A Taste Of Summer All Year Round: Designing Your Home To Be Light And Bright

Summer is warm, both in temperature and in colour. Make sure your home follows the latter as much as possible; the former is a personal preference and is totally up to you! 

If a colour has a warm tone to it, it’s going to be bright, a little dusky, and make you feel like you’re being wrapped up in summer. Reds and oranges are an obvious choice here, but yellows, pinks, and purples work as well. You can also use a bit of green and blue where you like, especially if you’re a fan of summers on the coast. 

Of course, you don’t want the colour palette of your home to feel overwhelming, so be careful how you pair these colours with each other. You don’t want things to clash, or at least to clash too much. 

Summer is in the air as well as in the colour and temperature. Use this to your advantage around your home and plug in some air fresheners that carry typical summer scents. Freshly cut grass is a popular one, but you can go for anything that reminds you of the sun and spending time at the beach. 

A lot of people like to pump the smell of fresh air into their rooms, and a scent that incorporates summer flowers will always do well in your bathroom or living room. You can also use scented candles in strategic areas to make your house feel cosier; we recommend the bedroom and the kitchen when you’re sitting down for a romantic dinner with your partner. 

Be sure to replace these plug-in fresheners on a regular basis. Always read the packet instructions on the back as well! 

Blinds are a great summer addition to every home, and they’re going to work in every room as well. However, if you’re on a bit of a budget, we recommend only fitting them in the bedroom. 

If they're covering a bedroom window, they can provide plenty of privacy when you’re getting ready for bed and lying down to sleep, but you can also open them ever so slightly so the light comes through in the morning. Feeling slits of the sun’s rays on your face first thing in the morning will help you feel like you’ve awoken in a tropical paradise! 

A set of stylish Venetians in the bedroom is going to help the room feel lighter too. Blinds tend to be white or cream in colour (although you can get them in bright shades too), and this highlight is perfect against a blue, red, or yellow background. 

A nautical bedding set looks great. If you have a few to swap in and out in your bedroom, you’re always going to feel a bit like you’re out there on the water and ready to step onto the beach at any time. Blues and whites are great colours to pair together throughout the home. 

Nautical theming in general is popular in homes for this very season; not only does it help to complete the summer decor, but it helps to make your home feel a bit cooler if you’ve got a lot of warm colours already at work. 

And who doesn’t want to sleep in a cool room under a cosy blanket? That’s the best way to get to sleep at night! 

Greenery, i.e., plant life, is great for a summer home. You want to have that real hint of summertime nature in your rooms, and as long as there’s a plant somewhere in the room that helps to bring it together, you’ll have a dream space. 

A small plant pot on the table in the dining room. A big, towering plant in that spare corner of the living room that often gets blocked by the door. Trailing spider plants on either side of the French doors at the back of the house. Plants will always look good and to be honest, you can never have too many of them. 

Or if you’d rather not have all of these plant’s lives on your conscience, invest in some fake plants. From small succulents to big shrubs, fake plants come in all shapes and sizes. 

A cosy kitchen is perfect for the summer season. If you’re a fan of the ‘cottagecore’ movement, this is going to immediately stand out to you. 

An open window, a tree outside rustling in the gentle breeze, birdsong filling the air from a distance, and you’re standing against a cluttered, flour-covered surface with a mixing bowl in your hands. It’s a very picturesque vision of the summer season and we heartily recommend it! 

So change some things around to make your kitchen a bit cosier this year. Buy some new utensils and cute casserole dishes, and don’t let a bit of clutter make you feel that your home is messy. And a kitchen rug will always be appreciated if you’ve got a typically cold, stone and/or lino floor in there. 

Of course, if your home is going to have open windows and you’re thinking about installing a pair of French doors, there’s every chance more bugs are going to fly into your house and call it their own as well. And that just won’t do, especially if you live in a country where little bitey bugs like mosquitoes are common!

That’s why you should invest in screens you can place over windows and doors. These are pretty non-intrusive, in that they’re see-through and can be easily moved and replaced. Just make sure you don’t forget you’ve got on over your French doors and try to walk straight through! 

You can also get some bug-repellent items to put in the garden if you’d like to keep creepy crawlies away as much as possible. But we’re not talking about poisoning them if they munch on some pellets; you can get fairly harmless plants that help to repel them and place them on the outside deck or patio. You can even make a big centrepiece yourself! 

If you’re a fan of the summer season, why not decorate your home to feel like it all year round? It’s a fun way to decorate, there are plenty of ‘summer-y’ decorations to pick out from thrift stores and charity shops, and you can play around with light levels and scents to make your home feel super cosy. As long as your home feels like a good summer memory, you’ve accomplished the perfect decor!