Style
Find Your Personal Decor Style
May
We all know how important the space we live in is. Interior decoration has a huge impact on our mood, especially when you spend a lot of the time at home. Home is the place where we should rest, feel relaxed and comfortable. However, too many of us are not happy with the space we live in which is affecting our well-being and home atmosphere. While working as an interior designer I found out that many people simply need a bit of help of professionals to change and improve their home interior. One of the biggest problems of my clients was the fact they didn´t know what they like, what they will feel good in and what their personal style is when it comes to interior décor. But let´s face it: not everyone can afford services of interior designers and to be honest with you, not everyone needs it… Sometimes you just need a bit of research to find out your style and to decide what your interior is missing. In order to do that very easily, you will need a list of steps to follow.
Definitely NOT your style
Since you´re not exactly sure what you like, it´s good to start with a list of things you´re sure you don´t like. Think of any colours, textures and pieces of furniture that are definitely not your style. This will eliminate at least some of the available options. Start with looking around your house and take notes of everything that you´re not happy with and write down the reason why you don´t like it. To make it easier and more organized, you can download this worksheet with all the questions you need to ask yourself. This will help you to keep a record of all your notes which you will then use to find patterns in your research. Answer questions in the worksheet and see if there are any repetitive items, colours or textures that you don´t like. Take some time for this task, start with your own house and later move on to any interior, for example your friend´s house. The idea here is not throw away everything that you currently don´t like in your house but to think what exactly is wrong with it and how can it be improved to suit your style. So that was your homework number 1.
FIND YOUR DECOR STYLE
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Where does inspiration come from?
The next step to find your decoration style is going back to your wardrobe. If you feel good wearing it, you will feel good having it around you. Start with taking a look at your favourite pieces and discard the ´maybe one day I will wear it´ items. You will easily see the colour palette that you prefer. For example in my case I see immediately black, beige, white, navy with pops of colour like mustard yellow and turquoise. Are there any patterns that you see repetitively in your wardrobes? Which textures do you wear? Is your style very feminine or has a masculine feeling? Add all your notes to your worksheet.
Your new best friend Pinterest
In order to expand your research, it´s a good idea to look for more ideas and inspirations online and Pinterest is a great tool for that. Many people consider Pinterest as another social media platform but in fact it is a great search engine, just like Google, but visual. And let me tell you something, EVERY interior designer I have ever worked with uses Pinterest for their research and it always does a great job. So another homework for you is to create an account on Pinterest (if you´re not there already) and creat a board called ´My Décor Style´. Your task now is to look for images of interiors that you find inspiring. However, instead of scrolling through Pinterest without a plan and pinning every single lovely image, you need to use your notes from the previous research you´ve done. Look at the colours, textures and patterns that you liked on your clothes and look for pieces of furniture with similar features. Go back to the list of items that you don´t like in your house and before pinning an image, make sure that it agrees with what you´ve discovered before. For example, you realised you have a few clothes with stripes on them and you really don´t like your marble floor. In this case you can search for ´stripy dining chairs interior´ and ´wooden floor living room´. Try to really spend some time on it, pin the images carefully and keep looking at your notes. After your board has at least 30 pins, take a look at it and see if all the images are matching and looking good with each other. You should notice that your Pinterest board has some consistency, has a feeling and some…STYLE. At this stage of your research, go back to your worksheet and try to answer the questions in the bottom section. And remember, even if most of the images you saved on your board are of living rooms, you can still use them as an inspiration for a bedroom, kitchen etc.
Stay in the mood
Now, this is the most exciting part – creating your moodboard! Since moodboard is a very visual source of information, I will start by posting below a couple of examples of moodboards:
As you can see, there is very little (or sometimes none) text on the moodboards. The images that you select should be doing the talk, but feel free to add some bullet points if you want to make all clearer. As the name says, your board should illustrate MOOD and STYLE of a space. It´s always good to add a concept image showing a general feeling of a room and then make a selection of individual pieces to match it and complement it. You can create moodboards for each of the rooms or keep it more general – one moodboard for your whole apartment or house. In my opinion the last one will show more of what kind of feeling you look for in your space and the more detailed moodboards will be more helpful when it comes to shopping. And that´s our next step!
The pleasure of shopping
Shopping for furniture nowadays is really easy and in most cases very pleasant. First of all, you don´t even need to move from the sofa because online furniture shops provide you with everything you need: furniture catalogues, prices, delivery and return service. Furniture web shops give you the comfort of searching for hours and hours in order to find the perfect items for your home. And that´s without going anywhere! You can easily add items to your wishlist and come back to them later. Since you´re shopping from home, it´s always a good idea to measure your space and check if the furniture you´re planning to buy fits in your room the way you want it to fit. A good online shop always provides their customers with dimensions and materials of the product.
With all the research you´ve done, your moodboard and all the information provided by online shops, you simply can´t go wrong. Probably some of you will still hesitate between choosing a model of your dining chair or the perfect side table, but that is normal. There will always be more than one model that we like and that will suit perfectly to our interior. We just need to commit to something – sometimes there is just no wrong or right, it´s only a matter of our personal taste. And hey, who said if you buy electric blue chairs this year, you can´t swap them to a white linen ones in a year or two? We all know that ´fashion changes but style endures´.
FIND YOUR DECOR STYLE
DOWNLOAD OUR WORKSHEET
Type your email address below to download the worksheet.
