How to Transform Your Home With a Well-Placed Mirror

In a new interiors column for Vogue, maverick London-based furnishings seller and designer Jermaine Gallacher delivers his strategies on taking interiors building blocks—bookshelves to blinds, curtains to chairs—and switching them up to reinvent your living area at any price range. Strange, stunning, and at times even sorcerous, here’s how you can do it much too. Mirrors not involved.

There are no less than 15 mirrors in my very small just one-bedroom flat in south London. In truth, I just caught sight of myself in a single of them seeking a minimal like the ghost of Queen Elizabeth—the very first Elizabeth, I hasten to add—and I shrieked. Clearly, celebration time has taken its toll. 

Some may well read through that and contact me vain, when other people would say it signifies I know a thing or two about inside design and style. Both of those, I feel, would have a level. A mirror should really be a lot more than the floor we pass by for a fleeting instant once or two times a day to verify ourselves out or consider a selfie. They are, in reality, the seasoned decorator’s best conspiracy, reworking little, light-weight-starved areas into seemingly bright and glamorous rooms. Frankly, the trickery of a mirror is aware of no bounds—and with the new calendar year on us, and lots of dim winter months looming ahead—what far better time could there be to increase a few much more of these vignettes of intrigue to your individual partitions?

They say that appears to be can be deceiving, but in this scenario, which is accurately what we’re soon after. When it arrives to decorating with mirrors, it is all about this sleight of hand. Placing a mirror opposite a window to invite in more normal mild? Confident, it is the oldest trick in the book—in reality, you have most likely read about it in each individual interior style reserve ever penned. But even if it does audio manifestly clear, believe that me, it genuinely works.

And personally, I feel it works most effective when you mount a piece of glass in an alcove, or insert it into a piece of wall-mounted furniture, like a cardboard doorway panel or dresser shelf. I did particularly this in my hallway bookcase, which faces my bed room window, opting for traditional, mirror-backed glass prior to getting it slice to suit precisely in involving the two tallest shelves. Mirrored glass can be slice to any size, condition, and end at any fantastic glazers—I discover builder’s service provider glazers are the ideal, the the very least expensive, and constantly ready to haggle—and the finish consequence throws a ton of light-weight back into what would otherwise be a darkish, dingy basement hallway. 

If it is a authentic eyeful you are just after with mirrors, while, bedrooms are the excellent place to get creative—in additional methods than a single. Yes, some people today really do it with mirrors. I attract the line at mirrored ceilings and headboards, as no one wants to see that much. But a very well-hung (so to discuss) assortment of mirrors on a bedroom wall can punctuate the space, incorporating a contact of mysterious chance to any beneath-the-sheets come across.