Inside Out: Bringing the garden into your home this spring
As May arrives, homes naturally start turning back towards the garden. After months spent cocooned indoors, longer days and softer light make you want to open windows, shift furniture around, and reconnect with the outdoors. For me, this time of year is less about redecorating than rebalancing — making a home feel fresh and properly connected to what's outside it.
The simplest way to do that is with plants. A bunch of cut flowers will always have its place, but living greenery does something a vase of flowers can't — it brings genuine movement and vitality into a room, and even a carefully designed space instantly feels more relaxed once it's there. I tend to reach for generous, architectural plants — large palms, ficus, hardy monsteras — that add height and softness without dominating a room, and are forgiving enough to survive the odd missed watering.
Essex is well served for this: garden centres like Perrywoods in Tiptree and The Barn Garden Centre in Stanway have become genuine lifestyle destinations, stocking pots, ceramics and home accessories alongside the plants themselves. The right planter — textured terracotta, a woven basket, simple stoneware — is what makes a plant feel intentional rather than an afterthought.
Beyond plants, May is also a good moment to think about how a home connects physically with its garden. In the early 2000s, the dream was wide-open bifold doors dissolving an entire wall. They transformed how people live, but I've noticed a real shift lately towards something softer and more architectural: steel-framed glazing.
Essex has a genuine claim on this look. Crittall, founded in Braintree in 1849 and now based in Witham, remains the definitive name in steel-framed windows and doors, specified by designers well beyond the county. Unlike a fully open bifold, Crittall-style glazing frames the garden like a piece of art while still holding onto a sense of structure and intimacy indoors.
Ultimately, this isn't about the view from a single window — it's about treating the garden as part of the interior itself. What you see from the kitchen table or the sofa is a view you live with daily, so thoughtful planting, layered greenery and a defined seating area outside do as much for a room as any new piece of furniture inside it. As entertaining season approaches, that outdoor space starts working even harder — an extension of the living space rather than something separate from it.
The best interiors don't compete with the garden. They invite it in.
This piece originally appeared in Alicia's monthly interior design column for Essex Life, May 2026.
Alicia Mellish leads Studio Forty Seven, an interior design studio working across Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk.