Interior Design E-books for UK Homeowners

A kitchen is the largest single spend in most renovations, and almost none of what goes wrong is about taste. It is about the order things happen in, and about decisions taken too late to be free.

The Kitchen Renovation Guide is a 36-page illustrated handbook from award-winning London studio Akiva. It follows the job in the order it actually happens, so you know what has to be decided before the plasterboard goes on.

It starts with the eight things to establish before you buy anything: where the waste runs, what the floor is made of, your water pressure, whether there is a duct route, whether your consumer unit has spare ways. Then budget and programme, with a stage-by-stage timeline and the reasons kitchens overrun.

The technical core is where this guide earns its place. Clearances in millimetres. Zones rather than the work triangle, which was designed for a 1940s kitchen and does not survive an island. Waste falls and flow rates. Why an induction hob needs its own high-current circuit. And extraction explained properly: 30 litres per second over the hob ducted out, 60 where it is not, and why a recirculating hood does not count towards either.

Then the enjoyable part. What you are actually paying for in cabinetry, and why hinges and runners matter more than doors. Worktops compared on price, durability and the one thing that separates them, which is heat. Appliances, and why choosing them after first fix is the most expensive ordering mistake in a kitchen. Lighting a room that is a workshop at seven in the morning and a dining room at eight at night.

UK edition: written around Approved Document F extract rates, Part P notification and BS 7671, with prices in pounds.

Every chapter ends in something you can act on, including a full snagging list and a printable Kitchen Planner your fitter, electrician and plumber will all want to see.

Format: PDF, 36 pages, A4. Instant download after purchase. Read on any device or print at home.

Most furniture mistakes are timing mistakes. The piece was right and the room was right; what went wrong was when it was ordered, or what was left in the budget by the time it came to buy it.

This is the guide to the two things nobody enjoys planning and everybody regrets skipping. Real lead times for every category, from stock upholstery at one to two weeks to bespoke joinery at twelve. The budget split designers actually work to, and why spreading money evenly produces a room that reads as unfinished. The seven-phase order of works, and the point in a building programme at which each thing has to be ordered so it arrives after the decorators rather than into a building site.

It also covers the mistake that costs most and is entirely preventable: measuring the room but not the route to it. Roughly one in eight UK deliveries fails on first attempt, and access is the leading cause.

36 pages, 11 chapters, with a quick reference page collecting every figure in the guide and two printable worksheets to plan your own budget and ordering dates.

How to place, arrange and finish every room in your home, using what you already own.

The Styling Guide covers everything that happens after the furniture arrives: where the sofa sits, how high the picture goes, how much of a shelf to leave empty, and how big the rug has to be. Almost every answer is a number, and almost every number can be checked with a tape measure.

It gives twenty-nine placement measurements, from the 145cm picture centre to the 40cm between sofa and coffee table, and labels each one by where it comes from: a regulation or published standard, named research, or trade convention. Where popular styling advice runs past the evidence, it says so.

Nothing in it needs buying.

Inside, eleven chapters and a planner: 01 Before You Start, 02 The Six Principles, 03 The Living Room, 04 The Bedroom, 05 Kitchen, Dining and the Entrance Hall, 06 The Home Office and the Bathroom, 07 Artwork and Wall Composition, 08 Shelves and Surfaces, 09 Rugs, 10 Lighting the Room You Have Styled, 11 Restyling Through the Year, and the Styling Planner, a printable room-by-room checklist with every measurement on one page.

Twelve drawn diagrams, worked examples for picture hanging, rug sizing and television distance, and three fifteen minute exercises.

Instant PDF download. A4, 36 pages, UK edition.

Most home offices were never designed at all. They accumulated. A desk arrived, then a second screen, then a chair borrowed from the dining table, and at some point it became the room you spend more waking hours in than any other.

Free until 30 September 2026, then £12.99. This is the full guide, not a sample, and a copy you download now is yours to keep.

The Home Office Guide is a 36-page illustrated handbook from award-winning London studio Akiva. It starts from scratch: which room, and why the obvious choice is often the wrong one. The room chooses itself on light, not on spare square metres, and a window sitting behind or in front of your screen will fight you every day no matter what furniture you put in front of it.

Then the three pieces of equipment that decide whether your back hurts, with the numbers to set them by. 740mm for a fixed desk with about 20mm of tolerance, which suits someone around 1.70m and nobody else without adjustment somewhere. Why you should buy the chair before the desk, since a desk is a flat surface and almost any will do, while a chair is adjustable equipment your spine depends on for eight hours a day. Most people spend the money the other way round.

Lighting is the chapter most likely to change something today. You need 500 lux maintained on the task area and 750 for detailed work. A typical domestic pendant delivers 100 to 200 lux at desk height, which is why almost every home office in the country is underlit and almost nobody knows it. There is a ten-second test in here that finds the problem.

After that: power, data and why services should be decided before furniture, because sockets are cheap to position and expensive to move. Sound, the clap test, and what a solid core door and a brush seal actually buy you. Storage, and the twenty per cent you should leave empty. Heat, air and the room that is unusable by February. The video call. Small rooms, bedroom offices and two people sharing one space.

The garden office chapter sets out what permitted development rights in England actually allow, the height limits in section, the coverage and position rules, where building regulations start at around 15 square metres, and the exceptions that catch people out in conservation areas and listed buildings. It also flags the two questions worth asking your accountant before you build, one on capital gains relief and one on business rates.

