Refurbishing is not just about pretty things

Don’t forget about the practical things when you are planning the renovation of your home. There is so much to consider when you are planning a refurbishment that it can be easy to focus on the aesthetics and forget about the less glamorous elements. Things like coat storage, laundry room, linen cupboards for storing towels and sheets – they all sound pretty mundane but without properly planning these areas your beautifully-designed home will soon look chaotic.

Plan your utility or laundry room to make it as efficient as possible. Regardless of the space, consider raising up your washer and dryer so that you don’t have to stoop when using them. By doing this you will gain space below where you could have drawers that could be used as laundry baskets.

Try to plan for the future and not just now. It can be easy to design your home in a way that works for small children, for example, but pretty quickly you will find yourself with a house full of teenagers and your completely open-plan layout might not work.

Smart systems

If you are changing your heating system, you could opt for a smart system such as Nest. This will enable you to control your heating from your mobile phone. These are intelligent systems which adapt and react based on how you use them, in other words they get to know how warm or cold you like your house to be and adjust accordingly.

Make sure you leave yourself some wall space. This might sound like strange advice but particularly with open-plan layouts, you can very quickly run out of walls to hang art, photos or put furniture up against. Try to resist the temptation to put a window on every external wall. Plan your views carefully and avoid windows on to side passages.

For living spaces with large expanses of glazing, do try to incorporate a window for ventilation. There will be times when you will need to open a window and opening a large sliding door won’t really be practical.

Plan where all of your furniture will go before you plan your radiator, socket and lighting layouts. Think carefully about where you want to position everything and where you might need to put lamps – where your sofa is going to go, for example – to avoid furniture being pushed up against radiators and sockets in the wrong locations.

Storage is another practicality that you can never have enough of, but think carefully about what your storage requirements are and let what you need to store dictate the kind of storage that you select.

Designated storage is far more efficient and useful than general store cupboards into which everything gets thrown and in which it is impossible to find anything.

Think about the under-used spaces in your home that could be used as storage space. Under the stairs is a great example: it is usually just a general storage cupboard filled to capacity and difficult to access. However, there are great solutions that will allow you to subdivide the space into drawers and cupboards to maximise this forgotten part of the house.

Denise O’Connor is an architect and design consultant