The influencer edit: 5 home hacks

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Making a home look great on the inside is about more than wall colour and flooring. It’s about the details and the vision.

Some of our favourite interiors influencers have been renovating their own homes and finding innovative and creative solutions to make their homes look great.

We asked them to share their “home hacks” - the things you might not have thought of that really create an impactful interior. 

Nicola Broughton lives in a Victorian house in Yorkshire where she juggles her love of interiors with a full-time job investing in tech businesses. 

“Interior design and blogging are my hobbies, a much needed stress relief in a very full life,” she says.

Her “home hack” involves upcycling the insides of old kitchen cabinets to become upmarket-looking fitted shelves.

“Colour can transform a room,” she says. “Instead of removing old kitchen cabinets I simply painted them to create beautiful, open shelving. All it took was a day’s work and a tin of paint.”

Lucy and Dan Kemp renovated “a wreck of a house” in Victoria Road, London and turned it into their dream home - documenting the highs and lows on their blog and Instagram.

Lucy’s “home hack” is turning an old, unloved piece of furniture into a statement item that brings wow-factor to any room.

“Don't get rid of old furniture, think about how you can upcycle it,” she says. “I took an old chest of drawers, gold leafed them and changed the handles to give them a new lease of life.”

She also picked the lamp you can see on top of the drawers up off the street and gave it “the gold leaf treatment” before using a roll of old wallpaper to spruce up the shade.  

Jessica Horton and her partner have been restoring an East London house. It might have been built in 1859, but it had had all its original features removed.  

She has been documenting their progress on Instagram and says one of their most successful “home hacks” was restoring the decorative mouldings on the ceilings.

“We put new cornices up in the lounge and hallway and it made a huge impact,” she says. “It adds the Victorian character back into a property that had been stripped of all its charm.” 

Check out the before and after shots to see the difference.

It sounds easy enough, but was it? “It was a lot of work to get the joins to look seamless. We spent a few weekends sanding and filling, but it definitely paid off.”

Mitchell & Jessica West are self-confessed interiors addicts and shopaholics who have been doing up their home in a mixture of natural, industrial and Scandinavian decor.

“My home hack would be making a statement on the entrance to your house,” says Jessica.  

“We updated our entrance hall by painting a colour block arch. I just used some left over paint, frog tape and it took a couple of hours of faffing. It was so easy and so impactful!”

Even the very best house will have a corner or two that fails to fill you with joy. 

Chelsea Stonier, who has been documenting the renovation of her house (and her love for black) on her blogand on Instagram, found a solution to the conservatory she hated.

Her “home hack” was a tin of black paint and a spray gun.

“I had always hated our white UPVC conservatory, but at £15,000 or more to replace it with something more stylish, I had to get a bit creative,” she says.

“Queue a tin of black paint, a spray gun and sheer determination.”

As you can see from the pictures above, the transformation is dramatic.

Did it take a lot of work? “It took one full day to prep (cleaning, a light sanding and taping up everywhere we didn’t want paint) and a second day to spray,” she says.

Sounds like a weekend well spent.

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