5 ways to add more pzazz to your home 

The days of a single lightbulb per room are long gone. These days you’ve got a choice of lighting options that’s almost daunting – recessed lighting, pendant lighting, spotlights, uplighting, downlighting, floor lighting, stair lighting, chandeliers – you get the idea.

With so many options, it’s easy to go over the top, but your home doesn’t have to look like bridge of the Starship Enterprise. The beauty of modern home lighting is its flexibility and the ease with which you can adjust it to suit any situation and mood from a quiet evening at home watching telly to a lively dinner party for 15 of your closest friends.

There’s a growing trend in New Zealand to light the outside of your home as well as the inside, and not just at Christmas. Subtle lighting can highlight the distinctive architecture of your home and turn your garden into an oasis of harmony and peace.   

It’s hard to believe there are Kiwi homeowners who paint all their walls in one neutral colour so as not to alienate potential buyers. The trouble is, by trying to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody. So our recommendation is: Do what you want to, but don’t ever, ever be wishy washy.

Our homes are three dimensional – that is, they have height, width and depth – but the trend of minimalism often seems to be doing its best to eliminate the third dimension of depth with flat, featureless surfaces. The room above, with its recessed ceiling, is a backlash against flat minimalism. Other ways of adding depth in your interior design include texture, contrasting colours, floating ceilings, clever lighting and wall art – all of which are amply utilised in the room below.

Our Artist of the Month, Lydia Eden, may only be 23, but she is already starting to make a name for herself around the world with beautiful botanical-inspired artwork from her studio in Epsom, Auckland. She is pictured above on her wedding day in 2015.

As you can see, her works combined with the foliage of indoor plants add colour, depth and panache to a studio decorated in white and neutral tones.  

Of course, art isn’t confined to paintings or prints on a wall. You can also spice up your living space with rugs on the floor (or walls), ceramics and sculpture.

It used to be that fireplaces were brick or iron shrines, immovable, and with about as much pzazz as an old shoe. Because modern fireplaces tend to be fired by gas, they’ve become decorative features, versatile enough to bring ambience and warmth to any room in the house (they’re becoming popular in bedrooms and even bathrooms) and across two rooms by straddling them (see above). 

You can even move them around, as with this rolling bio-ethanol fireplace by Commoto.