Ideal home

Stephen Lewis calls in the interior designers for advice on how to get the right look for his home.

Buying a house is just about the most stressful experience you can go through.

Sorting out the mortgage, worrying about whether you've offered too much, arguing with the people you're buying from about whether they leave the carpets, and panicking about what the new neighbours are going to be like is more than enough for anyone to cope with all at once.

So thinking about what you're going to do with the place once you've moved in may not, at first, be the number one priority.

The fact is, though, that very often moving in is just the beginning. Eventually, most of us will want to do it up to suit our own taste. We want to make it ours.

But where to begin? Let's be honest, most people haven't a clue about how to decorate a home. We may have a vague idea about how we'd like the place to look: but matching colours, materials, textures and furniture to make a co-ordinated whole? Dream on.

It's not only the decoration that can all too easily turn into a DIY disaster of clashing colours and materials. In the mad rush to furnish a home, you can also make some expensive mistakes: a sofa that's too big for the room, furniture that doesn't match, carpets that clash with the curtains, wallpaper that makes a room look too dark or dingy.

That's where an interior designer could be helpful. And before you rush off into the distance shrieking 'The expense! The expense!' it's worth pausing for a moment to think.

This is, after all, your home you're talking about. You've just spent a fortune on it. Do you really want to spend the next 15 years living in a clash of colours like something out of a psychedelic dream, with furniture you don't like that doesn't match and doesn't fit?

An interior designer, says Joy Plaskitt of Plaskitt and Plaskitt in Walmgate, isn't there to impose designs on people. Their job is to look at a home with fresh eyes, talk to the owners about the effect they want to achieve: and then help them achieve it.

Interior design, Joy says, is all about making the best use of space and light. We invited her into our home to make a few suggestions. We've done nothing to the house since moving in about a year ago except buy furniture. It's a three-bedroom terraced cottage dating from about 1905, filled with sunshine and with plenty of nooks and crannies but - upstairs in particular - a riot of conflicting colours and materials. There's also not enough storage space.

We set a suggested budget of about £2,500 for the three bedrooms and the bathroom. That includes the cost of labour: I'm not the DIY type.

Here are Joy's suggestions:

Main bedroom A decent-sized room with a single, large window and beside it - a feature of all the upstairs rooms in our home - a sloping ceiling. There's a single overhead light, walls are yellow, carpet red, furniture heavy pine and curtains orange. We have a purple quilt cover - a dreadful clash of colours.

Joy's suggestion: get rid of the red carpet, and fit a 100 wool 'natural'-coloured carpet instead. Paint the walls pale cream and replace the wardrobe with a simple, more modern design from MFI that takes up more of the wall and so gives more storage space. Replace the curtains with a Roman blind with a pale-coloured Japanese bamboo design. Matching covers on the bed and downlights fitted above the bed to improve lighting. Total cost, including labour: £740.22.

Study bedroom A pale-coloured room with bags of light from the large window. We have a fitted wardrobe, double futon, single floor-to-ceiling bookcase and a computer work station facing the wall. Main problem is storage.

Joy's suggestion: get rid of the computer desk and replace it with a larger one from Ikea that would run beneath the window, with two separate cabinets for storage space along the wall. Paint walls a soft lilac to match colours in the futon cover and replace curtains with a blind in pale lilac and beige pastels to make the most of the light. Total cost, including labour: £600.

Guest bedroom A long, decent-sized room, with a big window but strange colour scheme. The carpet is pale terracotta: the walls a deeper terracotta. Even the people we bought it off admitted it was like living in a flower pot. The other problem is that it's filled with the junk that won't fit anywhere else - an ancient bookcase, a corner display cabinet, an old computer desk some friends didn't want.

Joy's suggestion: get rid of all the furniture except the double sofa bed. Paint the walls a pale cream to brighten the room, fit check patterned blinds in the window that pick up on colours in the sofa, and overhead 'track' lights. Bring wardrobe from main bedroom in here (the room doesn't have one) and have an upholstered footstool with an opening cover made, for comfort combined with more storage. Books on wall-mounted shelves to save space. Total cost, including labour: £760

The Bathroom A large, bright bathroom with big window that lets in the afternoon sun. It's all whites and pale blues and pinks: a bit stark.

Joy's suggestion: pale terracotta diamond-patterned wallpaper and matching blind to warm the room, revolving Ikea open-fronted wall cabinet with full-length mirror on reverse side for towel storage, shower screen. Total cost, including labour: £684.

Total cost for four rooms: including labour, materials, paint, wallpaper and furniture: £2,784. Expensive: but in the context of the price of the house (and the £1,500 sofa which we bought which is really too big for the sitting room) perhaps not so expensive after all.

Ask the Plaskitts. Peter and Joy Plaskitt's next feature will appear in the Evening Press on Saturday, April 1.

Contacts

Plaskitt and Plaskitt offer a full interior design service for £100 per room. That includes consultations in your own home and in their York store, detailed design plans taking in colour, space, texture, materials and your own preferences, a chance to look through suggested samples, and suggestions about where to buy materials. They also have a list of recommended tradesmen who will carry out quality work. Call 01904 624670.

York House Interiors in Hull Road offer a consultation in your own home and subsequent design board showing some suggested colours and samples. The service is free, and the store hopes simply that you will source some of your redecorating through them. Call 01904 414939.

Some high street stores, such as Laura Ashley, offer their own interior design service. Laura Ashley's costs £50 for three rooms, £100 for the full house, which includes consultation in your own home, quotes and a selection of samples. Call 01904 611021.

The Interior Design and Decorators Association (IDDA, to which the Plaskitts belong) can also supply a list of experienced interior designers in your area. Call 0171 349 0800.

PICTURE: Guest bedroom