Light
Most room problems are lighting problems
A room that feels wrong and cannot be diagnosed is almost always lit from one place, at one colour, at one level.
Nour Haddad
Contributing writer, Rooms With Stories
Nour writes about lighting and how a room changes across a day.
Contact Nour through our contact page — mark your message for their attention and it will be passed on.
17 articles
Small Spaces
A small flat needs fewer things, better placed
Most small-space advice sells storage. The rooms that work usually contain less, arranged around how the space is used.
Small Spaces
Renting well is a set of reversible decisions
You cannot change the building. You can change almost everything you experience of it, and take it with you.
Light
Lumens, kelvin and CRI: the three numbers that decide a bulb
Watts stopped meaning brightness years ago. The figures on the box now describe three separate things, and mixing them up is why…
Light
A roof light delivers far more daylight than a window of the same size
The amount of sky a window can see, not its area, is what determines how much light gets into a room.
Light
Bathroom lighting is a mirror problem before it is a room problem
The downlight above the mirror is why you look worse at home than anywhere else, and it is entirely fixable.
Light
How bright a room is depends on its surfaces, not just its lights
Two rooms with identical lighting can differ enormously in how bright they feel, because most of the light you see has bounced.
Small Spaces
A studio flat needs zones, not dividers
Chopping one room into smaller rooms usually makes it worse. Marking what happens where makes it work.
Small Spaces
A galley kitchen is efficient if it is planned as one
The narrow kitchen everyone apologises for is the layout professional kitchens use, and it fails for a specific and fixable reason.
Small Spaces
Small bathrooms are won and lost in fifty millimetres
The difference between a cramped bathroom and a comfortable one is usually a handful of dimensions nobody checked.
Small Spaces
Storage in a rented home without a single drilled hole
Almost everything sold as rental storage still needs a wall plug. The things that genuinely do not are worth knowing.
Small Spaces
Two people in one room fails on timing, not square metres
Shared small spaces break down over when things happen and where things are left, long before they run out of area.
Light
Paint colour is a conversation between the pigment and the light in the room
A colour that looked right on a card can look grey, green or lilac on the wall. The paint has not changed; the light reaching it…
Small Spaces
The top third of a small room is usually wasted
Floor area gets measured, argued over and paid for. The volume above head height is free, unused and capable of absorbing most of…
Small Spaces
Platforms and mezzanines buy floor area and spend head height
Building upward inside a room converts unused volume into usable area. What it costs is clearance, and clearance is the dimension…
Small Spaces
Furniture that does two jobs usually does one of them badly
Convertible pieces are sold as the answer to small homes. Some are genuinely good, and the ones that fail all fail for the same…
Small Spaces
Drying laundry indoors is a moisture problem before it is a space problem
A load of wet washing releases litres of water into the air of a flat. Where that water ends up is what decides whether you get…