Author Archives: dev

Get the Look: Technology + Design

When it comes to technology in the living room. Everything is so small-scale these days.

There’s no need to have that huge sound system taking over half the space.

We’ve partnered with Stylist Briar Stanley, to help show you how you can integrate technology into your spaces.

 

 

Find amazing pieces for your kitchen at JB Hifi, The Good Guys and Sony Centre – all now open at Nunawading Homemaker HQ.

Get the Look: Bringing it all together

Bringing it all together

When you’re decorating, have fun with proportions and the size of pieces you choose.

Bring your dining area together with the right dining table. We’ve partnered with Stylist Briar Stanley, to help you find out how.

Find amazing pieces for your dining room at Focus on Furniture, Nick Scali Clearance Outlet and Provincial Home Living – all now open at our Homemaker Centre.

a small and cozy living room

Get the Look: Feature Appliances

Get the look

Are you wondering how to bring your kitchen to life and bring in your own style?

There is such an amazing range of appliances for the kitchen these days, that you can treat key pieces like a piece of furniture in your home.

We’ve partnered with Stylist Briar Stanley, to help you find out how.

Find amazing pieces for your kitchen at JB HiFi, The Good Guys, Sony Centre and Godfreys – all at Nunawading Homemaker HQ.

Tips: Will your furniture fit?

Thinking of a mixing it up a little at your place?

Take a few tips from Urban Rhythm at Nunawading Homemaker HQ.

Before you order that four-seat sofa or eight-seater dining table you’ve fallen in love with, be sure to check that it will fit inside the room it is destined for, as well as through all the passage ways to get there.

A little thought up front can potentially save you unnecessary expense, inconvenience and disappointment.

Will the furniture fit?

Check that you’ll be able to get your furniture into its final position. 

Make a newspaper template of the furniture footprint, then place it in the intended position on the floor of your room.  See that you can move around the piece, and that it won’t block heating or cooling ducts for example.

Do you have a lift or stairs to navigate? Do you have a tight corner to turn, such as a narrow apartment corridor? 

Such spaces need to be considered, as your furniture will need to be able to pass through these areas to reach its final destination.

What is the parking access like at your place? Do you have a narrow laneway or a steep driveway to navigate? Can a truck park close to your entrance?  

These are questions that need to be answered so that your furniture can be delivered smoothly.

It might simply mean that we organise a smaller truck to deliver your goods so it can fit in the laneway outside your home.

Access concerns

Advise your contultant about any access concerns. 

If you have any doubts, your consultant will provide you with a Delivery Access Questionnaire. Complete it as accurately as possible so that our warehouse manager can help determine accessibility. Photos of tight corners and entrances will also be helpful in our assessment.

From this we will make an assessment whether or not we need to either provide a larger delivery crew, modify construction of the furniture that won’t fit, or suggest to you a more appropriately sized piece.

With a little planning, most access challenges can be overcome. Being prepared is the key.

For more great ideas and special finds, visit Urban Rhythm at Nunawading Homemaker HQ today.

4 simple ways to bring feng shui into your home

Feng shui is the ancient Chinese art of creating a positive home environment by balancing the flow of energy. Here are some easy ways you can create a feng shui-friendly home and bring more happiness into your space.

  1. Create an energy flow to the front door

One of the basic rules of feng shui is to ensure there’s a clear flow of energy to the front door. Make sure there’s nothing blocking the energy to your front door or cluttering the entrance.

Instead, create an inviting entry to your home by placing beautiful flowers on a nearby side table or a stylish doormat on the floor. Or maybe it’s time to show your door some TLC, whether it’s repainting it or giving it a thorough clean with a lint-free cloth or sponge.

  1. A feng shui-friendly living room

In general practice, good feng shui involves decluttering your space and the living room is no exception. Keep things clean, airy and filled with beautiful natural light to attract positive energy.

If you don’t have many windows, you can decorate your space with mirrors or layered lighting to help energy bounce around your room. Consider using a combination of floor lamps, table lamps and ceiling fixtures, for example. Also, ff you wanna redesign your living room, Aspley Shopping Centre has a lot of furniture stores that can help you, as a Freedom in Aspley or the Nick Scali Aspley.

Place your couch and tables in a circle in your living room to create a warm and inviting space, while adding mirrors to help energy bounce around the room. One of the rules of feng shui involves also creating a home with beauty in mind. It’s still important to select furniture according to typical design principles, such as working with scale and proportion and choosing the best sized rug or sofa for your space.

  1. Embrace your green thumb

Of course, you already know that indoor plants have many health benefits, such as purifying the air, but they also help to activate positive energy in your home. According to feng shui, the best time to add a new plant is at the beginning of the month or year when it symbolises a healthy beginning for you and your loved ones.

