During lockdown it has been especially cheering to bunker down in my mad floral jungle of a sitting room when outside all is grey and unrelenting gloom
Chances are you’re quite bored of your home by now. Oh sure, you know how lucky you are, if you have a warm and comfortable place to live when so many don’t. But a person could live in a full-on palace and still, at this point in a generation-defining global pandemic, think, “If I have to spend one more day looking at this cornicing and those enormous wall sconces, I will genuinely hurl myself off the balcony.” So allow me to share the greatest tip of all time for making your home more fun: get some wallpaper.
People are very wary of wallpaper, especially the patterned type. I didn’t fully understand this until my partner and I were house-hunting half a decade ago, after we found out I was expecting twins. Off we went to look at family houses and, while the prices were horrific, the houses were, to my mind, even worse. That’s not fair: they were perfectly fine, but there was something about them that sent me spiralling into a low-grade depression. I tried to explain it to the increasingly exasperated estate agents: maybe they were dark? Or they just had a bad vibe? Were the ceilings too low? At last, I understood: every house I looked at was painted all white or – worse! – some weird Farrow & Ball-esque muted grey. Literally, every single one, and I assume the people who lived in them thought they looked chic and safely neutral. To me they brought back memories of teenage years spent in a psychiatric unit.
