This month's home and garden indea comes from the wonderful new book by Mark and Sally Bailey Restoration Home, and focuses on display:

The principles of recycling go hand in hand with collecting and consequently display. Seeing the beauty and potential in an abandoned object, rescuing it and taking it home can become a habit, and before you know it you have a collection.

If you love something enough to preserve it then you’re bound to want to show it off, so consider display options. Look for a link – materials, color or items from the same place or time.

Display in the recycled home shouldn’t cost lots of money – it isn’t necessarily about spending thousands on a fancy cabinet or a painting that matches your cushions. A haphazard mix of items built up over years of trawling through markets, travelling or beachcombing is much more interesting, because it is personal. The objects you’ve collected remind you of past adventures and have a story to tell. Displaced from their original surroundings, this story becomes all the more poignant.

Displays work best when a little bit of thought has gone into them. An odd mixture of objects, from delicate pottery to chipped and chunky print blocks to an old cycle helmet, can work wonders together if they are grouped according to color. The same goes for objects made of similar materials – scraps of driftwood mixed with balls of string and wooden beads make an eye-catching and harmonious display. Rusty-round-the-edges shop signs or ex-marketing display items such as an extra-large shoe last, huge pencil or child-sized spoon and fork give a display an extra twist. A weird object thrown into the mix makes you look twice and appreciate the display even more.

Treasures picked up while travelling in foreign climes, such as ethnic-looking pottery, woven hats, pebbles or shells look great displayed in small gangs, maybe with a group for each holiday if you have the space. If travel is your thing, a mixed-up arrangement of old globes perched on a shelf can help you decide on your next destination. Old maps no longer showing the right routes or long-sent postcards look good patchworked over the door of an ugly fridge, or you could paper an entire wall with them.

Think about what you display your objects in or on. Smaller things, maybe abandoned strips of pearly buttons, tape measures or old needles still in their packets rescued from a closed-down haberdashery, look good housed in old glass jars lined up along a shelf.