Choosing a Look – How to Choose a Style or Look for Your Interior
Choosing a look for your home interior is an enormous and long lasting decision with too many to choose from, where do you start?
Most people have got something that will give them an idea for how they want to theme their room. It can be an existing piece of furniture or an artifact, a piece of artwork or a picture in a magazine.
If you already have an idea of what style you want to pursue, it could be nautical, french provincial, victorian, asian, then you can start researching for ideas around that look, theme or style. Using examples from books, magazines, websites, movies, TV programs you can start to collect and form ideas on how that look is achieved. You then need to decide what are the main things that make that define that theme or look.
This will be an important part of achieving that style. Focus on these areas and decide if they will fit into the space you are working in and if they do actually incorporate your taste. Sometimes the bones of the room we have to work with will not be capable of achieving the new look you desire.
As with everything in life you have to be practical and work within your parameters, unless you are able to make major structural changes.
For example, you want a modernist, minimal look with large glazed windows and you have a Spanish home with solid plastered archways funneling through your living room and over all your windows you will not be able to achieve this look without demolishing the entire house and starting again.
We advise against using completely unrelated themes or periods for different rooms in the same house. This can make your home very disjointed and upsetting on the eye, you can use different pieces of furniture or artifacts of differing periods or themes in individual rooms, and this makes helps create your individual style within your theme, but overall it is best to keep a common theme running through your home, not create a movie set with dramatic changes from room to room.
Now that we are thinking in our theme or style, we need to work out how to incorporate that look into our room.
Using the decorative colors of a period or era that your furniture derives from is a simple way to decorate to enhance the furniture and create your style in the room using paints, wallpapers, carpets and fabrics.
If you are a collectaholic and enjoy displaying your treasures, like tea pots or china plates, porcelain dolls or silver teaspoons, you can use these to create your own individual style. Simply find a suitable dresser, china cabinet, book case or wall to display your collection of treasures.
The important thing to think about here is grouping, don’t spread them all around your room, keep them all together where they can be appreciated all at once, this way, you create one focal point and not a distraction of clutter if they were all randomly placed. You can then choose a predominant color from your collection to base your decoration on.
If you have 20th Century contemporary furniture you can use it as the decoration as most pieces have wonderful sculptural form. Keep the interior simple using a white background on the walls and a simple flooring like timber is a popular way of displaying large objects therefore focusing on your designer pieces of furniture rather than your surroundings.
The fun thing about design is telling a story and by combining different periods in a room you create a journey as your eye hops from one to another wondering how this piece popped in here! This style is called eclectic, and is basically what most of us follow, we select items that we like and we pull them all together and create our own style or look which represents our lifestyle.
The most important aspect of choosing a look or style is that you have to love what you are going to do. Don’t be a sheep and be lead into following what is the current “in trend”. You and your family have to live in the space, so before you make any major decisions make sure that you are happy with the changes you are going to implement.
To sum up, don’t jump head first into the pages of a magazine and say that is where you want to be, have a good look around and make sure that how you live and what you like will fit into your new look. Now go and get creative.
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