We all know how important is the environment we´re surrounded by and the space we live in. Interior decoration has a huge impact on our mood, especially when we spend a lot of the time at home, like we all did in 2020. Home is the place where we should rest, feel relaxed and comfortable. However, too many of us are not happy with the space we spend time in which is affecting our well-being and the atmosphere in the room. 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 is the fact they don´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 interior design style and to decide what your space is missing. In order to do that very easily, you will need a list of steps to follow.
Define what´s 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 textures, colours and pieces of furniture that for sure are not matching your interior design 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, below you can download our 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 office or your friend´s house. The idea here is not to 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 lifestyle. So that was your homework number 1.
FIND YOUR PERSONAL
Interior Design Style
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Inspiration at your fingertips
The next step to find your interior design 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 fashion style very feminine or does it have a masculine feeling? Add all your notes to your worksheet.
Your new best friend
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 if you still don´t have a Pinterest account, go to www.pinterest.com and open one. Then create a board called ´My Interior Design Style´. Your task now is to look for images of interior design style 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 many clothes with stripes on them and you really don´t like your marble floor. In this case you can search for ´stripy interior dining chairs´ 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 a…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.
Moodboards
Now, this is the most exciting part when it comes to defining your interior design style – creating your moodboard! Since moodboard is a very visual source of information, I will start by posting below some 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 it all easier to understand. 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!
Shopping time!
Shopping for furniture nowadays is really easy and in most cases very pleasant. First of all, you don´t even need to move from your couch because online furniture shops provide you with everything you need: furniture catalogues, prices as well as 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 fit 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, your interior design style should now be clearly defined and in this case you simply can´t go wrong with redecorating your home. 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 PERSONAL
Interior Design Style
DOWNLOAD OUR WORKSHEET
Type your name and email address below to download the worksheet.
It was a very helpful tip when you said to maximize the functions of Pinterest to find the best interior design ideas. I have a couple of themes that I would like to incorporate in my house, and I’m not sure if it’s good or not. The best way to verify this is to have it checked by qualified professionals that offer architectural peer review services.