One of television’s more flamboyant characters, Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen, is back! He’s currently tearing through the living rooms of the UK for ITV’s This Morning, ripping out interiors that have not been changed for years and introducing some clarity, light and colour to their owners’ lives.

In his new guise as ‘Laurence of Suburbia’, Jali was part of his latest cunning plan. This week he and his team provided a makeover for Diane in Gloucester. Diane, a self-confessed hoarder, felt helpless in the face of overwhelming quantities of pottery pigs, paintings and much, much more.

Laurence rode to her rescue with the help of display space provided by a Jali made-to-measure bookcase above a radiator cabinet (seen above), and another long radiator cabinet elsewhere.

He also visited local charity shops, recommending them as good sources of interesting glass and china, as well as getting down to some mural painting. As seen in the previous programme, Laurence is equally at home with a sewing machine and fabric glue. Good to see a celebrity design guru advocating thrift and DIY and then actually putting them into practice – but then again, he’s long been a fan of Jali…

Diane was obviously thrilled with the effect, as were her neighbours – even her dog approved! You can see the transformation on video here – it’s under 10 minutes long.

- Annie

With this post, we’re relaunching the Jali blog, part of our website, which aims to bring you all kinds of information, ideas and inspiration to help you make the most of the spaces where you live and work.

And let’s face it – feeling good about the place you’re in is important. Especially when times are hard, we all need a refuge from the nasty stuff life is throwing at us.

In fact, the French have a wonderful noun, ‘le cocooning’, that sums up the idea of surrounding ourselves with things that make us feel cosy and comforted as well as being stylish, a safe haven from the harshness outside.

So, here we go – this will be an opportunity for the team at Jali to explain how we can help you create furniture and interiors that will give you pleasure, and be exactly what you need to make your home somewhere special.

We’ll be posting helpful guides for all you aspiring interior designers or DIYers, as well as information on our new products and features.

We’re interested in questions such as: What makes businesses of all kinds work successfully for everyone? How do we make sustainability more than just a buzzword or a bit of ‘greenwash’?

And this blog is a chance for you to tell us what you think, pass on and share ideas of your own and generally get involved in ‘making it yours’.

Well, another soggy summer’s over and it’s time to think about what to do now. Rising energy bills and climate change mean this coming winter will be a cold and expensive one. But that doesn’t mean we have to suffer and shiver. Today we’ll be talking about how you can use smarter decorating to take the pressure off the heating bill. Here are some tips to help you design with heat efficiency in mind.

1. Get a radiator cabinet. Unless your radiator looks like these ones, odds are it’s not the attractive focus of your room. And if you haven’t already, you should definitely hide it behind one of our flagship radiator cabinets. A cabinet will turn an ugly radiator into an attractive feature but, more importantly, a well-designed cabinet will direct the heat from the radiator forward into the room, rather than just letting it bleed out into the walls and floor. Heat in the middle of the room is useful heat: there’s no point in your paying to heat up the walls. Although they say walls have ears. And no one likes having cold ears.

2. Paint it black. Black is the hottest colour, it never goes out of style. Also, it is quite literally hotter than all the other colours: black paint radiates less heat and thus will warm the radiator up quicker. “What’s the point of a radiator that radiates less heat?” I hear you cry. Well, a radiator isn’t really a radiator, is it, it’s a convector. And you’ll get much better convection if you have a greater temperature gradient between the air and the radiator, and for that you want the radiator surface to heat up as fast as possible.

The other reason, of course, for painting your radiator black is that it looks nicer as a backdrop to the stylish grille you’ve put in front of it.

3. Windows. Doubleglaze them, draw the curtains. While they may make the place look light and airy in summer, turns out having what’s effectively a lot of whacking great holes in your wall lets lots and lots of heat out. And no one wants to look outside for another six months: this is England, it’s going to be grey and it’s going to be raining. You could hide all that behind some shutters.

4. Plug the leaks: Anywhere you’ve got gaps, holes, margins or spaces is leaking away your precious warmth and costing you money. Replace any doors that aren’t quite big enough for their frames with bespoke ones that are the exact size. Make sure all your walls have skirting boards and that they all touch the ground. If you have awkwardly shaped spaces that you don’t know what to do with, we sell general purpose mdf shapes with which you can cover them up.