At last, spring has arrived. Time to throw open the windows, lose the winter cobwebs and restyle your home. Here’s four pages of ideas, inspiration and expert local suppliers to get you started
Lighten up with colours, fabrics, and furniture. Everything should be clean, refreshing, light and tranquil. Choose sheer fabrics, linens, and open weave textiles. Move from ceramic to crystal and glass, either contemporary or traditional. With fresh flowers, be consistent with a theme rather than mixing bouquets
Get inspiration from nature. Avoid pasty pales or deep dark drenched colours and choose a mid tone. Use organic colour to cheer up an uninteresting neutral space – be inspired by the colours you see outside. Also, try using strong, bold designs and patterns against neutral tones and fabrics
10 SPRING CLEANING TIPS with Anna Hadi and Jane McKenzie:
1. Make an entrance Tidy up outside: cut the lawn, trim hedges, power wash the terrace, weed the flower beds, re-paint the front door. Some spring plants around the front door will liven up the entrance and don’t forget to sweep the path and hide the bins
2. De-clutter Minimalise your personal items. Clean out wardrobes, kitchen cupboards and bathroom cabinet. If you haven’t used it for over a year you probably don’t need it – if you don’t use it, lose it
3. Create an appealing social environment Re-group your furniture to change the focal point away from the TV or fireplace for a view of the garden. Let prospective buyers imagine entertaining their friends there
4. Make minor improvements Touch up paintwork; fill cracks in walls; clean grout; align cupboard doors; clean windows, doors and light switches. Have your carpets and curtains cleaned and re-varnish your floors
5. Keep pets out of sight and out of mind when prospective buyers are viewing. Ask a friendly neighbour to take the dog for a walk and don’t leave empty food bowls on the kitchen floor
6. Arrange fresh flowers This instantly uplifts a room and fills the house with a fresh natural fragrance
7. Let in the scent of spring Open the windows and air your rooms. Let in the scent and sound of spring. Any smells must be neutralised: fragranced candles are a good idea
8. Lighten up Enjoy the longer days by introducing paler colours and lighter fabrics. Let the sunlight in through sparkling windows with sheer curtains and introduce sheer tablecloths and valences
9. Change your accessories Sweep the dust from the shelves and bring out floral china or white ironwork. Display collections of glassware, picture frames and plants. Keep the colour scheme fresh and light
10. Reinstate your spare room Don’t use it for storage. Almost every home shows better with less furniture, whether you are living in it or selling it
• Anna Hadi and Jane McKenzie run Hadi McKenzie Interior Design. www.hadimckenzie.co.uk t: 01732 840441
LOCAL SUPPLIER GUIDE:
Get help with a spring makeover from the local experts...
• JE Design, Otford, Kitchen and Bedroom Gallery t: 01959 525111 www.jedesign.co.uk
Kitchens are often the focal point of the house, whether they’re used for elaborate cooking, simple meals, hobbies, work or entertaining. Here’s a selection of ideas, inspiration and tips if you’re planning a makeover or brand new installation
Star of BBC2's Save Lullingstone Castle offers Vine readers top tips on taking your gardening project from conception to fruition plus news of his brand new project at the World Garden: Hot and Spiky.
The conventional wisdom is that independent shops in Sevenoaks are closing and being replaced by restaurants and cafés.
Most people remember Outrams, the old-fashioned sports and leather goods retailer that gave way to Loch Fyne. Walk down the High Street any morning and it’s clear that serving up pizzas, lattes and espressos to Sevenoaks café society is now big business.
Though nobody on either side of the counter speaks a word of Italian, business is thriving. Despite high rents, most independent shop owners are surviving against stiff competition from chains, supermarkets and out-of-town destinations such as Bluewater.
Rather than butchers and bakers selling daily essentials, these are the candlestick makers – the shops who offer the chance to buy something that’s a little bit different.
Tinley House isn’t the only place in Sevenoaks where you can buy a kitchen knife to chop your carrots, but it’s the only shop where a professional chef will be on hand to advise you which one you need. This new cookware shop run by Noel Durdant-Hollamby and his business partner Peter Fleming is tucked away in Old School Walk, an alleyway in the Blighs Meadow.
Together they ran Bowlers cookware shop before its owner sold up and moved to Somerset, so they are convinced that the town has room for a specialist retailer of this kind. “We both know the town very well and we know there’s a market for it,” Noel says. Despite the high rents in Sevenoaks, there was no question of siting the shop elsewhere. Because of the shop’s location, Noel admits that 90 per cent of town residents probably don’t yet know of its existence.
