Your home makes sense on paper. The kitchen works, the bedrooms are where they should be, and technically everything is in the right place. And yet it doesn’t feel right. The living room stays somehow empty and the atmosphere you had in mind isn’t there. If you’ve recently moved to the Netherlands it’s even harder to place, because you’re in a new country, in a new house, with no idea who to ask. So the thought that you’ll have to renovate is an easy one to land on. In most cases it isn’t the answer. You can improve your interior without renovating, and it starts with better choices rather than new walls..
How do you improve your interior without renovating?
We were called in to a house in Haarlem that had just been renovated. The double reception room had been restored to its original state, the materials were of a high standard and so was the finish. And it still wasn’t right, which was why the owner rang us. Once we were standing in it, the problem was obvious: the furniture was on a different level from the house around it. Too coarse for the rooms it sat in. So we rebuilt the scheme, with new pieces and bespoke work where the proportions called for it, and we gave the walls colour in warm tones, with wallpaper in two places. The layout itself we left alone.
Materials do more than you think
Marble as a kitchen worktop is a different decision from marble on the floor, and the difference is surface area. A worktop is a few square metres you work and chop on. You can set a different floor and different cabinet fronts against it so the whole thing stays warm. A marble floor is the entire room. In a hallway that can look wonderful, in a living room it usually turns hard and cold.
Lime plaster is another example. It behaves differently from ordinary paint, even in exactly the same colour: it looks softer, almost as though there’s fabric on the wall. Over a hard stone floor that does what’s needed. Over a wooden floor, which is what most Dutch houses have, it isn’t automatically the right move.
That balance between materials also decides how your house feels and sounds. A stone floor, hard walls, little upholstery in the furniture and then aluminium blinds at the window as well, and you end up with a living room that echoes. Curtains are the best remedy, though wallpaper, rugs, paintings and pendant lights all do more than you’d expect.
Lighting is not an afterthought
In most homes, lighting is the element that’s had the least thought put into it. On a new build where we’re involved early, we combine recessed, surface-mounted and atmospheric lighting, and the lighting plan follows the interior proposal. In a restyling it’s different. The ceiling is closed, so recessed lighting is often off the table, or only available through work that’s out of proportion to the result. We look at what’s still technically possible: adding a lighting point in the ceiling, or chasing a channel into the wall for a surface-mounted fitting. If neither is an option, we do it with freestanding fittings and atmospheric lighting.
Holding on to what’s there is the expensive choice
People ring us because their interior isn’t what they had in mind, and more often than not it’s the dimensions that turn out to be the culprit. A sofa too big for the room, a cabinet too small for the wall, curtains to short for the window they hang at. As long as those pieces stay, the interior won’t come into balance, however much you design around them. It’s the hardest conversation we have, because it’s about things people are attached to. We say it anyway: be brave enough to let go of what isn’t working.
What a fresh pair of eyes can change
Dirk and Bella had lived in their house in Haarlem for four years before it actually felt like home. The kitchen was yellow and dated, the bathroom had a kitsch Greek finish and the interior was full of curls and arches. A renovation wasn’t necessary, and it wouldn’t have been in proportion to what it would have delivered.
What did happen: the kitchen cabinet fronts were replaced with sleek ones and a sturdy handle, new tiles went straight over the old ones in the bathroom, and a glass-and-steel partition between the kitchen and the living room broke through the fussy character of the rest of the house in one go. Around that came a new furniture plan, with matching lighting and quiet blinds and curtains.
“Everything you see here is Julia’s idea,” says Dirk. “She thought of all of it, like a director: the kitchen, the partition, the colours on the walls and the lighting plan.”
Have a look at the full project: country villa Haarlem.
Where do you start?
Whether you can improve your interior without renovating comes down to the first question you ask, and that isn’t what needs to change. It’s why the room isn’t working now, and that’s the hardest question to ask in your own house. You live there, you know why everything sits where it sits, and so you look straight past the cause.
We come in without that history. We look and we listen to what you tell us about what does and doesn’t work for you. After that we redraw your home in 3D and empty it out. That doesn’t mean everything has to go. It just forces us to weigh up every spot again, rather than designing around what’s already there. Whatever comes back, comes back because it works.
For expats around Haarlem there’s a layer on top of that: unfamiliar suppliers, a building culture that runs differently from the one you know, and a lot of decisions in a language you’re still picking up. We work in English and Dutch, and we have the local network to run the whole process while you’re still finding your feet.
That’s how a plan comes about that suits how you want to live and does justice to what the space can carry. Since 2007 we’ve furnished well over a hundred homes this way.
Have a look at our services or read how we take a project from inspiration to interior design.
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Want to know what’s possible in your home? Get in touch for an informal first conversation, with no obligation.
About Choc Studio
At Choc Studio we combine solid expertise with personal attention. Since 2007 we’ve been guiding interior projects from design to completion, first from Haarlem and now from our studio in Bennebroek. We think along, look ahead and make sure our clients end up with an interior that genuinely suits them.