If you’ve ever looked around a show home at a new development, you’ll know that the interior designers who style them have some very clever ways of making a home look great.

So what are their secrets? How can you make your own home look like the ones on display?

It’s simpler than you might think.

One of the most basic rules is that spaces must never seem crowded.

In show homes you’ll always find that dining room tables have plenty of space around them, sofas are slightly pulled away from the walls, and furniture isn’t placed in a place that makes it difficult to open doors or walk around.

Don't crowd furniture in: the Luxy leather sofa from Danetti

This is something that most of us don’t stick to in real life. If our dining room is too small we simply push the table up against the wall and expect guests to squeeze themselves into their chairs! It’s not a good look.

A second trick that interior designers employ is planning out rooms using harmonious colours.

Of course, they don’t simply make all the rooms look the same, rather they use a limited palette of colours that all work well together and style the whole house or apartment using these colours.

For example, you may have a living room that’s grey, lime green and cream, and the bedroom may be silver, grey and a lighter shade of green. What it means is that as you move around the property you get a sense of harmony, and the space merges into one.

Perhaps the oldest trick in the interior design book is to use mirrors to make rooms look bigger. It’s not just a case of hanging mirrors everywhere though. Position them in places where they’ll reflect something attractive – perhaps a window or a plant. A mirror reflecting your kitchen bin, for instance, isn’t going to give you the show home effect!

If you look carefully at show homes then you’ll find that appliances are often just for affect – they’re not usually plugged in. This is because tangles of cables look messy. Although you have to have your appliances plugged in at home, try concealing the cables by running them down the back of storage units, or putting them in a cable tidy.

Last but not least, show home designers will always set the scene – they don’t leave spaces looking bare and minimalist, but will have strategically placed objects showing how somebody can live in the property – crockery on the table, notebooks on the desk and customised art-work on the walls. You can make the same policy work for you by making sure that you have accessories that you can leave out, even when you’ve cleared away the more functional items you use every day.

Set the scene: the galaxy extending table from Danetti

Do you have any other bright ideas that you’ve spotted in show homes? We’d love to hear them.