Where To Start In A New Build
The photographs make it look easy. In practice you are standing in a house where every wall is the same off-white, the carpet is the one the builder fits in all four house types, and there is nothing in any room to arrange anything around. No fireplace. No bay window. No original anything.
Most interior design advice is no help here, because it assumes a house that already has something to say. Yours does not yet. That is not a fault, it is a starting position, and it is a better one than it looks.
We furnish empty new builds for a living. Show homes are the same problem under a deadline: same white box, same builder specification, same absence of features. What follows is the order we work in, and the order we would suggest you work in.
First, live in it for a fortnight before buying anything
Not a rule anyone enjoys, but it is the one that saves the most money.
You cannot tell where the light falls until you have been there in the morning and the evening. You cannot tell which way you actually walk through the kitchen, which side of the bed you end up on, or which corner of the living room you sit in when you are tired. Every one of those changes what you should buy.
The second reason is that new build rooms are almost always a different size in person to the size they were in your head. A room that read as generous on the floorplan can be exactly the wrong width for the sofa you had in mind. Two weeks of living in it, and a tape measure, will tell you more than any amount of scrolling.
Buy a bed and something to sit on. Everything else waits a fortnight.
Second, sort the windows
This is the one people leave until last, and it is the one that changes a room most.
An empty new build has bare windows. At night they are black mirrors, and by day the rooms feel unfinished in a way that is hard to place until the curtains go up. Soft furnishing at the window is also the single biggest thing you can do about the echo, because a new build with hard floors, no curtains and no furniture bounces sound around in a way older houses do not.
Get the fitting right and inexpensive fabric looks considered. Get it wrong and expensive fabric looks like a mistake. Three things do most of the work: hang the pole higher and wider than the window rather than tight to the frame, so the glass looks bigger and the curtains sit clear of it when open. Buy enough fabric that the curtains still look full when they are drawn, because a flat panel across a window always reads as cheap. And let them touch the floor.
Blinds alone will do the job functionally, and in a bathroom or a small back bedroom that is the right answer. In the rooms you sit in, blinds alone leave the window looking like an opening rather than a feature.
Third, put down a rug that is too big rather than too small
Your floor is the same as the one in every other house on the street and you are probably not going to replace it. A rug is how you stop that being the first thing you notice.
The mistake is buying one that is too small. A rug floating in the middle of the room with all the furniture around the outside of it makes the room look smaller and reads as an afterthought. Go large enough that the front legs of the sofa and the chairs sit on it. In a dining space, large enough that a chair stays on the rug when someone pushes it back to stand up.
Wool over viscose if you can. Viscose looks wonderful in a photograph, marks when it gets wet, and never fully recovers. In a house with people walking in from a garden that is not yet a garden, that matters.
Fourth, do something about the lighting before you do anything about the walls
Nearly every new build hands you a single pendant in the middle of the ceiling in most rooms, and downlights in the kitchen. That one central light is doing something specific to your rooms: it flattens them, throws everything into the same even glare, and makes the corners look like corners.
You do not need an electrician to fix this. You need lamps. Three or four light sources at different heights in a living room, none of them the ceiling light, will change the room more than repainting it would. A floor lamp beside the sofa, a table lamp on something at the far end, something low near where you sit. Then turn the big light off.
Warm bulbs throughout, and the same warmth in every fitting in a room. Mixing colour temperatures is one of those things you cannot see until you can, and then you cannot stop seeing it.
Fifth, then the walls
By this point you know where the light falls, what your furniture looks like in the room, and what colour your rug is. Now paint.
Doing it in this order sounds backwards and is not. Paint is the cheapest thing to change and the most affected by everything else, so it should follow the decisions that are expensive to reverse rather than lead them. Choosing a colour against a bare white room with no furniture in it is choosing in the dark.
When you do choose, test properly. Paint a large square on more than one wall, look at it in the morning and at night, and leave it up for a few days. New build rooms often have less natural light than the window size suggests, because the windows are frequently smaller than in older houses and the reveals are deep. A colour that looked warm in the shop can go grey and cold in a north facing room here.
Sixth, and only then, the things that make it yours
Art, books, the objects that mean something. This is the part everyone wants to do first and it works far better last, because now there is a room for it to sit in.
One piece of advice we apply to every show home and would apply to your house: hang art lower than instinct says. Most people hang too high. The centre of a picture wants to sit at roughly eye level for someone standing, which is lower than it feels when you are holding it against the wall with your arms up.
And leave some surfaces empty. A new build has clean lines and not much architectural interest, which means clutter has nothing to hide behind. Restraint reads as deliberate in a house like this in a way it does not in a Victorian terrace.
What you can safely ignore for now
Worth saying, because most advice implies everything is urgent.
The spare bedroom can wait a year, and will probably change purpose before you finish it. The garden is a separate project and will eat any budget you point at it. Feature walls solve a problem you do not have yet. And you do not need matching furniture, which is the thing new build owners worry about most and matters least. A room where everything came from the same range looks like a showroom rather than a home.
The order matters more than the budget. Fortnight, windows, rug, lighting, paint, then the personal things. Follow it and each decision is made with better information than the one before.
When you want a hand with it
Design Seven is a Bristol studio. Most of our work is show homes for housebuilders, which means we furnish empty new builds for a living and have solved this problem a few hundred times. We take on private projects too, whether that is a single room, a whole house, or made to measure curtains and blinds fitted properly. If you have a house you are stuck on, tell us about it.