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Room for improvement Found your dream home and planning some changes? Kate Watson-Smyth can show you how to make your space work for you
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s the woman behind the UK’s number one interiors blog, Mad About The House, Kate Watson-Smyth is used to being asked for advice and it’s her honest and relatable tone – as well as her great eye – that makes her such an authority. Her much-photographed north London home is a living example of how to achieve successful design, and now Watson-Smyth, a journalist and blogger who has become a serious design mover, is launching an online course to help the rest of us realise our interiors dreams. The big thing about Watson-Smyth is that she’s not snooty or dogmatic, and her mission is to demystify the process of decorating your house the way you want it. And because deciding on the way you want it is almost half the battle, that’s what she focuses on with this course, which is dedicated to finding your own interior design style. Note ‘your own’ – she’s not advocating recreating her own style (though we’d wager that many of her followers are quite keen to do exactly that) because her core belief is that living somewhere you love has an enormously positive impact on your overall happiness and wellbeing. The timing of the course’s launch really couldn’t be better, with the idea of wellbeing at home becoming more relevant than ever over the past two years. “I think a lot of people have now realised the link between your surroundings and your mental health,” she says. “In the past, a lot of people would move into a house, slap a colour on the wall, think ‘that’s quite nice’, and then go to work and not see it again in daylight until they were on holiday. Being forced to spend time indoors has led people to think, ‘well actually I hate this room’ and then start to analyse why they hate it. So that’s led to an interest in working out what colours you like and what you use your rooms for. And that’s where my courses and books come in.” For Watson-Smyth, the starting point is to ask six basic questions, just as she was taught as a trainee journalist. It’s all about the who, what, why, when, where and how.
LONDON PROPERTY MATTERS · kfh.co.uk
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28/03/2022 22:51
