got like a copper with strata lines going through it and I’ve also got some really lovely tiles all in different metallic colours.
How often do you redecorate? Do you feel the need to after a couple of months or after a year do you change things?
No, I don’t redecorate that much to be honest. What I do is I tend to build on what I already have. So each room in my house has a kind of ten year story going on, which reflects a lot of my family, bits from my mum and dad, from my grandparents, it’s definitely a real narrative in my house.
Anything else you’d like to have a go at in your house?
Well I’ve just tried overdyeing rugs, so taking old Persian rugs and doing really acidic colours over the top, it looks really good. It’s quite big though, so you have to get a massive bit of tarpaulin out in the garden. I’m also into the idea of doing ombre effects on curtains, which can be really expensive if it goes wrong!
I love ombre effects.
It looks so cool.
Do you get many gifts for your home and have you ever thrown one out or put it on display when you didn’t want to?
I get tons of gifts for my home and honestly it’s a really funny thing, because especially as a designer my sense of taste is really specific. With me, people often just think, “she’s into interiors, I’ll buy her this”, however I make such specific choices that no one’s ever really got it right. So please don’t buy me anything for my home!
As an interior designer, surely you don’t have anything in your home you don’t like?
No, but I think like most people there’s the odd gift that you’ve been given and you whip it out when the person comes over – research shows that one fifth of us do that!
How do the capital’s homes differ from the rest of the country on an interior design note?
Well I think you’ve got to use space much better if you live in the capital because space is at a premium, so you find that you’ve got much more efficient storage systems. I think also you see a lot of the beginnings of trends in apartments in cities and then country-wise you just have a lot more space and people have a lot more rooms, they can experiment more, so I think really it’s half a dozen of one, six of the other.
Has the influx of foreign investors to the capital bought a wave of new, interesting design styles?
It’s bought a very high end lux market in, which we didn’t necessarily have before, the kind of top of the top and these overpriced places like the apartments at the top of the Shard which has art pieces and everything in it before it’s even been sold. So it’s almost like a prescriptive lifestyle that we haven’t really seen so much of before.
You work with HomeSense – what are they up to?
They’ve just launched a new Sensology App and this really helps you identify your own sense of style and helps steer you to items that might be good for your specific style.