As you probably know I’m really passionate about light. I love natural light. When we first went to see our new home, I loved all the windows, in fact we both did. It wasn’t just the character of our 70s home that sold it to us, but also the green views and the natural light. We have much more space to enjoy as a family. It’s really great to be able to spend time together and to have separate rooms for our work. My husband and I both work from home, so it’s all about balancing work and family life. After nearly 3 and a half years in a 2 bedroom flat, what we needed most of all was more space. We needed both family space and creative space.
The kitchen was one of the darkest rooms in our new home, so we decided to knock down a wall to make the space work for us. We opened up the space between the kitchen and what was the family room. We’ve now have a kitchen / dining room instead. It’s by far the brightest room in the house and the natural light is amazing. It’s a huge transformation, as you’ll see in my next blog post. By changing a few windows from obscured glass to normal glass and painting the space white, the room now looks much larger than before. I love spending time there, which is great as I really didn’t like the way it looked before. In fact it used to be my least favourite room. Isn’t it funny what natural light can do for a space?
Our living room has got beautiful light too. I quite often sit there when I create mood boards for my work. It’s bathed in light, so it’s perfect for doing what I love. All my green plants love the living room too. They seem to be thriving at the window, soaking up all the light. One day I would love to install some Velux roof lights to get even more natural daylight in. I’ve found so many great options here. In the summer our living room has got quite a lot of light, but I think when it comes to winter it will be quite dark. A couple of roof lights would quickly fix that as they let in up to two times as much light compared to a vertical window. I think the transformation would be huge! I think a lot of people underestimate how important natural light is for our wellbeing and our mood. I always find it hard in the winter when it’s so dark and I’m constantly switching lights on.
I recently created a bathroom mood board, you can see it on Instagram here. I always make sure I have lots of magazines and samples for mood boards. One of my favourite parts of my work is to sit down with a cup of coffee and get creative. It’s so satisfying working away from the computer. I have so much fun getting creative with tactile materials and of course I make a huge mess and have samples everywhere, but that’s a part of being creative, isn’t it?
As our home was built in the late 60s, the way we live have changed a little since. We felt that it was important to create more of an open plan feel and adapt the living space. My husband was reluctant to knock down the wall in the kitchen, but he get’s it now. The kitchen felt really small as it was a vintage blue colour, had lots of wall units and hardly any natural light.
We feel really lucky that we found our home and are very pleased about the way we’ve managed to make the space work for us. Our house is up side down, meaning the living space is upstairs. The reason for using the two bedrooms upstairs as our offices was because we wanted to make use of daylight. It’s worked out really well and we can enjoy the green views, as well as all the natural light. It was definitely the right decision.
This is definitely my living room goal! Just look at the light in this picture. My photos above would look totally different if we had roof windows.
For more inspiration check out my curated board on Bright Interiors on Pinterest. Click here to see it.
This post was written in collaboration with Velux, all views are my own.