Five Ways To Refresh Your Home For Summer

Summer calls for lighter layers, a cooling colour palette and an effortless attitude, both when it comes to your outfits and your home. Giving your rooms a refresh for the new year is incredibly simple, all it takes is a few style updates. Here, we show you how to decorate for summer and create that holiday feel at home.

Lighten up with linen

Linen is synonymous with summer style. Linen is light, breathable and durable, it’s easy to care for, it naturally grows softer and more beautiful over time, and even when wrinkled linen looks and feels effortless. These qualities make it the perfect fabric to style your own home with. Try adding a linen slip cover to your sofa, hang sheer linen curtains, entertain with a colourful linen table cloth, swap velvet or wool soft furnishings for linen cushion covers, and trade heavy blankets and bed covers for linen bed sheets, which makes for a more comfortable sleep in summer.

Introduce jute and rattan

Linen isn’t the only textile that should be embraced at home in summer. Natural materials such as jute and rattan evoke a resort-style mood, which is perfect for updating your home in the new year. These woven materials can be styled as subtly or dramatically as you please, from rattan dining chairs, lamps and bedheads to jute baskets that can be used as stylish storage in every room.

Opt for neutral tones

Nothing evokes the spirit of an Australian summer quite like a light neutral palette. Think crisp whites, warm tans and sandy tones, with pale wood accents and pops of citrusy lemon or fresh blue. Light neutral tones are naturally calming and cleansing, and well-suited to our more relaxed, pared-back state of mind in warmer weather. Consider swapping cushions and throws in rich winter hues for lighter shades, or introduce a coastal-inspired palette to your table setting with bright servingware and tinted glassware.

Find your summer home scent

It makes sense to alternate your fragrances between summer and winter, so why not spritz your home with a new scent each season. Where winter calls for something rich and evocative, summer scents should uplift your interiors and sit somewhere on a spectrum of green and clean to fresh and floral. Look for candles and interior sprays with notes of citrus, green herbs, white flowers or sea salt to set the mood — your summer home scent should inspire memories of days spent in the sun, trips to the beach and time immersed in nature.

Bring the outdoors in

The beauty of Australian living is the ease with which the outdoors influence our interiors. There’s so much style inspiration to draw from, whether it’s the colours of our coastline, the natural materials perfectly suited to our climate, or the seasonal flora that can be distilled into a home scent. Displaying vases of greenery or bringing large potted plants into your living space will also blur the boundary between the indoors and outdoors and allow your interiors to breathe. Complete that holiday at home experience with beach towel-inspired cotton bath sheets, an art print redolent of a favourite destination and a summer soundtrack playing on the stereo.