What looks good and why?

Design consultant Frida Ramstedt runs Scandinavia's leading interior design blog. In this book she distils the secrets of successful interior design and styling to help you create a home that works best for your space, taste and lifestyle. Filled with practical tips, rules-of-thumb and tricks of the trade, The Interior Design Handbook will help you to think like a professional designer.

Make yourself at home

In The Interior Design Handbook, design consultant Frida Ramstedt explains and simplifies the fundamental principles and skills of interior design, giving rules of thumb and tricks of the trade that would be useful to everyone, irrespective of their taste in furniture or personal style. It shows how small adjustments can have a major impact on the overall effect, without the need to buy a host of new items or rip things out and start from scratch.

This is a book you can refer to as you set about turning your house or flat into a home; a book that will help you come up with your own solutions instead of just encouraging you to copy other people's ideas.

Lighting

Just as paint and brushwork can be used to create a visual effect and mood in a room, so lighting can be employed in the same way. Where we place the lamps, direct the beams of light and how we combine different strengths of light can make a huge difference to a room, transforming it at the flick of a switch from day into night.

Design tips

Decorators and interior stylists frequently group objects in order to catch the eye or reinforce the style and mood they are trying to achieve in an interior. These arrangements are called still lifes. Grouping things rather than spreading them out is an effective way to make a design that is full of detail feel more cohesive.

Style versus comfort

Since the lounge suite is often the largest group of furniture in our living rooms, the sofa and chairs send out a message about the aesthetic and functional feel we are trying to create. They tend to drown out any other stylistic clues in the room, which is why it is so important that, in choosing them, we stick to our thematic red thread or, at the very least, do not allow things to move in a different direction from the one we had planned.

This certified organic hand soap from Meraki is gentle and effective with a lovely, fresh scent of the cactus flower. Naturally, the soap is cleansing and with its content of aloe vera you do not necessarily need to use a hand cream after washing hands. The hand soap is gentle and suitable for all skin types. It comes in a stylish green bottle, which will adorn your bathroom, kitchen or the utility room.

Tray - Survival of the brittest

Illustration by : Karin Ohlsson

Can be washed in dishwasher 

20x27 cm

Made of pressed Birch tree