How To Decorate Your Home With Interior Design…
Moving into a new home can be one of life’s great joys, but it can also be a time of uncertainty, especially when it comes to decorating. How do you make your space look its best while reflecting your personal sense of style? Do it well and you’ll end up with a comfortable, happy home. Do it poorly and you’ll end up with a hodge-podge of furniture, fabrics and paint colors that never congeal into a pleasing whole. With a little planning, and by following the same steps used by professional interior designers, you’ll have a much greater chance of success.
Don’t Start in the Furniture Store
Many have heard the advice to avoid shopping when hungry, because it leads to poor choices. The same holds true for furniture stores – don’t go shopping in a panic, just because you have an empty home. Yes, you need a sofa. But if you pick the pink-striped sectional just because you like it in the store, without taking measurements or thinking about the rest of the room, you’re stuck with it. The rest of the room will have to be built around that sofa, and if it’s too large for the space it will look forever awkward.
Start in the room you’re looking to furnish, armed with a measuring tape and a notepad.
Determine Your Style
How do you want a space to feel? Here’s a trick to help you hone in on your style: take a look at your closet. Do you prefer tailored pieces or do you prefer looser and more comfortable items? Do you gravitate toward certain colors or patterns? Another way to help you determine your style is to think of key words that define how you want a space to feel. Traditional, formal, elegant? Playful, humorous, inviting? Monochromatic, streamlined, modern?
Know Your Measurements
Matching the scale of furniture to the scale of a room is critical. A deep sectional sofa can easily overpower a small room and svelte chairs can get lost in a wide-open loft. Before you start designing, measure the length and width of each room you intend to decorate, along with the ceiling height and elements that could get in the way – stairs, columns, radiators and other obstructions. It’s also a good idea to measure window openings, along with the wall space below, above and to the sides of each one, to get ready for window coverings.
Decide How You Want to Live
This is the tricky part, and there are no right or wrong answers. Rooms can be traditional or modern, formal or relaxed, and visually warm or cool. “To the best of your ability, you have to try to discern how you would like to live in a given space,” said an advisor. “What will you be doing? How many people live there? Are there children? What are your ambitions for how you would like to live?”
The decoration of a home for someone who regularly hosts large dinner parties, for instance, should be different from a home for someone who eats out at restaurants every night. The person who plans to host lavish fundraisers should have a different living room than the person who dreams only of crashing in front of the TV.
Sample Your Paint
Paint selection is one of the most important and cost-effective decisions you can make. Proper paint choices harmoniously connect spaces. Consider the house as a whole. You risk creating disjointed rooms if you paint one room at time. Take into account how colors affect our mood. Some colors make people feel happy, calm or even agitated.
Sample actual paint colors on your walls when looking at options. Observe them in natural light, morning light and at night. Often a go-to color that worked well for one project will not work for another. What might work at your friend’s home might not work at your home. The chips at the paint store are a helpful starting point, but what looks good on paper might not translate into your interior. With white paints, try a handful of different hues on the wall and pay special attention to the undertones. They can have touches of pinks, blues or yellows. The outside surroundings strongly affect the temperature of the light. The vegetation and the sky can create reflections of greens and blues on your interior walls.
Design can be overwhelming. People often want to know where exactly to start. For any room, I usually suggest that you begin from the ground up: Decide on the floor covering. It doesn’t matter if you want or have hardwood floors, area rugs, tile, stone or wall-to-wall carpeting. Thinking about your floor first will dictate how other pieces are layered in the space. If you select a neutral tone or natural fiber without a lot of pattern or color, you have more options with colors or upholstery. If you start with an antique rug, you can draw colors from the rug to formulate a color palette. It is important to plan these things in tandem, otherwise you end up with the circus effect: too many things going on without the space as a whole functioning in unison. Starting with a sofa or upholstered chairs limits your style immediately. There is more flexibility with something like an area rug with dozens or even hundreds of possibilities. This is where you have options and can then start to layer pieces. It is a much easier approach to make your final floor covering decision first, and then layer.
Go back to your original inspirational images and study the way those rooms are accessorized. Do they mix candles, boxes, bowls and books together, or is there just one vase on a table? Is there a single artwork above the sofa, or a freeform gallery wall?
Be sure to consider your functional needs. A tray on an ottoman can contain remote controls. Throw pillows provide extra back support for deep sofas and chairs. A magazine rack can keep reading materials out of the way. Attractive baskets are ideal for tidying up children’s toys in a hurry.
These are but a few tips. To contract a professional service for home decorating, contact us at Treasure Real Estate at:
242 677 0897
We can connect you with a preferred designer.