It ends with an honest chapter about what you can do yourself and where paying someone is worth it, including the cases where it is not. Most of this guide is a weekend and a tape measure.

UK edition: the garden office chapter is written around permitted development rights in England, and the electrical guidance around Part P and BS 7671. The ergonomics, lighting, acoustics and layout apply anywhere and are metric throughout.

A note on what this is: we are interior designers, not accountants. Nothing here is tax advice, and figures are given so you can ask your accountant a better question rather than act on ours. Electrical and structural work must be carried out by qualified people.

Format: PDF, 36 pages, A4. Download link arrives by email straight after checkout. Read on any device or print at home.

Two people. One house. A thousand decisions. Almost every couple we work with believes they are the difficult one. They are not. Designing a home together demands hundreds of aesthetic judgements, in public, against a deadline, with money attached to each one.

This guide is not about learning to like the same things. It is about a process good enough that your differences produce a better house rather than a stalled one. It starts with why you disagree, which is usually less about taste than it looks: vocabulary, priority or control, each with a different remedy. Then the practical machinery: a separate boards exercise that replaces adjectives with images, a one-page brief you both sign with three non-negotiables each, whole categories of decision owned outright rather than halved, and budget used as a neutral arbiter rather than a weapon.

And the chapter most of the guide exists for: where the standard advice to meet in the middle actively damages a house. Split the difference on forty decisions and you arrive at the house nobody chose. The negotiation research says trading whole decisions leaves both of you better off, and the guide shows how. Figures come from the 2025 UK Houzz Renovations and Relationships Report, colours are referenced in BS 4800, RAL and NCS, and late changes are handled as priced, written variations. It is a guide to design decisions, not relationship counselling, and says so.

36 pages, 11 chapters, with an Agreement Worksheet to fill in together and hand to whoever is designing or building. Instant PDF download after purchase.

The one trade decision you cannot undo later. Almost everything in a house can be changed afterwards: paint, furniture, even a kitchen. Lighting positions cannot, because by the time you can see whether they work, the ceiling is closed and the room is decorated.

This guide is written to be read before first fix, in the order the decisions actually arrive. What a lighting plan decides and what the electrician decides. The four layers of light and how each one fails. How much light a room needs, and why the 500 lux figure you keep being quoted comes from a workplace standard, not one written for homes. Colour temperature and colour rendering, including R9, which is where most of the money is either well spent or wasted.

Then room by room: kitchens, bathrooms and their statutory zones, the rooms people sit in, and the halls and stairs nobody plans. Then circuits, switching and dimming, the chapter that decides whether the rest can be used, and an honest account of what the research on evening light and sleep does and does not support. Written to BS 7671 as amended in 2026, Part P and Approved Document L, including the 75 lumens per circuit-watt minimum that also applies when you replace fittings in an existing home.

36 pages, 11 chapters, with a two-sheet Lighting Plan to fill in before anyone quotes and take to first fix. Instant PDF download after purchase.

Most of what goes wrong on a building job was decided before anyone arrived. Ask a builder why a job went badly and you will hear the same handful of answers: the brief was vague, the drawings were not finished, the kitchen was chosen too late, the party wall notice went out late.

This guide is written from the builder's side of the conversation, for the person paying. What a builder needs in order to price properly, how to read a quote and compare three of them, contracts, stage payments and retention, insurance, and the costs that sit outside the build contract, from the engineer and building control to the party wall award and VAT.

Then living through it: permits and notices, what gets found when the walls open, decisions and lead times, changes of mind, who is on your site, what goes out of use and for how long, and who speaks to whom. It finishes with sign-off, certificates and snagging, and what a finished job actually looks like. Figures are given as dated 2026 ranges from named sources.

48 pages, 16 chapters, with a one-sheet Homeowner's Planner. Instant PDF download after purchase.

Most small-space advice is somebody's opinion. This guide is measurements: every figure is named to a British Standard, a Building Regulation or a trade convention you can check yourself, so you always know which numbers are law and which are simply what tends to work.

It starts with the clearances a body needs to move through a home and the Nationally Described Space Standard, then works room by room: furniture that does two jobs, how much storage a flat needs and where it goes, the colour and light figures that genuinely change how big a room reads, a compact kitchen, a bathroom in less space, and a studio that has to do everything at once.

Then the built-in joinery that makes the most of every wall, escape windows and daylight, and the two-month party wall notice to build into the programme before you knock through. England-specific wherever a regulation is named.

36 pages, 11 chapters, with a Small Space Planner to fill in against your own flat. Instant PDF download after purchase.

A bedroom is the easiest room to furnish and the hardest to get right. Most rooms announce their failures. A bedroom hides them: one side of the bed is too tight to walk down, the wardrobe door fouls the frame, the window is on the wrong wall for the morning.

This guide is about the decisions underneath the decoration, in the order the room gets built: the bed first, then storage, then the four environmental questions that decide whether the room is any good to sleep in (light, temperature, air and damp, and sound), then the rules, the power and the finish.

And the part most bedroom advice gets wrong. The ideal sleeping temperature, the light threshold, the night-time noise limit and the seven-year mattress rule are all repeated with confidence, and none of them survives contact with its source. Each is traced here, and you get the figure that does hold up. Bed sizes are checked across the UK and German markets, because the same bed is not the same size either side of the border, and the UK rules that now reach the bedroom are named by clause.

40 pages, 12 chapters and 8 measured drawings, with a printable Bedroom Planner to fill in before you buy anything. UK edition. Instant PDF download after purchase.