Welcome to Spacelo: What We Explore and What’s Coming

Spacelo started with a fairly simple idea: there’s always something you can do to make the space around you work a little better. That might mean finding a plant that will actually survive in the corner of your living room. It could be working out how to fit a desk into a small bedroom without making the whole room feel like an office. Or maybe it’s figuring out whether a smart home device will genuinely make life easier — rather than becoming another app you forget you have. Those kinds of questions are what we want to explore here. Spacelo brings together ideas, practical advice and tools across three main areas: GrowHaus, Space Lab and Smart Living. They each look at the home from a different angle, but ultimately they’re interested in the same thing: making the spaces we have more useful, comfortable and enjoyable to live in. Some of the ideas you'll find here are particularly useful when space is limited, but Spacelo isn't just about small-space living. The same thinking can be applied to a larger room, garden or whole house. Whether you're trying to make more of a compact flat or simply make a bigger home work better, it's about using what you have in a way that suits you. And you definitely don't need a perfect home, perfect garden or unlimited budget to get something from it.

Not everyone has a garden. Some of us are working with a balcony, a windowsill or that one suspiciously sunny corner of the kitchen. GrowHaus is where we explore what you can grow with the space you actually have. That includes growing herbs, vegetables and fruit, choosing indoor plants for different rooms, making better use of balconies and compact gardens, and figuring out how to keep everything alive once you've brought it home. We'll also look at the less glamorous side of plant ownership: yellow leaves, watering mistakes, repotting, pests and the occasional plant that seems determined not to cooperate. Alongside the articles, the Plant Finder helps match plants to your space and preferences. Instead of starting with a plant and hoping your home suits it, you can start with the conditions you have and see what could work.

A room doesn't necessarily need to be bigger to work better. Space Lab looks at how we use the space inside our homes — from storage and organisation to home offices, layouts and more experimental ideas about how homes could work in the future. We're particularly interested in spaces that have to do more than one job. A spare bedroom might also be an office. A living room might need somewhere to work, exercise and relax. And sometimes the challenge is simply figuring out what to do with an awkward corner that seems to serve no purpose whatsoever. We'll explore practical solutions as well as interesting products, design ideas and new concepts that could change the way we use our homes. The Room Layout Planner is one way we're turning that thinking into something practical. It lets you build out the shape and measurements of a room, add its features and start understanding the space you're actually working with before making changes.

There are plenty of things that can technically make a home “smart”. Whether they actually make life better is another question. Smart Living is where we'll look at connected devices, automation, useful household products, home comfort and the routines that make everyday life run a little more smoothly. That could mean smart lighting or heating, but it could just as easily mean finding a simple product that solves an annoying household problem. We'll also look at energy use. The Energy Saver tool is designed to help you think about where energy is being used around your home and identify practical areas where you may be able to reduce it. The aim across Smart Living is simple: if something adds complexity without adding much value, we're allowed to question whether it's really that smart.

Articles are an important part of Spacelo, but we don't want the site to be somewhere you only come to read something and leave. That's why we're building practical tools alongside the content. The Plant Finder, Room Layout Planner and Energy Saver are the starting point. Over time, we'd like to develop more tools that help turn an idea or a question into something you can actually use. If you create a free Spacelo account, you can also save useful articles and keep some of your tool information together in My Spacelo, making it easier to return to things later. We're still building, and that's part of the fun.

Spacelo is starting with three different ways of looking at the home, but there's plenty of room for those ideas to grow. Have a look around. Try one of the tools. Save something useful for later. Or join the newsletter if you'd like to see what we add next. And if you have an idea, expertise or something interesting that you think belongs on Spacelo, we'd like to hear about that too. We'll talk more about collaborations and contributing to Spacelo in a separate Inside Spacelo article. For now, welcome to Spacelo. Let's see what we can do with the space we've got.