Decorating your home provides you with the creative freedom to turn your space into a refuge that is uniquely you. To make it easier, we have compiled 10 interior design tips that will help you set the mood.
1. Use your travel experiences to help you determine what you want your space to look like.
The next time you travel, look around when you fall in love with a hotel, a restaurant or any other venue. Jot down some notes about the feeling the space gave you. Look at what colors they used, how they layered the light with recessed lighting options, accent lamps and tape lighting. Also, think about how the style of the space might be defined.
Pro Interior Design Tip: Hotels are a gold mine for interior design inspiration. They typically use texture, color, and rugs to help define sleeping spaces from living spaces. They also think about the small details that add character to a space, like how to layer light for the best ambiance.
2. Look at interior design images through Pinterest, an Instagram hashtag, a magazine, a Facebook group, or a google image search and identify things that you both love and hate.
Social media is dynamic, which makes it a great place to find on-trend interior design inspiration. Follow designers you love, stores that jive with your style (IG: @homeclickdesigns), or bloggers whose interior spaces make you happy.
While looking through these visual resources, try to pay attention to what you lean towards. You can create a Pinterest board or a file on your phone to store the images you love the most. After you have collected enough images, look through them to identify similarities. This is a great way to narrow down your style.
3. Hang out in your closet and explore your favorite pieces of clothing.
One of the best interior design tips we have ever heard is to remain up to date with the fashion industry. Believe it or not, interior design trends tend to follow fashion trends. Therefore, your closet is the best resource for interior design inspiration.
Take a few minutes to look through your closet and note what your favorite pieces are. This is a great way to determine what colors you already lean towards and to get a sense of what styles you truly love and feel most comfortable surrounding yourself with.
Some questions to ask yourself include:
- Are the pieces you favor classic and timeless?
- Are they trendy?
- Are they comfortable?
These answers will give you a good sense for how you should design your home.
4. Do you feel best with less around you or with more around you?
If clutter makes you feel overwhelmed or stressed, then a more minimalistic style like Scandinavian design or other clean lined modern touches may suit you best. On the other hand, if you love to collect things like antiques or art, then a more transitional, traditional or even boho style may be right up your alley.
5. Think about how you want your space to function.
Deciding how a room functions is one of the most important interior design tips we can provide you. Form should always follow function, because no matter what, you need to be able to use the space you’re designing. A great way to determine the function of a room is to have each member in your house describe how they use the space.
Here are the things you’ll want to think about:
- How is the room currently used?
- How should the space function moving forward?
- Who uses the space?
- What should the space have in it?
- What needs to leave the space in order to achieve the right function?
These answers will give you a good sense for how you should design your home.
6. Identify the size and lighting of the space you live in.
This interior design tip is all about measuring and observing the room. First, you’ll want to record the length, the width and the height of the ceilings in both inches and feet. This will help you start to work through the scale of the furniture you purchase for the room, as well provide you with the information you need for other big purchases like flooring or rugs.
Then, you’ll want to pay attention to the light in the room throughout the day. Note when you get the most sunlight and where that sunlight hits the walls within the room. This will help you make decisions about seating arrangements, the television placement etc. It will also help you decide on paint colors, because light can alter the color of the paint quite a bit.
Finally, it can be a huge help with determining the kind of lighting you would need in the room. A perfectly placed floor lamp in the right size might help even out the height of a piece of art on the other side of the wall. Or, a table lamp might add the right amount of light to a reading corner.
7. Consider color options
To give yourself a starting point, you can use your favorite color or pick a color from a painting that you want to use in your space.
Pro Tip: When applying color, use the 60-30-10 rule. With this rule, you use three colors and apply percentages to them. The dominant shade, usually a neutral, would be used 60% of the time in your space. Your secondary color would take up 30%, while your third color, typically being the boldest, would take up 10% of the space.
8. Build out a plan before you start purchasing items.
Having a plan is helpful, so that you don’t purchase one-off items that may not work in the space. It doesn’t have to take a long time to put together, either. In fact, if you have followed the steps above, your plan is almost ready! Here are the final steps for putting it together:
- Step 1: Draw your space on some graph paper and use your measurements for scale.
- Step 2: Label each wall with the direction it faces (North, East, South, West).
- Step 3: Include features like windows, half walls, doorways or anything else that will need to be worked into the plan. Make sure you note where the electrical outlets, light switches and vents are.
- Step 4: Make some copies of the floorplan, so you can play around with the design without messing up the originals.
9. Start your room design by thinking about your flooring, paint colors and finishes, then layer in furniture and decor items
When you begin to play with your overall design, start with your visual inspiration and what you have learned about your likes and dislikes. Use that information to narrow down color and finish options. Once you have a few choices, you can go to the hardware store and bring home some samples. Use what you know about your natural light in the room to see what the samples look like throughout the day and decide what colors you can easily live with.
From there, you can start to plan out the scale of the furniture and what pieces you might need to make the room work the way you want it to. Use the sketches from above to start sketching out different designs, so that you can decide what would work best in the room.
10. Once all is said and done, does the plan you put together make you smile? If so, then you know you have hit the right tone.
Once you are happy, you can use the stylistic choices from above to start your shopping experience. Homeclick.com is a great place to start! Our knowledgeable customer care team can help you with any questions you might have about our products. Give us a call at 866-603-5014