Three Essential Starting Points When Creating Your Ideal Home Decor.

Three Essential Starting Points When Creating Your Ideal Home Decor.

By Diane M. Hoffmann, I.S.R.P.
(International Staging & Redesign Professional from QC Design School)

Have you ever been in some places where, even though there were nice furniture and accessories in the room, it just didn't feel right? That's because it lacked balance or harmony somewhere between the colors, patterns and textures.

Missing out on any one, some or all three of these essentials will throw off a whole room and even a whole home. Not only do you need to pay attention to these details within one room, but you need to care about it from room to room throughout the house also.

For example, if you can see the dining room from the living room, you should see a harmony and balance between the two rooms – like the flooring color and pattern, the color of the walls and accessories, the furniture, etc.

There has to be some common elements carrying throughout as you look and walk from one room to another.

The three essential starting points are

1. Color
2. Patterns
3. Textures.

Color:

When planning your home décor, consider color carefully. This is the first thing that will either make or break your harmony and balance. Harmony and balance not only of the colors themselves throughout your home, but of the feeling it will cast on your emotions.

For example decide what color scheme you will have – warm, cool, complementary, split-complementary, adjacent, triadic, monochromatic… then harmonize this throughout your home. You might want to do one room in a warm color and another in a cool color, so you would chose a scheme that will give you that capacity to work it together. Example: red is warm, blue is cool. By working with the above-named schemes you can blend these beautifully. (I have a post that can help you on this at my web site http://homestaginganddesign.blogspot.com.

Patterns:

The same idea is worked within the patterns of your furniture and drapes or curtains throughout your house. Patterns will also follow a scheme or sense of warm and cool with the addition of styles such as contemporary, country, tradition, etc. So again chose carefully, planning first what style you want to live with. Here too, you can have one room in traditional and another contemporary, but the transition will have to work together from the one room to the other.

For instance, you might have furniture with large flowers. Don't use large flowers in your accent cushions; instead, use a geometric pattern of the same colors or complementary accent color... or tiny complementary flowers -- same with your drapes, etc.  You can pick up a lot of ideas in decorating magazines by watching for that balance in photos.

Textures:

Here again, textures have the same effect and require the same care and attention to details. Here, you are looking for the effect of the texture. For example you cannot have a heavy tweed in a fine traditional setting of brocade and silk. You may want to make a boy’s room more masculine than a girl’s, so you will have to transition the textures so that going from one room to the other will be a pleasant experience.

In this case, rather than going from one extreme feminine to another extreme masculine, you might want to use a middle point between the two rooms and carry some aspect of the three points from one room to the other to tie them together. Now if you have one room in the basement and another upstairs, then you don’t have to be concerned about tying the two together.

So the key is to be aware of these 3 points and look for ideas as you plan what you want to achieve. And then, develop and build from there one upon the other./dmh


Article copyright(c) by Diane M. Hoffmann. You may re-print this article without any changes, making sure to include the following bio:

Diane M. Hoffmann, I.S.R.P., is owner/manager of Hoffmann-Rondeau Communications and the blog http://homestaginganddesign.blogspot.com . She holds a diploma in interior decorating and a certificate on home staging and re-design.


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