This rental home in Bengaluru makes DIY decor look like expensive designer pieces
Krittika Srikanth manages to keep her whites white
If homes had designated ice cream flavours, Krittika Srikanth’s Bengaluru rental would be a key lime sorbet. Gentle on the palate with a crisp freshness and just enough zing to tantalise the senses. You won’t find anything sticking out like a sore digit, scrambling the brain. In fact, scrolling through the DIY decor enthusiast’s Instagram handle, Willow and Love Home, is the closest we’ve come to meditating in a week.
Having lived on rent for the past 11 years with her husband and their troupe of dogs, Srikanth is not one to settle for horrors typical of rented apartments. After convincing her landlord that a makeover was long overdue, she rolled up her sleeves and set about “painting the walls white from a dull and uninspiring yellowish cream, changing the light fixtures in the living, dining and bedroom, and the dated showers in our bathrooms.”
The living room is a mix of new, thrifted and DIY decor. Srikanth calls out a bookshelf corner that “we put together with leftover plywood from another project. The macrame lamp next to it is one of my favourite DIYs.” She scored the second-hand couch for Rs 5,000, then got the cane weaving, cushioning and upholstery redone.
Srikanth’s mantra is ‘what you can’t buy, DIY’. “My favourite DIY decor piece in the house at the moment is our dining table. I bought a second-hand dining table set about three years ago because I fell in love with those dining chairs. I changed the tiled table top to reclaimed wood planks from an old pushcart, then painted the chairs and the base of the dining table white.”
When she isn’t scouring second-hand marketplaces like GoZefo and Facebook Marketplace, Srikanth finds herself visiting Fabindia (home linens and ceramics), Ellementry, Nicobar, The Yellow Dwelling, Chumbak, Studio Coppre, Altrove, Westside Home and Freedom Tree. “I also buy plants online and my go-to stores for those are Ugaoo, Plantwagons and Happily Planted (for Bengaluru only).”
Srikanth shared her most recent DIY decor idea with us, in case you need inspiration to finally complete that project gathering dust in the back of your cupboard.
“I saw this beautiful macramé lamp online a couple of years ago but couldn’t afford it, so I decided to make one myself. I bought cotton cord and an ordinary floor lamp from Amazon (Rs 2,500) and ripped out the lampshade fabric. I knew nothing about macramé so I looked up YouTube tutorials and practiced the knots on a dowel before I started out on the lamp shade. The lamp is actually not completely finished to my satisfaction. I want to change the base to a rustic piece of wood and then paint the rest of the stand to a soft shade of white. But that’ll happen when I find that perfect piece of wood!”