Summer is here - let's get the house ready

With the summer season almost here, FrithRugs provides three top interior design tips to let the sunshine in.

The Big Stuff

We are not proposing you have to kit out your home with new furniture to give your home a fresh look for summer – but perhaps now is a good time to think about moving things around a little. Can you move the sofa onto an opposite wall? Could you move the chair from the hall into the seating room, and then perhaps move the sitting room chair into a bedroom? 

Sometimes just moving your familiar items into a new place or into a new room is all it takes to revamp your design style. One other piece of advice – when you do buy new items of key furniture – always buy the best you can as quality will stand the test of time.

Let’s get colourful

You can’t change the colour of your walls (that’s why neutral is always best) but you can easily change your soft furnishing and accessories to add a dash of colour into your summer home.

One of the season’s key colours is yellow or shades of it – from bright and bold to a subtler mustard.  See which you prefer and find a colour that most suits your style.  Contemporary home with lots of white, will easily carry a bold canary yellow, where more traditional homes may work better with muted tones.

Start with a new rug and then colour co-ordinate around it – cushions, silk throws, a new lampshade and some new pottery will be enough.  You don’t’ need to spend a fortune to get a new look for any room.

Light Up

Lighting is a wonderful mood enhancer. If you have a real or electric stove, it’s unlikely it’s going to be lit for a few months ad so swop the logs for some fairy lights.

Fairy lights are now being used all year around – you can use them in glass vases or wound around tall pot plants. You can drop them around the fire place or behind a glass cabinet.  They will look great wherever you place them.

Keep lighting a minimum – you don’t need a lot in the longer summer months but it’s always nice to have a cosy lamp in a corner, when the sun does set.  Hopefully you will be spending more time outdoors, but when it’s time to come inside – you still want to create a cosy home.

So, remember those three top tips for your summer home:

Move or swop furniture around

Buy a new rug and accessories

Get out the fairy lights - and your home is ready to go.

Fireworks at home

Our exclusive Vibrance collection

Even if you are not setting off your own fireworks or attending an official event, you can usually enjoy all the colours of somebody else's firework in the night sky - but we've got some fabulous colourful rugs for those people who appreciate dazzling design and an explosion of colour.

Our Vibrance collection is the place to start your search for some colour.  As the name suggests, it features contemporary rugs in vibrant colours. Available in numerous sizes and made from 100% wool, you won't find these rugs anywhere else - as they are exclusive to FrithRugs.  If you are looking for a statement rug - take at look at the full range.

Or, check out another exclusive range, the Ella Claire Exclusive collection.  This offers beautiful handmade rugs that use the finest wool with touches of viscose to enhance the colour and design. The smooth, plush pile is a joy to walk on as well as being a treat for the senses.

These rugs really do turn up the heat and bring a warm glow to your autumn/winter decor.  The bright pops of colour are just what you want to cheer up a dark, dreary winter night - just because it's miserable outside, it doesn't have to feel that way inside.

When you have such a wow accessory in any room, you should ensure that other pieces are more subtle.  However, the great thing about having a colourful rug is that you can take one or two colours from the rug to co-ordinate.  In the example above, you're spoilt for choice - mustard, red, blue, orange - a few cushions in the shame colours and perhaps a couple of ornaments in the same colours and you're done.

Have a safe and enjoyable Bonfire Night everyone.

Be Brave with Colour

A recent report said that we Brits would love to use more colour at home, but we are afraid of getting it wrong.  So, if that sounds like you  - then why not have a go at colour blocking?

Colour blocking remains an interior design style that doesn’t go out of style.  Essentially, it does what it says on the tin.  Rooms are decorated and dressed using blocks of bright, often primary colours and there isn’t a neutral colour to be seen.  Beige is banned and the result is a very modern, grown up room that dares to use those colours that normally would not be paired together.

FrithRugs has several collections which feature rugs in one colour and we would recommend that you use a rug to pull together and co-ordinate the whole room.

Lime green, shocking pink, turquoise, pillar box red… you name it, you can colour block it.  You can also use the same colours in different hues or shades - the only rule is, don’t follow any rules!

Don’t know where to start - we do!  If you have a brown sofa, opt for a red rug and mustard cushions.  Have a grey sofa, why not buy a pink armchair and then go for a blue rug and green cushions.  Have a black leather suite?   Select red cushions, invest in a purple rug and try white shelving.  We did say forget the usual rules.

Colour blocking means using primary colour where possible and some of the following collections are a great place to find that all important accessory - Gabbeh, Emily, Basketweave and Plain.

Have fun.

And so to bed

Soft thick rugs are ideal
by the bed

Having trouble sleeping?  Did you know your bedroom could cause problems nodding off?

Let’s start with the colour.  Experts say that colour really does have an impact on your mood and so while red, yellow and black may keep you awake at night, shades of blue and green are renowned for their calming and soothing features.

In most other rooms in the house, interior design experts will tell you to let the natural light flood in.  However, the opposite is true in the bedroom.  You need to make sure you have thick curtains that block out daylight.  Ideally have dimmer switches on your artificial lighting to keep them low as you climb into bed and turn them up high when you want to wake up and get dressed. 

These bright rugs are
great to help you
wake up.

Other accessories are just as relevant.  Texture is important in a bedroom as it is such a multi functional space.  By night, the place you wind down, relax and sleep and by day, the space where you wake up and prepare yourself for whatever the next 12 hours is going to throw at you.

And so use accessories and different textures to help zone the different areas. By the bed, soft, thick rugs are the perfect floor covering for when you get in and out of bed.

By day, why not put a practical, bright rug near your dressing table or wardrobe?  This will highlight the space as an area where you mean business as you prepare for the day ahead. 

Colour co-ordinate your rugs, curtains and bedding so that the room has an inclusive feel within the specific zones.

Night, night.