Interior design for newbies, lazies, and everyone else
Easy steps to define a vision for your home
Here you are — moved into that much-anticipated place by yourself for the first time, or got that spacious apartment together with a friend or a loved one… but what’s next? How do you make these bleak cubed rooms feel like home?
A friend recently approached me asking if I could help decorate her apartment. She insisted that she has “no vision” and that she needs all help in the world to make her place cozier.
Well, the good news is that you have a vision. Otherwise, you would have not admitted that your space does not align with who you are and what you want it to be.
Your vision for a home you want is there, you just need a little bit of a framework to make your dream come true.
Here are a couple of simple steps to help you out:
1. Get a sheet of paper and a pencil. Or, use a tablet of choice — anything that you can sketch on.
We are now in design mode, baby. And we are going to get our hands dirty.
2. Make a mental (or written) list of the most frequent (or anticipated) actions performed in the space that you want to transform.
Is it a living room where you like to watch TV, read, and attend a remote kickboxing class on Saturday mornings? Or is it a home office where you need to feel focused? You have to define zones where you play, relax, or move. Once you know what those activities are, they will inform the kinds of furniture to place or not place in certain areas.
3. Play with different layouts
Based on the most frequent actions performed in that space, generate a variety of ideas for the layout. Perhaps you want to keep a desk near the window to look outside while you work, and perhaps you need to keep a corner of the room free of things to be able to roll out your yoga mat.
Make it intentional — assign every space a function and design around each function.
4. Now, let’s talk about the feels… Create a moodboard!
Mood…what? Oh yes, you heard it right. A native thing for designers, a moodboard is a tool to organize visual ideas around a particular topic. You can create a moodboard for virtually anything — ideas for your living room, Halloween party, vacation to Italy, or a birthday cake. The main rule is to put visual ideas together in one place to develop a common theme.
One nice free tool for creating moodboards is Milanote, so perhaps give it a chance. In addition, the king of moodboards — Pinterest — is always at your disposal.
5. The magic formula for visual aesthetics
This part might be the most challenging, but we will use a simple and effective tried-and-true principle here:
Strike a balance using color, texture, and shape.
Hopefully, putting together a moodboard has already given you some ideas of where you want to head in terms of aesthetics.
Generally, you want to determine 2–3 base colors for your room. They will be the main accents and you will coordinate the room to match those colors.
I suggest conducting a quick search about what colors go well together in an interior space. Using a color palette generator could be an excellent idea.
As for the shape, you generally want to make sure that your space has a number of different shapes.
If your couch is a rectangle, your wall art is a rectangle, and your desk is a rectangle, make sure to give the space a round coffee table and a set of round pillows to balance the shapes out.
And finally — texture! At times, your space might have too much of one metal — silver legs for a table, silver frames for the wall art, and a silver lamp. In that case, you might introduce other textures, such as wood, velvet, and wool into your space. Bring in woven baskets, fun pillows, or more plants to add texture variations. Do not be afraid to bring different textures together!
6. Last but not least — give second-hand items a try!
Instead of committing to buying expensive furniture, spend some time searching for quality second-hand items. Look around thrift stores, garage sales, and online marketplaces to get nice items for half the price. I will write more about second-hand furniture hunting in my next article.
You got it, happy decorating!
#interiordesign #decorating #interior #designprocess
