The secrets of Spring

Lanzarote’s famous for its year-round mild climate, and it’s certainly lived up to it recently, with one of the warmest, driest years for ages. Yet the seasons still exist here, albeit in a much less obvious form. Here’s the way to bring springtime into your Canarian home.

Volcano craters and the clifftops of Famara are among the greenest, freshest places on Lanzarote. At this time of year you’ll find pretty wild flowers, and lots of local plants with fresh, vivid green colouring that screams springtime. The refreshing colours and shapes will inspire you at home.

Spring is the time of year to change your arrangements and room lay-out. Be bold – you can always move it back – and combine the project with a trip to buy some fresh items, which will absolutely shine out in their spanking new surroundings.

Spring is all about new growth, so now’s a brilliant time to fill your home with plants and flowers. Whether it’s poetic, tumbling ivy or glossy, in-your-face rubber plants. Springtime is also a wonderful time to invest in cut flowers, the perfect centrepiece for any room.

If you want to increase the feeling of space and light in any room, get a mirror. It’s one of the oldest magic tricks inn the interior decorator’s book, but it still has astonishing effects. On Lanzarote you may have had your windows open all winter, but a couple of mirrors will still bring light flooding in.

Spring isn’t about vivid, saturated colours – we’re looking at a subtler, more demure colour scheme that includes pale pastels and light yellows, pinks and baby blues. These colours really do need the right neutral to set them off, so look into those cool sober greys, sky blues and natural, creamy whites.

The fathers of modernism worshipped spring – T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring both celebrated the harshness and beauty of a season where everything changes, where life twists overground again. Look for exciting avant-garde shapes and ornaments to stimulate your mind.