Sunday, December 22nd, 2024
There are a variety of things that you should take into consideration, when decorating the interior of your home. Things such as how to combine the different elements in the rooms, when it comes to proportion, balance, contrast, rhythm, and patterns.
Creating a cohesive custom interior design for your home, shouldn’t be that difficult once you learn some of the basics.
In fact, decorating your home so that all of the various elements combine and mesh together, this to create the exact look that you’ve always wanted, can be a lot of fun. What’s listed are some proven tips, on how to turn your house into a designer home.
Taking The First Steps
What’s needed is starting from the beginning, by planning out what you want to do. The chances are good, that your current home is most likely a smorgasbord of furnishings, art, accents and accessories that you’ve amassed and collected over time.
To create that perfect designer look, you want to first consider the purpose for each room, how you want it to look, jazzed with your personal tastes, and knowing which features can or can’t be changed. Finally, what you need is to consider the budget that you have available.
Begin With The Key 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 comfortable and functional as well.
Exact 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 the pieces to scale.
A large overstuffed sofa needs an equally large end table or coffee table. Otherwise, these accents will simply disappear as the sofa will dwarf them proportionally. When considering scale, look at the other rooms in your home and look at the furniture, and see if there’s a better fit with the focal pieces you have in the other room.
The Right Balance
When creating balance, there are two ways to do so. The first is symmetrical design, where everything is perfectly balanced. With symmetrical design, there’s roughly two of everything, or the items are mirrored in the room. For instance, one chair is placed directly opposite to another that’s similar.
Although this creates balance, it can also make a room look static, along with it lacking visual interest or energy. Experienced designers use asymmetry to create this interest. Objects will then balance well, because they’re judged by their visual weight, and not pairings.
For instance, you may have a large sofa on one side of the room, that is balanced by two large overstuffed chairs with an accent table in the middle, and floor lamp behind it. These pieces balance the sofa visually, even though they aren’t equal in size or shape. The design works, because there’s balance in the asymmetrical layout of the furniture.
Finding Contrast
Imagine walking into a white room with white carpet, and all of the furniture is white as well. Pretty boring, right? Contrast helps draw the eye around a room, this through the intelligent use of color. What bold use of colors does, is creates energy while the use of muted shades in complementary tones, creates calm.
The more contrast that you create, the easier it is for the human eye to follow the intended design of the room, as it moves visually from one space to another, guided by the use of perfect color and contrast.
Developing Rhythm
Although creating contrast with the use of light and dark tones can be effective, it can also appear bland. To keep the room connected, you want to use rhythm. This means reusing specific colors, patterns, textures or themes throughout the room. Pick a few main colors, and then repeat them in different ways in your paint scheme, fabrics and accents.
Pattern And Texture
As the eye begins to move around the room, it picks up specific patterns. These are grouped together, so a blue wall should be combined with a striped piece of fabric that has the same blue on it. Patterns that don’t fit create conflict in the mind, compromising the appearance of the space.
So what you want is to pick one or two primary patterns or textures, and then vary them with the color palette that you’ve chosen for that room. What’s similar to the elements of contrast and rhythm in home decorating, is the pattern and texture.
Creating Harmony
If you’ve ever heard a group of singers sing different parts of a song in acapella, and they’re in tune as they sound amazing together, that’s what perfect harmony is. The same is true for the harmony in your home.
Different colors, different designs and different proportions, combine to create a new look that hasn’t been seen before, just as harmonized notes are created by the singers singing in perfect unison.
What the room suddenly does is looks and feels complete. It has the look that if you remove one element of it, it won’t have that same harmonic texture to it any longer. Once you’ve achieved this harmony, you’ve achieved your design goals.