Making a rented space your own

Ruth Dsouza Prabhu offers some simple yet effective tips to decorate a rented space and make it your own till you live there.

With a massive floating population, rented homes are the norm in Bangalore. In most cases, tenants are forbidden from making any changes to the structure to personalise the space a bit. These restrictions can go down to hammering nails in the walls as well. With such a tight set of rules to adhere to, giving a rented home a touch of your own can be a tall order. But not anymore — here are a few ideas that you can use.

Juhi Santani, a City-based interior designer has these ideas to share. The first is to use paint in a smart manner. Rather than attempt to change the paint job completely in a rented home, take up a small part of it. In your living room, let it be the space behind the TV or the wall at the end of the corridor. Such paint jobs work at changing the feel of the room instantly. Once you have painted a part of your walls, use coordinated curtains and cushions to create a colour theme for your living room, harmonising it with the new coloured wall patch.

You could also hang your photos, paintings and art on the coloured patches. Invest in some art such as prints that are easily found in home decor stores around the City.

Coordinate their colour schemes with your theme and shade, then place them on the area that has not been painted. This brings about a kind of coordination in colours in the space.

Growing plants can really help liven up a space. Place money plants in bottles and put them on your window sills, in the kitchen and even on your coffee table. Create clusters of plants around your balconies and bring in some cane furniture as well. You will have a beautiful space thus created which can easily be taken down and re-created in your new rental space.

Most rental spaces don’t come with any furniture or carpets as they do abroad, but what you can do is make use of dhurries as well as small rugs and really define some spots across your home. This brings in much colour and texture to your space. Then you have the lighting, it’s not really easy to innovate with lighting, but what you can do is use a candle corner or twinkle lights to create mood lighting.

Especially for your children’s rooms, look at using stickers or wall decals to do up spaces. This way you won’t leave a smudge when vacating the rental. One gets a fairly good collection of children’s decals especially.

Besides Juhi Santani’s ideas to do up your rental space, it would also be a good thing to invest in modular furniture that can be broken into sections to be used. Should you end up moving many times and not have space for an entire sofa set for example, you can always use a section of it alone. If the space is painted and your landlord is dead against you using a new coat of paint, simply go with it and try and coordinate the rest of the room in terms of accessories. This can give you a beautiful room by happy accident. Take a look around your kitchen and check out some modular storage units that can give your kitchen a complete facelift.

These are just some of the basic ideas you can work with the make your own comfortable space in a rented home. You won’t be stepping on any toes and you will have a space that is truly your own.