How To Decorate A Studio

Hi, I'm Adrienne Chinn. I'm an interior designer based in London, England. Today, I'm going to talk to you about an aspect of interior design.

Today, we're going to look at a studio flat or a studio apartment. These are small places which a lot of you will be familiar with where you have your living room and your bed all in the same room, possibly the kitchen is kind of at the end of the room as well and the only separate room you have is the bathroom. So, the scheme is this small area needs to all work together.

What I've chosen here is a scheme with a little bit of punchy orange in it which is quite nice in a small room. It gives a lot of vibrancy. So, I've started with the flooring.

Now, assuming that you're putting your own flooring down, I possibly for this particular scheme would choose this nice greyed oak flooring with the wide plank that will make the small room seem a lot bigger. Alternatively, if you have an existing floor, a wood floor or something like that, you might want to put a rug down. This is a flat weave wool rug in tones of gray which has a border all around it so that would be very practical, easy to roll up when you're finished with it, when you move on, and that would sit very well on the floor and unite the sitting, sleeping and living area in your space.

So, we've got our flooring. Let's look at the walls now, and again, it's a small room so instead of just painting it all white, let's do something a bit more adventurous, I think, and let's look at some different wall coverings. Here, I've looked at a textural vinyl which is very practical.

It's like a woven linen and it has little flecks of gray so this would give the space a nice textural quality but keep the light in the room so it wouldn't feel too dark. Now, this is dark. Obviously, you can see that.

This is if you might want a different feel in the room. You want, maybe, cosier, a bit more dramatic. This is polished plaster and you would need to get somebody in to do this.

This is a specialist wall finish, and here I've got this in tones of gray and that could look really fantastically elegant and contemporary in a small room if you want it to go in that direction. You could also just use this as the feature wall. That's an interesting idea and you could possibly then combine the other walls.

Combine it with this wall covering on the other walls. Alternatively, you might just want to have a feature wall and here, I've chosen this wallpaper. It's a sturdy-up wall paper, it's usually wipeable and it has tones of orange in it, and I've mentioned that I want to bring orange in as the accent colour.

So, maybe you'd put this on one wall, the wall that your sofa sits against, and do the other walls in this very light neutral colour. Now, based on the scheme that we're working with here which is light neutrals, grays and oranges, I've chosen a striped fabric for curtains which I think would work very well. It's got quite a lot of white background so it's not overwhelmingly dark and brings in that orange accent.

The vertical will make the room feel taller as well which is probably what you might need in a studio. And then, I've covered the sofa bed, because that's more than likely what you've got in your studio flat, in this brushed cotton which is very durable and very comfortable to sit on as well. It's got a very soft feel.

On the sofa bed, I've put some cushions in this nice brushed cotton orange so there we've got our accent colour and a few cushions in this fun print. This has got your orange and gray, and it just adds a bit of vibrancy to the scheme, and possibly, you have another chair in the room and I've put this fabric on the chair which is a woven linen and it's got a nice self-patterned stripe in it. You can see that, it's woven into the fabric and gives a little bit of a herringbone quality which is nice so that adds textural interest in the scheme while keeping the soft grays that I've established with this particula