Inside Eliza’s Beautifully Cluttered Edinburgh Home

In her home in Edinburgh, Eliza Perdu’s brought a sense of life from the Shetland Islands; a kind of carefree, childlike playfulness, and the feeling that all your neighbours are friends or family, always up for sharing a good dinner or sitting together in the garden as the sun goes down.

Being restrained or precious about what ends up in her space — that’s just not Eliza.

What she does know is how to make a rented flat feel anything but temporary, and instead give it a warm sense of connection across time and cultures.

She’ll tell you all about it herself.

In Their Own Words: Eliza on Making a Rental Space Feel Like Home

I’m from the Shetland Islands. I moved to Edinburgh to study, and it was the best thing I ever did. We live on the top floor of an Edinburgh tenement flat with my boyfriend Lewis.

When I walk into the flat, I get this nostalgia for something I’ve never really had. It reminds me of my childhood home and how I used to decorate.

I’ve been living here for about a year. I met a girl on Facebook — a nice Spanish girl — and we loved living with her. When she moved out, I moved my boyfriend in.

It didn’t feel like home straight away. It came after about a month. After I got to know my flatmate more and how we could decorate together so it still felt like her space too.

My boyfriend and I have been together here for about three months. We’ve done a lot of decorating in that time. It was quite last-minute finding the flat, but it felt like a godsend.

As soon as I walked in and saw how tall the ceilings are, I was like: this is perfect. I’m so tall as well. The wide, big ceilings are probably my favourite thing about this flat.

I’ve lived in student flats before — so small and cramped — with like six other people. This feels more grown-up. It’s my first time living with a partner, just me and him, so it feels very adult.

The first way I made this place my own was definitely the plants. I have to have plants everywhere. I need them to be in here to breathe — it feels so suffocating without plants in a room.

The hallway is the darkest place in the flat. It doesn’t bother me much. The only thing is I can’t put plants there because they’ll die (but I do have a spider plant that likes not being in the sun).

The second way I made this flat my own was big splashes of colour. I just try to make it look really inviting. I want it to feel like a really happy place to walk into.

Me and my boyfriend, we go on a lot of walks together. If we see something and we love it, we’re like: we need to take it home. We rip posters off walls and take them home to put up.

There’s really no rule to this kind of madness. You see it, you like it, you grab it, and then you put it up.

My favourite object in the whole flat is the antique desk. People nearby were moving out and getting rid of things they couldn’t take, and we thought: perfect. We dragged it up in three separate pieces — a lot of sweat and tears — but it was so worth it.

We’re going to keep it forever. Pass it down to kids, grandkids, whoever. It’s just beautiful.

I took a lot of decorations from my parents’ garage. I wanted a little something from Shetland because I’m from there, and some stuff from France because my dad is French. It’s a mix of cultures for sure.

Some of the decorations are Spanish language-based. That’s from my old flatmate, and I liked them so much I kept them up. It reminds me of her, and I kind of miss her.

The first thing I put on the wall was my big skeleton poster. It’s a bit morbid, but it really got me through some tough times when I was living away from home in Canada. It grounded me. I remember putting it up here and being like: this is my flat.

My room is exactly what I like. I love old-looking things: vintage-y things, antiques. Anything that looks like it was well made. Sometimes you see things in shops now and it doesn’t last — it wasn’t made to last.

In Edinburgh, when antique places close down, they’ll have really cheap sales. That’s what I keep my eye out for. Posters, stickers, antique things — whatever.

A lot of posters are literally ripped off walls. The Pink Floyd poster is one of them — walking past a bar, taking it home. It feels a bit street-like, like party places and pubs.

If you walked into my flat, you’d see a lot of books. I love looking for books, especially in charity shops where they’re like £2.

Physical books are more special to me. A lot have been handed down to me from parents or grandparents. Kindle feels like you’re holding electricity — there’s no turning of a page, no smell. It’s a different experience.

I like to go outside and cut plants as well. I bring them in and decorate with them. Even sticks — I bring sticks from Shetland beaches and attach beads to them just for fun.

I wanted the space to feel like a collected culture vibe. Some things from Thailand, some Spanish, some French, Egyptian. My mum went to Egypt and brought me back little Egyptian head statues.

You’ll see a lot of bottles as well. We keep them to melt big wax candles over them and give them a spooky vibe. I like a bit of gothness too — you can’t really tell with the colour, but it’s there.

The bathroom is my favourite place in the flat. It’s the most decorated one. The club vibe comes from when we used to go out together more. It reminds us of when we were first getting together — the fun, the freedom, the vibrancy. That’s why we like decorating the bathroom like a club.

I don’t want any white walls in that bathroom. I feel like we can do a bit more of whatever we like in there because it’s just the bathroom.

The bathroom stickers are from holidays. We got them in Budapest and Amsterdam. We’d be walking around like: oh, that one’s cool — let’s take it back — and that’s how the sticker collection grew.

We have eucalyptus in the bathroom. I went to a yoga session and the lady said it’s amazing for aromatherapy in the bathroom. I have a dinosaur theme in there, and eucalyptus looks like dinosaur food — perfect.

There was a time when we had an actual tree lying in our flat. Within the first week, I went to the park, found a broken tree after a storm, dragged it home, took it up the stairs, and kept it in the hallway for a while. It was so cool — until it rotted away.

The layout of my flat starts off a bit French. The toilet and the shower are separate, and I love that, especially living as a two. There are two bedrooms, one quite big living room, the biggest I’ve ever lived in, a wee kitchen that’s perfect for two, and a nice hallway.

We have a secret garden. Nobody really knew about it, so I was going around telling the neighbours to come down.

Now we’ve got a nice little table in the garden. You can have a cigarette there, have your breakfast — it’s really, really nice. I like to read down there too.