Our home is the most important outward expression of who we are. Keeping this in mind…what does our most personal environment look like? Would our home have the look and feel of comfort and fun? Would our homes reflect our personalities?
If we want our homes to speak about us we can choose to design and decorate every corner of it. We need not hire a professional or a designer for the task. Interior design is like putting together a tricky puzzle that has dimensions, textures, colors and a ticking timer. Interior designers have to be: part artist, part architect, part psychic, part negotiator and part visionary; while also being fully flexible and creative.
Here is how you can make your house look beautiful with one’s own efforts:
1. Know Yourself Before Decorating: Before you begin a decorating project write a brief journal or answer a few questions about yourself, your likes, and preferences and select a theme that would suit your taste. Remember, rooms have no feelings, YOU do!
2. Play with Colors: Paint is the fastest way to bring a room to life. Use it like make-up, with strong colours as highlights. The biggest mistake people make is using very dark colours on walls - be careful with strong, dark reds and greens, they can kill a space. Keep walls subtle. For beginners, use the same colour throughout. It's an old trick, but it works.
3. Mix it up: Have interplay of fabrics and colours. Mix affordable cottons with wonderful silks, linens and velvets and down-filled cushions. Don’t decorate by numbers; the idea is to collect - something from France, something from London something from China, something from Vancouver, something from India.
4. What kind of Lighting: Always light the areas where you need to see…otherwise ambient lighting creates “shadowsâ€. Have lights at areas wherein you would want to highlight your décor.
5. The Real entry to your Home is Outside:
The “outside†entry is what people see first. Buy a new large mat that coordinates with your door. Have aluminium railings at the gate. Decorate the foyer with a small garden.
6. Treat yourself to Flowers: Flowers add beauty and make an area look fresh and elegant. Decorate house with different kind of flowers in different corners.
7. Your Garage can feel like an Extension to your Home. Paint, de-clutter, clean up and even hang pictures in your garage. Definitely keep it clean.
8. Give your Child a Tidy Room: If you struggle to keep a child’s room tidy, provide a place for everything they will learn to put things away. Decorative storage pieces and space under beds can be used as storage bins. Install ready-made units to organize the closet that will grow with the child’s needs.
9. Splurge on one thing and work around it: Everything doesn’t have to be expensive. Just buy one thing that is very special to you and decorate from there. Make it the focus of the room and add pieces that blend or contrast but not detract.
10. Refresh not Rephrase: To replace what we have in our home can be expensive so just “refreshâ€. Refresh means use it differently. Refresh is to move something in the same room or to another room, eliminate something, use it differently, and rearrange your accessories or wall art.
The best interiors are often done on a shoestring budget - it's a matter of paint, proper lighting, a few decent pieces of furniture, some elbow grease and imagination. Develop your sense of what looks good and learn to recognize quality in any price range.