Any aspiring Nigellas and Jamies will find this shop the right place to come. It’s small but unlike many kitchen shops, it’s uncluttered and has room for buggies to overtake. The shop will sharpen your kitchen knives and help you draw up your wedding present list. “This isn’t a buy-it-quick shop. We can close the shop and give people an appointment to discuss their needs,” Noel says. What it needs to bring in the customers is the smell of something tasty wafting out of the door and along the alleyway. “In the summer I may just throw a barbecue on the street,” the former chef says.
Anthony Broad runs Claremont in London Road
Claremont,9a London Road
Anthony Broad’s new furniture shop and art gallery, Claremont, has spent its first few weeks battling against the noise of pneumatic drills as workmen renew the pavements in London Road near the Stag theatre. “The first three weeks here were hectic, then they closed the road off and the noise and dust slowed things down quite noticeably. A shop like this depends on people driving past and seeing something in the window and coming back.”
Anthony is a longtime Sevenoaks resident who has a warehouse in Wrotham and used to own an antiques shop in Tunbridge Wells. “For the last three years I have sold wholesale only to dealers and designers. The main reason I have opened a shop is to do the art as well. You can’t do that from a barn in the country.”
So why did he choose Sevenoaks, where the rents are higher, rather than going back to Tunbridge Wells? “I live here and I’ve seen the way the town has steadily improved in terms of the shops over the past few years. I thought it would be nice to try it here.”
He acknowledges that he is trying to buck the nationwide trend of antiques shops closing, but explains that what he is offering is something rather different. “While the furniture is antique, it is often adapted in a modern way. Many of the pieces are repainted and adapted to make them more functional in a 21st century home.”
Anthony sources old furniture – tables, dressers and cupboards – not just in the UK and France but from as far away as Russia and Slovakia and adapts it. “I do a lot of these console tables which I cut back to a depth of about seventeen inches. People nowadays want the look of that kind of table but they don’t want it to take up so much space in a room.”
He acknowledges that old furniture seems to be out of fashion among the under-40s, but is optimistic that the pendulum will swing back. “It’s quite easy to envisage a time when I couldn’t sell a table with turned legs. It had to be straight legs. Now some of my American customers are saying, we want turned legs. It all comes around.” So the tables on which Slovakian peasants ate their dumplings find a new lease of life as coffee tables in Sevenoaks. “It’s the ultimate in recycling. We should all be thinking as greenly as possible, and you can’t do better than to recycle furniture.”
Interestingly, Anthony has dropped the word ‘antiques’ altogether from his shopfront. “In the current market people may be put off by the word antique because they think it’s passé, fuddy-duddy, whatever. If you’re selling antique stuff which has a fresh contemporary look, it can actually represent very good value for money, a far superior product to what you’ll find at IKEA or anywhere else.” Anthony’s other passion is for 20th century art, and he plans regular exhibitions of paintings, beginning with the Bristol artist Barrington Tabb. “I’ll be doing around six exhibitions a year.”
Peter Morgan, Sarah Brown Sofas
Sarah Brown Sofas,High Street, Sevenoaks
Sarah Brown is a family business dating from the 1920s, a bespoke furniture manufacturer which had its origins in London’s Kentish Town, making coaches and coach wheels. For the last 35 years its workshop base has been in Sittingbourne, where its traditional luxury sofas are made from scratch by a team of nine skilled workers using top-class materials such as German beech, duck down and exclusive fabrics from Belgium.
“Our research showed us that the Sevenoaks area was one of the wealthiest in the country, and Ightham in particular is one of the wealthiest villages,” says owner Peter Morgan. He put dots on the map to mark where customers at his existing stores in Tunbridge Wells and Bromley were living, and found clusters of wealthy sofa buyers around Sevenoaks.
Peter, it would be fair to say, is a man who is passionate about his sofas and how they are made, and scathing about his cheaper rivals. “We manufacture about 40 or 50 sofas a month,” he says. The firm has about 20 traditional designs, including several variants of the famous Knole sofa.
“Everything is made to order and it takes a minimum of eight weeks.” Peter is confident from his research that the Sevenoaks area has enough people for whom his price range, which starts at well over £1000 and moves upwards, won’t be a barrier. “If you have a million pound house, there isn’t much point in having DFS furniture,” he says. Unusually among new retailers, Peter decided to buy the freehold of what was a run-down fashion shop at 157 High Street.
Originally he wanted to demolish the building, which dates mostly from the 1920s on a much older foundation, but after planning permission was refused, he carried out extensive renovation instead. Though his shop has been open only a few weeks, it looks as though Sarah Brown will be here for the long term, and Peter has been busy recruiting a local manager to take over running the shop.
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Star of BBC2's Save Lullingstone Castle offers Vine readers top tips on taking your gardening project from conception to fruition plus news of his brand new project at the World Garden: Hot and Spiky.
