What size vase should I get for my space?

I've been doing styling and interior design in one form or another since I was a kid, helping my parents style our own home long before I knew that was a job. Later I worked in window displays in London, and after that in visual merchandising in stores, before starting North Home just over seven years ago.

When someone asks me "what size vase should I get?", my honest answer is always the same: that's not really the question you're asking.

It's not about the size, it's about the confidence

Almost every customer I speak to who's hesitating over a vase isn't actually unsure whether they love it. They know they love it, that's why they picked it up in the first place. What they're unsure about is whether anyone else will. It's peer pressure, dressed up as indecision about dimensions. "Will this look right?" usually means "will other people think this looks right?"

It's that fear, not a lack of a tape measure, that actually causes sizing and colour mistakes. It almost always pushes people in the same direction: too small and too lifeless. I'd say 99% of people who get the size wrong go smaller than they should, because in their head the space feels smaller than it really is. You picture the shelf, the corner, the console table as more crowded and more precious than it actually is, so you reach for the safe, modest option. Then you get it home and the room swallows it whole.

I had a customer with exactly this problem, a shelf unit that was both deep and quite high. They'd chosen a small vase for it, and the depth of the shelf just ate the vase alive. It wasn't a bad vase. It was the right vase for a different shelf. That's the story I come back to most often, because it captures the actual issue: it's rarely about the vase in isolation, it's about the vase in relation to the specific depth, height and weight of the space around it.

Why I don't give you a rule

People want a formula. Height should be a third of the shelf, or two-thirds of the table, or whatever. I don't work that way, and honestly I don't think it works that way. What I actually ask, every single time, is: where in the room is this going? Which room is it? What does that room need to do: is it a space for relaxing, working, entertaining? And what are you actually trying to achieve with the styling: do you want it to calm the space down, or give it a bit of drama?

Those questions matter more than any ratio, because the same vase that's perfect on a deep, high shelf would be completely wrong on a narrow console table by the front door. So if a customer is trying to picture this from home, the best thing they can do is bring me a photo of the space. Then we can talk about roughly what scale we're dealing with, and I'll often suggest they take a piece home to sit it in the space and live with it for a day or two before deciding. You genuinely cannot always tell from a listing photo. You can tell in the room.

A shelf full of triangles

One of my favourite projects was a coworking space — a bar-like meeting room with shelving that wasn't simple straight lines at all. It was a real mix of geometric niches: triangles, rectangles, squares, all different depths and heights in the same run of shelving. Getting that right meant treating every niche as its own small decision rather than applying one idea to the whole wall. Some spots called for bold, contrasting pieces with real presence: strong colour, strong shape, something that could hold its own in an odd triangular slot. Others needed something quieter and smaller, almost a full stop between the louder pieces. That project is the clearest example I can give of why there's no single "correct size"; there's only the correct size for that exact niche, that exact moment in the run of shelving.

Go bolder than you think

If I only get to give one piece of advice, it's this: buy bigger and more colourful than feels comfortable. Not recklessly bigger, but push past your instinct, because your instinct is almost always too cautious. And the thing that makes this easy to say is that it isn't a one-way decision. If you bring something home and it genuinely doesn't work, you can bring it back. We can help you swap it for a different size, or work out what else needs to change around it. Sizing a room is rarely solved by returning a vase and trying again with nothing else different. Oftentimes the vase is right and it's something else nearby that needs to shift.

A vase has to earn its place twice

Something I care about that doesn't get talked about enough: a vase isn't just a decorative object, it's also meant to be useful. It doesn't have to be of course but it is right to consider it as something you'll be putting something in rather than just an object of beauty in its own right.

Part of choosing the right one is thinking about what you might actually put in it. Do you buy fresh flowers regularly, are you more of a dried-flower household, or do you lean on good faux stems? That changes what vase actually works, because the scale and shape of a real bouquet behaves completely differently to a single dried branch. And then there's what goes around it: books underneath to lift the height, smaller objects placed near it, different textures nearby so it doesn't sit alone and isolated.

The vase is rarely the whole styling moment. It's the anchor for one.

For something that needs real floor presence, I'd point people toward our HKLIVING Earthenware Floor Vase in Pale Mint — it's a genuinely large, floor-standing piece, and it's a good test of the "go bigger" instinct because most people's first reaction is that it's too big for their corner. It rarely is. For a shelf or console that can take real scale and a bit of sculptural drama, the Nienke Sikkema Gemstone Amphora Vase is deliberately oversized: it's built at what the designer calls "a generous scale" on purpose, in both Crystal Clear and Green. And for that kind of bold, contrasting piece I mentioned in the coworking project, the House Doctor Waves Large Statement Vase in antique metallic is exactly the sort of thing that can hold its own in an awkward or oversized niche.

Before you buy anything, look at what you already own

This is the bit people forget most. You don't always need something new. Most homes already have pieces that have been sitting in the same spot for years, simply because nobody thought to move them. Sometimes the entire fix is rearranging what you've already got — swapping a vase from the console table to the shelf, moving books around it, giving an old piece a new spot where it actually gets to shine. Then, once you've done that, bring in one or two new pieces to complement the new arrangement or push it in a fresh direction. You'll get a completely different room without needing to replace everything in it.

If you're still not sure

You can find our current range here and if you're still not sure, honestly, that's fine. This is genuinely hard to judge from home, and I'd rather you ask than guess and end up with something sitting in a cupboard. Book a styling consultation with us and we'll go through your space properly, bring photos, bring measurements, bring whatever you've got, and work out what's actually going to fit, both in the room and with what you already own. The goal isn't for me to tell you what to buy. It's for you to leave with the confidence to make the call yourself, in this space and the next one.