Renting is the great interior design challenge of our time. You can't paint the walls. You can't knock through doorways. You can't do anything permanent and you often can't even put up too many hooks. And yet somehow you're supposed to make a place feel like home. The good news is that it's entirely possible, and the changes that make the biggest difference are almost all reversible.
The Walls Are the Highest-Impact Thing You Can Change
Even in a rental, you can put things on the walls — you just have to do it carefully. Command strips from 3M will hold prints up to A3 without damaging plaster, removed cleanly when you leave. The key is what you put on them.
A single beautiful print transforms a rental room faster and more dramatically than any piece of furniture. A watercolour destination print of a place that means something to you — a favourite holiday, a city you lived in, a coastline you grew up near — takes a generic magnolia room and makes it yours. It says "someone who has a life lives here."
At Sundays In Tuscany we make watercolour destination prints of European cities, coastlines and countryside across 25+ destinations. A4 from £17.99, A3 from £36.99. Made to order, free UK shipping. Takes down in seconds with a Command strip when you move.
Shop All Prints →
Replace the Landlord's Lighting
The single most depressing thing in most rented flats is the overhead lighting — the bare bulb or the flat white fitting in the centre of the ceiling that makes everything look like a waiting room. You don't need to rewire anything. Plug-in pendant lights, floor lamps and table lamps on timers transform the evening mood of a room completely. Pack them when you leave.
Layer Textiles
Cushions, throws, rugs and curtains are the fastest way to add warmth and personality to a neutral space. Replace the landlord's curtains with your own (store theirs carefully). Add a rug over ugly carpet or bare laminate. Layer two or three cushion covers over the existing sofa cushions. Textiles are removable, storable and make an enormous difference.
Add Plants Everywhere Possible
Plants are the other great equaliser of rental properties. A large fig tree or monstera in a bright corner, trailing pothos from a shelf, a windowsill of herbs in the kitchen — plants make a space feel cared for and alive in a way that no amount of furniture arrangement quite manages.
Build a Gallery Wall
A gallery wall on Command strips — three to five prints arranged in a cluster — is the single most effective thing you can do to make a rental feel like a home you've curated. The arrangement, the choice of destinations, the order they're placed in — it all tells a story about who lives there. When you move, take it down in ten minutes and take the whole story with you.
Make the Space Smell Like You
Scent is the fastest route to "home." A candle you burn every evening, a diffuser on the windowsill, a bunch of fresh flowers once a week — smell bypasses reason entirely. Every time you walk in the door, it should smell like somewhere you chose, not somewhere you ended up.
Start Your Gallery Wall →
