Did you know our first ever Excellence Collection show home, the Newsam, was dressed incorporating furniture that had already been on display in a previous show home? Erris Homes and our fantastic interior designer, Jeanette Holmes, have worked together to show that you don’t need to go for a whole new look when upsizing – all you need are a few staple pieces and a determination to make it work!
The Newsam is a stunning 4-5 bedroom detached home boasting an enhanced specification as standard. Spread over three floors, the Newsam home also presents two lounges, a contemporary open-plan kitchen-diner, and a trendy home office all dressed by Jeanette using furniture from the Bramham show home.
We sat down with Jeanette to pick her brain on how to upsize on a budget. In this blog, she talks about how to make the most of your existing furniture in a larger home.
How would you fill a larger room using furniture you already have?
The upper ground floor lounge at the front of the Newsam is perfect for zoning.
Zoning
It’s very tempting for homeowners to purchase a large corner sofa or two mid-size sofas for a sizeable lounge such as the one in the Newsam, but I think the layout we have established in the show home works well. We decided to use the small grey sofa that was in the family room in the Bramham, and a separate chair which is a nice green-blue colour.
This ‘zoning’ effect works really well for families who might have a mum and daughter watching Corrie on an evening while dad is on his reading in his chair or another child is perhaps on a tablet or laptop. It enables a family to spend time together without being on top of each other – after all, no one upsizes and wants to have the whole family squashed up together on one or two sofas!
Storage
You can definitely fit more in the front lounge than we have included. This room lends itself to being a proper family room where you can put lots of storage, whether that be a bookcase, a cosy ottoman table, or basket side tables such as the one on display in the Newsam. Storage options such as these are great for making the most of the increased space whilst keeping everything neat and tidy.
How can I make the most of my existing furniture?
Jeanette reused furniture from the Bramham's open-plan living area and the little boys' bedroom to create this cosy yet stylish chill-out room on the Newsam's lower ground floor.
Colour palette
Because we were reusing the furniture from the Bramham in the Newsam home, we already had a set colour scheme to play with.
In the main lounge, we were able to reuse the blue and teal nesting tables from the Bramham along with the grey corner sofa and chose a patterned green and black botanical wallpaper that would complement these pieces. In the Bramham living area we opted for a myriad of blues and gold, but in the Newsam we were able to rethink the lounge and opted instead for a contemporary botanical feel with stylish black metal. The rest followed naturally as we incorporated more greenery and smaller pieces of furniture such as side tables and lamps.
Re-think your furniture
Try to think outside the box when designing your new home – just because a piece of furniture worked in a bedroom in your old home doesn’t mean you can’t reuse it elsewhere in your new home. For example, in the lower ground floor family room, we reused the majority of the furniture that was in the family room in the Bramham and incorporated some features from other rooms such as the navy velvet sofas from the living area and the ladder bookshelf which was in the boy’s bedroom.
The second bedroom in the Newsam is an older, more sophisticated version of the second bedroom in the Bramham - a perfect example of how subtle amends can change the feel of a room.
As the girls’ bedroom on the top floor is a symbol for Rosemeade, it remains almost exactly the same as it was in the Bramham show home. However, we made one small change to elevate it from that of a younger teen to a young adult. Whereas in the Bramham this room had a flecked pink and gold feature wall, in the Newsam we opted for a rose-printed panel of wallpaper which instantly adds another level of sophistication. If you wanted to take it further, all you would need is perhaps new knobs on a set of drawers, and a new bed-side table, and a change of photo frames to give this room a totally new feel.
Are you picking up some top interior design tips? Have a read of Part 2 of the series here!
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