Once I stopped decorating whole rooms and focused on corners, my home started falling into place

Home decorator Lara Winter is one of Ideal Home's Open House contributors, sharing her thoughts on revamping a 200 year old cottage to make it right for modern family life. See the rest of her articles here.

I used to think decorating meant tackling a whole room. Choose the paint, find the furniture, hang the art, sort the lighting and somehow make everything work together. Easy.

Except sometimes it really isn’t. The more I looked at a room as one big project, the more overwhelmed I felt by everything that wasn’t quite working. So, almost accidentally, I started doing the opposite: ignoring most of the room and concentrating on one corner at a time.

And weirdly, that’s when everything started falling into place.

Start with a corner you’ll actually use

One of my favourite spots in our living room is ridiculously simple: an armchair, a small marble-topped table and our green drinks cabinet. That’s basically it. But the chair swivels around to look straight out into the garden, which makes it somewhere I genuinely want to sit, rather than just furniture arranged to look nice.

That’s probably my first rule for a good corner: think about what you’ll actually do there. Where will your cup of tea go? Is there somewhere for a book? What will you look at when you sit down? Sometimes moving a chair by half a metre does more for a room than buying anything new.

Don’t overlook the really tiny corners

Not every corner needs an armchair and a perfectly positioned lamp. One of the smallest areas I’ve deliberately decorated is our kettle corner.

Our thrifted kitchen cabinet holds all our mugs and glasses, so the kettle naturally lives beside it. I hung a tiny piece of art by Lucy from Kitchen Corner Gallery on the side of the cabinet, just above the kettle, and added a little hen-shaped teaspoon holder. That’s it. Cute and practical.

I make tea approximately 700 times a week, so why shouldn’t that tiny bit of kitchen make me happy? We tend to focus our decorating energy on the big views of a room, but sometimes it’s the little places you use every single day that deserve it most.

If a whole room overwhelms you, shrink the job

Our dining room is a walk-through room and the first room you enter when you come into our home. For ages it bothered me. There are lots of doorways, people constantly walk through it and whenever I thought about “doing the dining room”, I couldn’t work out where to start.

So I stopped trying to solve the whole room and focused on the dining nook instead. We built the DIY banquette, added a good table, put down a beautiful Neptune rug and painted the shelf above in Firebrick Red, one of my favourite colours. Done.

And somehow, once that area felt intentional, the rest of the room stopped bothering me. My eye had somewhere to land and the whole space suddenly made more sense. Now it’s one of my favourite rooms in the house.

Shop your house before you shop the shops

Before buying anything for a corner, I always think it’s worth moving things around. Steal the lamp from upstairs. Try the little table that isn’t doing much in another room. Move some art. You’d be surprised how different something can look simply because you’ve stopped seeing it in the same place every day.

Corners are brilliant for this because you’re not committing to an entire new scheme. A chair, lamp, table and picture you already own might be all you need.

Know when to stop

This might be the hardest bit. Once one corner looks good, you don’t immediately have to “finish” everything around it.

Rooms can evolve slowly. In fact, I think mine usually end up better that way. Make one bit work, live with it and then see what starts bothering you next.

The internet would have us believe rooms are transformed over a weekend. Mine tend to improve one little corner and one inexplicably long DIY project at a time.

Turns out, looking at less of a room has helped me like the whole thing a lot more.