Furnishing Your Conservatory
A conservatory was once just the preserve of the rich, designed for the cultivation of exotic plants to replicate sunnier climes. Today's advances in materials such as UPVC have made the cost of building a conservatory more accessible, and conservatories now provide valuable extra living space for many families across the UK.
Following all the excitement of deciding to invest in the addition of a conservatory, new owners are left with the dilemma of how to furnish this new, and often initially rather bare, space. A good place to start is to think about how you actually intend to use the conservatory before you consider the type of décor, lighting or furniture which you will need.
Here are some typical uses for today's conservatory:
- An informal area for reading the paper, coffee with friends, an afternoon snooze
- Home office
- Playroom
- Dining Room
- Gym
- Cultivation of plants
- Stargazing
- Bird watching
- Feeling the warming effects of the sun on your face, all year round
Defining what you want to do in a conservatory can help you to see more clearly the type of furniture you need and the mood and feel you want to achieve. Natural colours soothe and calm, whilst brights can invigorate your mood and are great for stimulating play or creative thinking.
Increasingly, a conservatory can also be used for more than one purpose so with some clever storage, the kids playroom can be turned into an elegant seating area for the evening. A home office might need to double as an occasional guest bedroom.
The important thing to bear in mind is that, by its very nature, a conservatory is always going to be a transitional room between the 'indoors' and the 'outdoors' so this is one room where you can make the most of natural materials such as cane, rattan, leather and wood. The chances are you've got plenty of natural light to work with so avoid over-dressing your conservatory, otherwise an airy and light space will quickly feel cluttered and small.
Conservatories can come in all shapes and sizes, from vast rectangles to octagonal and hexagonal formats. Each shape requires separate consideration as to what furniture is going to be most suitable. Rectangular or square rooms can generally accommodate larger pieces of furniture, whereas sometimes it can be difficult to fit, say, a three seater cane or rattan sofa in an octagonal space - chairs or two seater sofas often work better to make efficient use of the space.
A conservatory can become an area of high traffic in the house, especially if it is continually used to access the garden. Flooring should be easy to clean, and easy on the eye, so many people like large ceramic or terracotta floor tiles or even a real wood or laminate floor for ease and aesthetic purposes. If you want to make the look a bit more cosy, a rug under the coffee table and some textured cushion covers can soften the effect of a hard floor.
I am sure that many people have had the experience of buying furniture which looked just right in a showroom, but which takes on gargantuan proportions when it arrives in your home. Often furniture showrooms are so big, that normal furniture looks like it belongs in a dolls house, thus convincing you that the bigger the sofa, the better. In a conservatory, the sizing of the cane or rattan furniture is very important - if necessary cut out some templates from newspaper or use masking tape to mark out the actual footprint of the pieces of furniture on the floor. To be able to use and enjoy the space properly it's advisable to leave sufficient space for at least a side table or two for resting that all-important cup of tea or coffee on. Remember that arms of chairs and sofas can often make the furniture seem bigger, so smaller spaces suit elegant, clean lines much better than big chunky blocks.
If you are planning to visit a showroom to look at cane or rattan furniture for your conservatory, you might like to take along the following:
- The dimensions of your conservatory (you might want to sketch out a rough plan)
- A couple of photos, possibly showing the garden and the room(s) which lead off the conservatory so the conservatory becomes a true extension of your home rather than feeling 'tagged on'
- Any colour swatches or magazine cuttings that have caught your eye if you are going for a definite 'look'
Feel free to ask the staff in the showroom for advice. Remember, they dress conservatories every single day for a living and they know what looks good - the right salesperson can inspire you with new ideas and before you know it, you've got a conservatory that's all yours.
So you can relax and enjoy the space as you intended!
