My easiest decorating trick? Focus on one corner

Kitchen dining area with red and white striped upholstered banqeuette around wooden table topped with pendant lampshade — (Image credit: Lara Winter)

Home decorator Lara Winter is one of Ideal Home's Open House contributors, sharing her thoughts on revamping a 200 year old cottage to make it right for modern family life. See the rest of her articles here.

I used to think decorating meant tackling a whole room. Choose the paint, find the furniture, hang the art, sort the lighting and somehow make everything work together. Easy.

Except sometimes it really isn’t. The more I looked at a room as one big project, the more overwhelmed I felt by everything that wasn’t quite working. So, almost accidentally, I started doing the opposite: ignoring most of the room and concentrating on one corner at a time.

Start with a corner you’ll actually use

Living room with armchair, marble side table with lamp and burnt orange sofa in front of green-framed drinks cabinet topped with houseplants

One of my favourite spots in our living room is ridiculously simple: an armchair, a small marble-topped table and our green drinks cabinet. That’s basically it. But the chair swivels around to look straight out into the garden, which makes it somewhere I genuinely want to sit, rather than just furniture arranged to look nice.

That’s probably my first rule for a good corner: think about what you’ll actually do there. Where will your cup of tea go? Is there somewhere for a book? What will you look at when you sit down? Sometimes moving a chair by half a metre does more for a room than buying anything new.

Don’t overlook the really tiny corners

Country kitchen with wooden worktops, ceiling beams and small framed artwork above blue and white floral patterned kettle

Not every corner needs an armchair and a perfectly positioned lamp. One of the smallest areas I’ve deliberately decorated is our kettle corner.

Our thrifted kitchen cabinet holds all our mugs and glasses, so the kettle naturally lives beside it. I hung a tiny piece of art by Lucy from Kitchen Corner Gallery on the side of the cabinet, just above the kettle, and added a little hen-shaped teaspoon holder. That’s it. Cute and practical.

I make tea approximately 700 times a week, so why shouldn’t that tiny bit of kitchen make me happy? We tend to focus our decorating energy on the big views of a room, but sometimes it’s the little places you use every single day that deserve it most.

If a whole room overwhelms you, shrink the job

Dining area with upholstered banquette around wooden table and bench on patterned rug, topped with pendant light shade

Our dining room is a walk-through room and the first room you enter when you come into our home. For ages it bothered me. There are lots of doorways, people constantly walk through it and whenever I thought about “doing the dining room”, I couldn’t work out where to start.

So I stopped trying to solve the whole room and focused on the dining nook instead. We built the DIY banquette, added a good table, put down a beautiful Neptune rug and painted the shelf above in Firebrick Red, one of my favourite colours. Done.

And somehow, once that area felt intentional, the rest of the room stopped bothering me. My eye had somewhere to land and the whole space suddenly made more sense. Now it’s one of my favourite rooms in the house.

Shop your house before you shop the shops

Corner of kitchen with red open shelving above red and white striped upholstered banquette, lit with wall and table lamps

Before buying anything for a corner, I always think it’s worth moving things around. Steal the lamp from upstairs. Try the little table that isn’t doing much in another room. Move some art. You’d be surprised how different something can look simply because you’ve stopped seeing it in the same place every day.

Corners are brilliant for this because you’re not committing to an entire new scheme. A chair, lamp, table and picture you already own might be all you need.

Know when to stop

Home office with vintage wooden desk and dark wooden wardrobe with glass doors backed with green patterned fabric

This might be the hardest bit. Once one corner looks good, you don’t immediately have to “finish” everything around it.

Rooms can evolve slowly. In fact, I think mine usually end up better that way. Make one bit work, live with it and then see what starts bothering you next.

The internet would have us believe rooms are transformed over a weekend. Mine tend to improve one little corner and one inexplicably long DIY project at a time.

Turns out, looking at less of a room has helped me like the whole thing a lot more.

Lara is originally from Germany, where she studied Special Educational Needs before moving to England in 2016. She now runs the instagram account What A View Cottage which has over 240,000 followers, who tune in to be inspired by her modern take on rustic style.

Lara has always had a creative streak and the urge to experiment with colours and different layouts made her rearrange the furniture of her childhood bedroom constantly. These days she lives with her husband, their two sons and their fluffy, ginger cat Gizmo in a modern cottage in Wiltshire. She loves to create cosy, lived in spaces with lots of texture and the use of colour. Her specialty is to give rooms that cottage feel with a modern and sometimes unexpected twist and she's not afraid to mix interior styles.