You can place plants within a few metres away from your computer to filter electromagnetic energy or place tall plants in the corners of rooms with sloped or low ceilings to counteract symbolic heaviness. When it comes to choosing plants, look for those with curved or round leaves, instead of spikes or thorns. For example, peace lilies, philodendrons, bamboo and ferns.

Not a green thumb? No worries. Silk plants are great, too – just make sure you dust them and take care of them, but avoid dried flowers, as they represent stagnant energy.

  1. Bring water into your home

Listening to the gentle sound of water is a wonderful way to relax at home, but in feng shui, water means wealth, so it’s a good idea to place a small water feature or fountain in your home, ideally near the doorway to attract extra money in. Your water feature doesn’t even need to be a Chinese design to bring wealth into your home.

It’s believed that the best place to put your water feature is either east, southeast or north corners of your home. Avoid placing it in the bedroom or underneath the stairs.

5 Do’s and Don’ts of Decluttering

Now that the cloudy skies and cold weather have passed and the warmer season is here, it’s time to brush away the cobwebs and freshen up your home with a spring clean.

But where are to start? Here are some of the most common mistakes people make when it comes to decluttering.

Do plan and prepare

So you’ve have had enough of struggling to deal with your disorganised drawers and you’ve decided that in this very moment, you’re going to clean your home immediately. But hold fire!

Consider which rooms and areas need the most attention straight away and how much time it might take to tackle them. This way, you’ll avoid disappointment and have a more realistic idea of what you can actually achieve.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew

Don’t attempt to declutter more than one area or room at a time. Maybe you’ll take care of books one day, then clothes another.

Now is not the time for a scattergun approach – you’ll just end up dissatisfied with the results and frustrated and confused as to what you have and haven’t dealt with. Work your way through one area before moving onto the next.

Don’t procrastinate

Set aside a time and day when you plan to attack your home. Treat it like you would an appointment – don’t postpone it, show up and get started. If it seems like too much work, call a friend to give you a hand.

Need some help?

Enter our competition to win one of 30 professional five-hour spring cleans. We’re giving away spring cleans every day this month until 30 September.

Don’t take a walk down memory lane

As the decluttering expert Marie Kondo herself has instructed, don’t get taken over by nostalgia when clearing your home, as tempting as it may be.

Read one letter your best mate wrote you when you were kids, and suddenly it’s two hours later, you’ve read your teenage diaries and your bedroom is even messier than before. Keep to the task at hand.

Don’t ‘fake’ declutter

Simply creating tidy piles of stuff is not decluttering. Think about what you want to do with your things and where it should go. Your items could go into four different categories: bin, keep, donate or sell.

Do take action

Once you have decided what you want to keep, sell, throw or donate, make sure those items don’t simply hang around your garage.

Throw out what you no longer want, whether it’s taking it down to the hard garbage bins, organising a council pick-up or taking it to recycling. Take the items you want to donate to your local charity or give them to a friend or loved one. Store away the items you do want to keep. And if you’re going to sell your items, think of how you plan to offload them, whether it’s online or through a garage sale or the markets.

For more ideas, sign up to our VIP Style club or visit us in centre today.

 

Image courtesy of Urban Rhythm

Create a stylish home office

Is it your dream to create a stylish home office?

It’s hard to feel inspired or to work efficiently in a dull office. You don’t have to spend a fortune to make small changes that can lift your space from drab to fab with these tips and tricks.

Declutter

Clear your workspace from piles of random papers and folders, books you are not using and other clutter that has made its way into your office. If you have not or will not use the item in 3 months, put it away.

Get organised

There will no doubt be folders or books you will need at hand. Use magazine file holders or stylish boxes to neatly store them. Open rattan baskets available from Bed Bath n’ Table also look great.

Light it up

Add a table lamp to your workspace. It will lift the mood and with the great range of lamps out there, you’ll be sure to find one that can become a feature.

Extra seating

If you have space why not add an occasional chair and create a reading nook. Perfect for off-screen work, you can position the chair to maximise natural light. Pop into Focus on Furniture to choose the perfect chair.

Add more colour

Using an accent colour against a neutral palette can make the room ‘pop’. Denim blues and lush greens are the colours forecast for the year ahead.

Style it

Your bookshelf has so much styling potential. Work it right. While there are no hard and fast styling rules, some great tips are to stack books horizontally and vertically, add a collection of objects, layer objects and incorporate some artwork.

Designing to maximise space

Regardless of your home’s size, we all crave a little extra space to make our interiors function better and feel more open and welcoming. As such, creating the feeling of spaciousness is one of the most common problems people face when decorating their home.

