Is Your House Magazine Ready?

Anyone who was worked on a photoshoot before knows that styling a house to be magazine ready requires a huge amount of work. So I thought this post could be an interesting behind the scenes look at what actually goes on to pull together a house ready for the camera. Apart from the obvious cleaning & tidying, we shop or loan a swag of accessories to finish off our spaces. Mostly this is because we all live in a nearly finished interior (if we are lucky). In fact many live in a not quite started yet interior but that’s a whole other topic. So on a recent shoot we gathered the troops & traipsed around some suitable haunts for old vintage looking clocks, interesting bowls, canisters, flowers, candles, objects & even some carved pigs. We organised the book shelves, colour blocking & stacking, turfing the crappy stuff so the good things could breathe, filled the place with flowers and styled every surface down to cutting oranges & arranging herbs in jars. When we finished the clients were so thrilled they thought this must be someone else’s house, theirs didn’t look this good. Tantalized that they could make it theirs they bought the lot. And this got me thinking, if we’ve got all the basics sorted why don’t we know how to finish off our most treasured private spaces to reflect who we are.

Well we lack confidence & we don’t know how. Yes styling takes skill, it’s about artful placement, grouping things that share beautiful colour or tone & choosing objects & things that resonate with you. So go on, get your house in order! Here’s some before & after shots to give you some inspiration.

Here goes before: