Chester Dog Crate Housing with Drawers from The Painted Furniture Company is a great way to hide unattractive areas in your home
According to research commissioned by Terry’s Fabrics, Brits spend, on average, 69 days a year wondering how we can update our homes. We spend an average of £1,508 on interiors every year, which equates to over £2.9 billion a year across the country.
Obviously we all want our homes to look and feel good, but there is no denying that there are certain areas of the home that can be problematic. Some areas are generally unsightly and require a great deal of imagination, creativity and elbow grease to bring them up to standard.
These areas are often the most functional aspects of a home that stand out such as conspicuous boilers to awkwardly placed pipes, cables and appliances. These things can disrupt the overall aesthetic flow and visual appeal of a room.
But how do we overcome the issue of eyesores around the home? Let’s take a look at some useful techniques to disguise unattractive areas and better incorporate them into our interior design.
How to Hide the Boiler
Vaillant ecoTEC Plus Combi Boiler 2023 from Quietmark
While it is essential to the comfort and functionality of your home, a boiler can spoil the overall style and aesthetic of the room. Thankfully, this large, bulky piece of equipment can be tastefully concealed in a number of creative ways depending where it is situated in your home.
If the boiler is situated in the kitchen, a custom-built cabinet that matches the rest of the cabinetry in the room is a popular and effective way to hide it. Opt for the same materials and consider adding a stylish feature such as a sliding door to give your cabinet a sleek, seamless finish that enhances the overall appearance of your kitchen.
A false wall can also be built to tastefully conceal your boiler. This can be achieved by affixing a panel of wood or plasterboard to the kitchen wall and finishing it with paint to blend in with the rest of the room. This ensures it remains hidden yet functional, enhancing both the style and practicality of your space.
Our boiler is situated in our living room. Thankfully it is hidden away in a built-in storage cupboard so it is completely out of sight. Building bespoke storage to house the boiler is a great option as you can design it in a way that makes the most of the storage space whilst hiding the appliance from view.
With each solution, always ensure your boiler can be easily accessed and has adequate ventilation. If at any point you need to update or upgrade your boiler, this is a great time to rethink its location and how you might go about disguising it.
How to Hide Your Radiators
Left: Anastasia White Glass Radiator Cover Silver from MY Furniture | Right: Etienne Standard Mirrored Radiator Cover from MY Furniture
Hiding radiators in your home is a personal choice. Some people don’t want to have them on view and others really don’t have an issue seeing radiators. Personally, I would rather not see them if I had a choice. Actually, I would rather not have them at all. I find it can make furniture placement a bit tricky as it is not a great ideas to position large items of furniture in front of a radiator as it limits the heat distribution into the room.
If you don’t want to get rid of your radiators altogether, but would still like to disguise them, the easiest option is to paint them the same colour as the wall. This helps them to disappear somewhat as they visually merge into the background.
Another option is to invest in radiator covers. these come in all kinds of decorative designs that often look more pleasing than the bare radiators. Radiator covers also have the added benefit of creating additional shelf space for placing small items such as picture frames, plants or books, allowing you to combine function with style and detract attention away from the radiator itself. Just bear in mind whether covering your radiators will impact their efficiency.
The other option is to completely rethink how you decide to heat your home and whether you can do away with radiators altogether. Switching to underfloor heating could be a good call and would allow you to forego radiators in your home. An alternative to radiators and underfloor heating is to install a Thermaskirt system. This system integrates the heating pipes into the skirting boards of your home. This groundbreaking technology works with air and ground source, biomass, and solar thermal systems. Thermaskirt has some great sustainability benefits too.
How to Hide Pipes and Wiring
Exposure to the inner workings of a house can interfere with its design, creating undesired contrast between chic interior features and utilitarian elements such as plumbing, wiring and HVAC components.
A great way to hide unattractive areas of your home is by strategically placing an access panel over these areas, attention can be drawn away from these objects, creating a cleaner and more harmonious look to your interior. Access panels come in a range of options to suit your taste and home interior. These include flush-mounted panels which can be painted or covered over with wallpaper to match the rest of the wall, and decorative access panels with unique finishes or patterns that can double up as a design feature while concealing the items behind them.
How to Hide Cables
Cables are so very unsightly. By the average household has so many appliances that cables really are unavoidable. The solution here is good cable management. Cables can be hidden from view by hiding them in simple cable boxes, tying them up or running them along furniture or by using cable trunking.
The option that you decide on will very much depend on the room, the layout and the function of the cables. It might also be possible to create a false panel painted in the same colour as the wall to hide the cables from view.
How to Hide Pet Beds or Litter Trays
Left: Chester Dove Grey Pet Bed Larder from The Cotswold Company | Right: Bespoke Handcrafted Kitchen by Willis & Stone
Something else you may want to hide out of sight is pet beds and litter trays. As a nation of animal lovers, many of us have these essentials in our homes, but we don’t always want them to be a focal point in the room. Previously, pet accessories were not particularly aesthetically pleasing but in recent years there has been a real push towards design-led pet accessories.
The best way to hide unattractive areas in your home when it comes to pets is to get furniture that integrates the pet accessories. For example, a pantry or larder unit that has an integrated dog bed in the lower half or a sideboard that has a dog bed within it. You can even have pet beds designed into your kitchen cabinetry.
Another alternative is to invest on some of the pet beds that look like miniature versions of human furniture. There are some really impressive tiny sofas around. This won’t hide the pet bed but it can certainly make it into a pleasing focal point in the room and will be sure to draw the attention of visitors.
By implementing these ideas to hide unattractive areas in your home you can enhance the appearance of your home’s interior while maintaining its practicality and function.