We’ve uncovered 9 tips to help you achieve that ‘airy’ feeling in your home, regardless of how compact it is.

Make your space work harder for you

When you’re short of space, making every room work harder for you is imperative. After all, smaller homes often won’t have the luxury of a dedicated room for every function such as a study, dining room or rumpus.

Consider how you can incorporate other functions in the one room. Could up incorporate a study nook in a corner of the living room where you can shut the doors to keep everything hidden? Maybe that unused space under the stairs could house a desk or some additional storage.

For those with young children, increasing the storage in your lounge room is essential to hide away all the kid’s stuff and avoid the space looking like a toy room. It’s also worth considering how you furnish the space to make it useable and inviting for both adults and kids to use.

Optimise the natural light

Natural light can help improve the perception of space as well as make the home more inviting. Open up and take advantage of the natural light where possible. This may mean by creating a bigger window opening, installing sky lights or knocking a wall or two down.

If your natural light source is limited, utilise reflective surfaces and mirrors to help create the illusion of more space and light. Bright white lamps rather than those that illuminate yellow can also provide the effect of more light in an interior.

Create an indoor/outdoor connection

Creating a connection with the outdoors will help your interior feel more spacious.

If you have the ability to open up your home to a garden or courtyard, you’ll be rewarded with a more useable and expansive space. Consider this outdoor space as an extra room which could be used as a dining area, an additional lounge space or a great area for kids play and to store their toys.

Those with only a small outdoor space such as a balcony can still utilise this space to make the room feel larger. Ensure the doorways to your outdoor space are clearly visible and can be opened with ease. Make your balcony space is also visually appealing, even if you don’t use it often, by potting up some herbs or hanging some plants.

Furnish within your limits

While you may desire a modular sofa that you can stretch out on and watch a good flick, it simply may not work with the dimensions of your space. Rather than filling your entire room with a big sofa, armchairs and tables, be realistic about what can actually fit.

Your room may be better suited to a finer sofa like our Melba with a couple of armchairs to allow for circulation. A round dining table may better suit the limited space than your large extension table which doesn’t allow your guests to move in and out of their chairs easily.

It’s also worth considering furniture that offers a multi-functional purpose such as a coffee table with drawers or shelving to put your magazines, remotes and coasters.

Consider custom-made pieces

Furnishing your home to fit its proportions perfectly will help maximise space and enhance its functionality. It also means you don’t have to go without or make a compromise on the overall style.

This may mean designing custom-made shelving that can be built into an area of your home or arranging for a table to be made at a shorter length. By incorporating some custom-made pieces into your interior, you’ll have a one of a kind home which considers the entire space and its aesthetics.

Show the floor

Interior spaces read larger when you can see the full extent of the flooring. This means learning to levitate your joinery where possible. You can create this optical illusion in most rooms, like the bathroom by installing wall-mounted joinery or shelving a bedroom.

You can trick the eye further my choosing furniture that has legs allowing you to see underneath and for air to circulate. A sofa like our Encore or Olso occasional chair creates the illusion that there is more space simply with its lighter appearance. They also make it easier to clean underneath!

Unite the spaces through materials

Nothing can make an interior look and feel smaller than a mishmash of materials. This is especially true for open-plan layouts.

Instead of having different materials in your living, dining and kitchen, treat all the spaces as one single entity. This may mean by running the same flooring through all rooms or painting the walls in the same colour.

Think about the materials you’re using for your kitchen cabinetry and how you can bring these into your dining room or living area. This doesn’t mean you need to adhere to one look and create a dull looking interior. Subtle uses of the material or colour palate in each room will help create consistency and provide a greater feeling of space.

Embrace the feeling of intimacy

We often view smaller interiors negatively. However, you can decorate these spaces to be not only highly functional, but feel warm, intimate and familiar.

To create the feeling of intimacy, look at incorporating materials that are comfortable and inviting. Wool, linens, leather, felts and timbers are all warming thanks to their natural qualities.

Small interiors also don’t need to be kept bare to retain their feeling of spaciousness. Find a place to display personal treasures or family heirlooms in your interior. This will enhance the feeling of intimacy and give your home personality.

Edit, edit and edit

Just when you think you’ve nailed your interior’s décor, edit one more time. A little restraint can go a long way in making your interior feel more spacious.

Start with editing your materials and colour palette making sure they are all work together and not one is competing over another. Consider if you’ve squeezed in one too many side tables into your space. How does your space feel if you remove one piece of furniture or swap it for something smaller? Edit your soft furnishings, artwork and decorative items too. Remember, if it doesn’t fit into your space or work harmoniously with the rest of your interior, it’s time to ditch it.

Original Post by Urban Rhythm

Image courtesy of Urban Rhythm