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First Time Buyer: Eight starters for your attention

If you’re lucky enough to be able to get a mortgage or, even better, borrow from the ‘bank of mum and dad’, you’ll find a range of starter homes across the country, which just might tempt you into buying.

Inside House & Home

Five buyers chasing every property

There are five potential buyers chasing every property on the market as demand continues to outstrip supply, research showed today.

A-head of the game: Barbara Hulanicki's skull print

Looks good on paper: Trompes l'oeil, tartans, skulls...the return of wallpaper is complete, with subtly outrageous designs to suit all pastes

The trends that influence the way we decorate our homes may move at a less frenetic pace than those that influence our clothing but, if anything, that makes them all the more pervasive. While most of us are fairly forgiving of individuals' sartorial eccentricities (it doesn't do to be too slavishly fashionable, after all), when it comes to other people's houses there is often frighteningly little mercy in our condemnation of anything that runs against the grain of collective contemporary taste. An avocado bath suite, for example, dusty fake flowers, or co-ordinated leopard-print soft furnishings are all more or less guaranteed to elicit snooty grimaces.

Winter warmer: Need a sophisticated, yet no-fuss bloom to give your frosty garden a colourful lift? Bring on the hellebores...

It sometimes feels as though there is very little colour in my garden over the winter, though I currently have a tide of orange growing up the back fence, where some late nasturtiums suddenly decided to germinate in early September. But their tropical colour will be a thing of memory come the first frost. For real midwinter jewels, I will never do better than hellebores, which flower from around Christmas through until March.