The most common furnishing mistake in Melbourne homes is a rug that is too small. Not the wrong colour, not the wrong pattern. Too small. It happens for two reasons. Rugs look big in shops, where they lie in a warehouse with nothing around them. And rooms are bigger than we think, especially the open-plan

A hallway has more work to do than any room in the house, and it has to do it in about three seconds. Between the front door and the living areas it needs to absorb the debris of arrival (keys, mail, sunglasses, the school note that can’t be lost) and at the same time set

Tuesday night. Dinner on the table. Someone’s elbow is in someone else’s plate. The youngest is balanced on a wobbly stool because the chairs ran out two kids ago, and the table that seated four comfortably now seats six uncomfortably. Most families don’t replace a dining table because it broke. They replace it because the

Forty-five square metres. That’s the whole floor plan of a typical one-bedder off Sydney Road, and it has to hold a sofa, a queen bed, somewhere to eat, somewhere to work, and every object you own. None of that is impossible. People do it well all the time, and the ones who do it badly

It’s 8pm on a Tuesday in a new estate in Clyde North. The downlights are all on, the electrician followed the ceiling plan exactly, and the room is somehow still gloomy. The middle of the floor is bright enough to read a gas bill. The sofa sits in shadow, the dining table is lit like

Furnishing a new Melbourne home — a fresh build in the Clyde North–Cranbourne growth corridor, a townhouse in the middle suburbs, a period place closer in — tends to go wrong in the same five ways. None of them are about taste. They’re about sequence and scale, and they’re expensive because they involve the biggest,

Walk into most Melbourne dining rooms — the front room of a Brunswick terrace, the open-plan corner of a new Clyde North estate — and you’ll find the same gap. There’s a table, there are chairs, and then there’s a pile of placemats, serving bowls and good glassware migrating between the kitchen bench and the