How to make a happy home

This week, Sophie shares what spaces in her home make her truly happy and why

According to Ikea’s annual Life at Home report, published earlier this week, 1 in 3 people don’t experience enough joy at home. Which, quite frankly, made both Charlotte and I a little sad!

Like many of you, Charlotte and I spend a lot of time in our respective homes. And for this reason, we both continuously strive to make our interior and exterior spaces places that we can enjoy spending time in. Whether that’s for watching TV, reading a book, socialising with friends, or playing games with our kids. So this week, I decided to showcase what spaces in my home make me truly happy and why, and also what spaces still need a little improvement…

The garden

Garden before & after

Like many others, we renovated our garden during lockdown. It was really getting us down that we had a decent-sized garden in London that was pretty much unusable. Our pesky dog at the time had absolutely destroyed the grass running laps around it like he was competing at the Olympics, as well as digging up any borders I had the audacity to plant in his homemade track! He created uneven ground and a trip hazard in the summer and a bog during the winter. Not great when we had two young children itching to be outdoors all the time.

So we hired some local landscape gardeners, recommended by our joiner, who replaced the lawn/quagmire with artificial grass and, as we were concerned that we were taking vegetation away and replacing with something artificial, they built us raised borders around the edge filling them with an abundance of plants and flowers. They also created an outdoor seating patio at the bottom of the garden where we get the last of the sun – it makes the perfect spot for sundowner cocktails! Now we’ve got a garden filled with colourful lavender and sweet-smelling Jasmine during the summer, which attracts all the bees and wildlife. Plus, the space is so much more green and alive than it ever was before! It makes all of us so happy to be able to spend time in this space all year round.

One piece of advice I want to share when choosing a planting scheme ­– especially if you’re not a big gardener (like me) or don’t have lots of time to spend pottering about in the garden (also like me) is to go for low-maintenance plants that have colour all year round. I love that the Jasmine has pretty much covered the side fence and, although it’s best late spring/early summer when it flowers, I also love that it provides a green backdrop against the fence all year round.