Decorating Your Home in Style

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Creating a cohesive interior design for your home isn’t that hard if you know some basics. Decorating your home so that all the elements combine to create the look you’ve always wanted can be a lot of fun.

Following are some proven tips to help you turn your house into a designer home:

Taking the first step

As they say, let’s start at the beginning. Chances are good that your home is a mish-mash of furnishings, art, accents, and accessories collected over time. To create the perfect designer look, you first want to consider the purpose for each room, how you want it to look, your tastes, features that can and can’t be changed, and the budget you have available.

Start with the essential elements.

The success of a room’s design lies in the balance you create. The basics of good design are proportion, balance, contrast, rhythm, pattern/texture, and harmony. Knowing how these elements work together will help you design your space so that it’s not only beautiful but also comfortable and functional.

Proportion

Scale is one of the most important things to consider when creating the look of a room. A room that is proportioned correctly will feel welcoming, while an incorrectly portioned room will feel crowded and unfriendly. The trick is to match pieces in terms of their scale. A large overstuffed sofa needs an equally large end table or coffee table; otherwise, these accents disappear as the couch dwarfs them proportionally. When considering scale, look to the other rooms in your home for furniture that may better fit the focal pieces you have in your room.

Balance

When creating balance, there are two ways to go here. The first is the symmetrical design, where everything is perfectly balanced. With a symmetrical design, roughly two of everything or items are mirrored in the room. For instance, one chair is placed precisely opposite another one just like it. While this creates balance, it can also make a room look static and lack visual interest or energy. Experienced designers use asymmetry to develop this interest. Objects balance well because their visual weight, not pairings, judges them. For instance, you may have a large sofa on one side of the room balanced by two oversized ovoversizedffed chairs with an accent table in the middle and a floor lamp behind. These pieces balance the sofa visually, even though they aren’t equal in size or shape. The design works because there is balance in the asymmetrical layout of the furniture.

Contrast

Imagine walking into a white room with white carpet and white furniture. Pretty dull, huh? Contrast helps draw the eye around a room through the intelligent use of color. The bold use of colors creates energy, while muted shades in complementary tones create calm. The more contrast you make, the easier it is for the human eye to follow the intended design of the room, moving visually from one space to another, guided by the use of color and contrast.

Rhythm

While contrasting light and dark tones can be adequate, they can also create boredom. To keep the room connected, you want to use rhythm. This means reusing specific colors, patterns, textures, or themes throughout the room. Pick a couple of primary colors and repeat them differently in your paint scheme, fabrics, and accents.

Pattern & Texture

As the eye moves about a room, it picks up specific patterns. These are grouped, so a blue wall is combined with a striped piece of fabric with the same blue. Ways that don’t fit create conflict in mind, compromising the appearance of the space. Again, you want to pick one or two primary patterns or textures and vary them within the color palette you’ve already created for the room. Right alongside the elements of contrast and rhythm in home decorating is pattern/texture.

Harmony

If you’ve ever heard three singers sing different parts that sound amazing together, you already know what harmony is. The same is true for the balance in your home. Different colors, designs, and proportions combine to create a new look that was never there before, just as new notes are produced by singers singing three other parts. The room is suddenly complete. It has a look that, if you remove just one element, won’t have that harmonic feel to it any longer. When you’ve achieved harmony, you’ve reached your design goals.