New lease of life: How to make a rental property feel like home

Irish Examiner

21-05-2025

Making your rented home feel like your own space is achievable, according to London-based social media content creator Katherine Ormerod, whose book Your Not Forever Home: Affordable, Elevated, Temporary Décor for Renters details her experience with renting and buying and renting again.
She's a fashion journalist but most likely to be found in dungarees, brandishing an electric drill. She's also adept at sewing everything from cushions to curtains — that's quite inspiring, but is it really worth the bother when the property will never be yours?
'There's no point pretending that renting doesn't have its drawbacks,' she says, 'but it's also not the living nightmare it's sometimes made out to be, especially if you can find an undervalued property and agree to making changes to help you feel properly at home.'
Art and books bring colour and your own personality to a room, especially if you are living with furniture you don't own.
With house prices soaring and in short supply, making the most of a rental can give you some sense of having roots.
'If you find yourself still short a deposit in mid-life it doesn't mean you've screwed up,' says Katherine. 'The world has simply turned quicker than our expectations of adulthood have evolved. I've lived in 15 rentals over the years, and I've made every single one a personalised space.'
Although she and her husband briefly owned a tiny flat, they quickly outgrew it. After 18 months of trying to sell, coping with two pandemic lockdowns with a toddler and a baby on the way, and even renting the flat out for a while, it sold without making a profit, and she found herself back renting and dealing with constraints, which she sees as being good for creativity.
Being able to take your own furniture to your new rental instantly gives a feeling of home.
'There are all kinds of temporary ways you can elevate a space,' she says. 'Vinyl kitchen surfaces, stick-on tiles, a host of movable artwork and objects. But I also deeply believe in trying to change the dynamic we have between landlord and tenant and seeing a lease more as a collaboration. We are so adversarial,l and it just doesn't have to be that way.'
She does go further than these easy-to-add and remove changes if you see yourself staying put for a few years. With the rental market being as excruciatingly competitive here as in London, she takes a novel approach.
'I always present a prospective landlord with a proposal for what I'd like to do to improve a rental,' she says. 'For example, I paint the walls and pay for that paint, and ask for a rental reduction in lieu. The landlord gets a refreshed home for a fraction of the cost of professional decoration, improving its value, and I get to live in an, admittedly neutral, colourful home.'
For tenants who don't want to go this far or can't get permission to do it, other steps can be taken, according to Katherine.
'When you walk into a rental, especially if it's a new build, the thing I hate most is that echo you get in an empty, optic white box,' she says.
Zoning is one of Ormerod's approaches to fitting everything into her space, including a dining room for entertaining.
'My number one tactic is to bring fabric and textures into the room, because aside from bringing that tactile cosiness, it also transforms the auditory quality of the space. As well as sofas, rugs, and throws, I'll make large bench cushions and curtains and stretch fabrics across handmade frames to create tapestries to line the walls. Nothing makes a home feel more comfortable than layered fabric.'
If you're unskilled with a needle beyond reattaching a button, this is ambitious, but a quick purchase of some soft furnishings would also do nicely. When eventually it's time to move, this interest in having a lovely home ought to endear you somewhat to your landlord so you get your deposit back, but it isn't always a guarantee.
Accessories and crafts, whether homemade or purchased, are a way of adding colour and texture.
'If a landlord is adamant that they're going to screw you over and keep your deposit, they will find a way to do it,' says Katherine. 'So many unfair situations have come up for me along the way and I am somewhat cynical. However, if you take pictures of every room yourself when you move in and ensure that you keep an email trail of everything, most definitely any changes that you've agreed to, you will have evidence to support your claim if it comes to arbitration. From my experience, you always have to compromise in small courts cases, but at least you'll have a leg to stand on.'
Your Not Forever Home by Katherine Ormerod, photography, Yuki Sugiura (Quadrille)
by Katherine Ormerod, photography, Yuki Sugiura (Quadrille) Instagram.com/katherine_ormerod