Ruth Matthews Colourful Home

Today's Home Tour is with Ruth Matthews, interior blogger, stylist and designer @design_soda_ruthie. 

Ruth's home is a lovely mixture of colour (understated colour in many cases) mixed with vintage finds, a bit of Scandi and some dark walls too. Because she designs her home in such an eclectic manner, despite this mixture of styles, her home has a lovely cohesive, warm and comforting feel to it.

You can read Ruth's blog through the button below and read on to hear all about her inspiration and the changes she has made to her home over the last few years.

Hi, I’m Ruthie Matthews, a design blogger, interior stylist and perpetual decorator who lives in South London with my husband Dan, our son Ted (aged 3) and our cat Dinah.

We bought our house, a three bed Victorian semi on the outskirts of London, just under two and a half years ago and have been decorating pretty non-stop ever since!  Our most well recognised rooms, are our green living room which won a Pinterest Interiors award for the most pinned image in the West of the UK last year, and my bathroom, in particular a shot taken from the reflection of the bathroom mirror, which is tagged a lot on Instagram and which I find people often know better than they know me (family included!). 

I have an truly eclectic style and you will find a whole host of design styles and eras throughout the house. I use vintage a lot to add weight and story to my rooms and I have a strong love for colour. I’m really passionate about colour and it’s something I can talk about for hours, this is part of the reason my poor (very bored) husband advised me to start writing a blog back in 2013 and I did!

I think our home is quietly colourful, by which I mean it uses colour throughout but not necessarily in the punchy way that that term often conjures up. We aren’t afraid of being bold with dark colours, but are equally as likely to use very neutral ones (for example in the bedroom which is quite Scandinavian in feel). 

I am as happy scouring the aisles of super markets for homewares as I am flea markets and items for our home come from a wide variety of sources. The house is filled with beautiful things that we’ve collected or saved up for over the last decade and although I like to curate my collections pretty keenly our style is pretty relaxed overall. I hate spaces that feel precious or like museum pieces, and as we are a family home nothing would ever stay perfect for long anyway!

I like to tackle things around the house myself, if walls need to be painted, floors to be sanded, gardens to be landscaped or small DIY tweaks, I’m you’re girl. Which is handy for my husband as he hates all of these kinds of task. I’ve always thought that if I had the budget for a decorator I’d rather keep that money back to buy something really special for a space and this tends to be my strategy.

When we bought our current house there was nothing major that needed doing, and although we have repainted and decorated every room, it hasn’t been a nightmare to renovate. Our previous flat in Tooting was very dated and needed a lot doing to it so this house has been a relatively easy space to change. I have wooden floorboards in most rooms (carpet in Teds bedroom) as I like the warmth wood adds to a space and I wouldn’t change my creaky floorboards for anything. 

After two years of pretty hardcore decorating I had thought that we were pretty done with our home revamp but some leaking guttering which caused a cupboard to fall off the wall in the kitchen recently (and revealed a fair amount of damp damage) means that a renovation of the kitchen is now next in my sights. I love being able to blog about the changes we make in the home, interiors are my real passion and I feel very lucky that I now manage to carve out a living from my passion. 

the girl in home