How to Find My Decorating Style

Do you find yourself unsure of what you think are a lot of different design styles? Is shopping for home goods more confusing than exciting? Are you worried you might not have many styles after all? Read “Find My Decorating Style” for some concrete steps and inspiration.

Find My Decorating Style – An Easy Guide

Are you wondering how to find your decorating style? With a little time and some considered thought, you will be “style savvy” before you know it.

The Basics

In order to find your own unique decorating style, it helps to discover your “interior motives.” Answer the questions below to make a start:

Did you choose the area you live in or do you have other ideas on where you’d like to be? What is that? Are you drawn to the city, the suburbs or do rural pastures call out your name?

When you drive through a neighborhood what home designs catch your eye? Traditional homes? Mediterranean or stucco homes, a casual country ranch, or is a French manner facade more to your liking?

How about a cottage-style house or maybe you are all modern with straight lines and metal or sheets of steel? Make some choices and if you take a photo of your favorite house, even better.

Let’s Go Inside

Interior Style

Have you decided on an interior style? Do you like rooms with patterned wallpaper?

Are you drawn to cabins with their caulked logs and rustic style?

Do you favor English traditional furniture with curved legs and dark cherry woods?

Or do you find yourself lingering over pictures of rooms with lots of glass and chrome?

Do you see architecture that’s interesting?

Make some notes in a journal about rooms you’ve seen that inspire you.

Design Categories

There are several major categories of room design, can you choose yours? If you pick more than one you are a current thinker because that is an eclectic style—which means a combining or blending of more than one style in an ordered way.

Write down you’re your pick and what that means to you: Traditional, Modern or Contemporary, Country or Eclectic.

Obviously, the room on the left is very fancy and very French but it would be called a “classical,” or French traditional room because the design is everlasting even though it represents a period of time.

Mood Setting

What type of setting makes you feel comfortable and happy?

For example, do you like a warm crackling fireplace and picture yourself in a chenille wingback chair with your feet on an ottoman that’s covered in a woven fabric? Are there oriental rugs on the floor?

These are traditional and time-honored classics that make you feel content.

“Ugh,” you say. You don’t care for that but want a room with minimal furniture, a clean, linear look, and a sleek modern sofa. No frilly, fringe pillows, or anything fussy, the most you would choose for comfort would be a bolster pillow.

And the floor should be cool tile or how about marble? This sounds like you are a modernist.

What if you want an airy open space but you also like casual leather club chairs and light wood furnishings like pine? Perhaps you would like the type of family room that is spacious yet with an easy, throw-your-feet-up style?

A wrought iron coffee table comes to mind. You could very well want the best of different combinations of furniture styles and tend to be eclectic in your choices.

Homework

If you’ve answered these questions and your mind has conjured up pictures, you have a better idea of what your major style category is: modern-contemporary, traditional, country, or eclectic.

Over the next few weeks look in shelter magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens, Southern Living, or even the high-end Architectural Digest.

When you come to a room you especially like, tear it out and slip it into a folder. You could also spend some time just perusing various catalogs—with those too, tear out your favorites.

After a few weeks time, pull out your files and lay out the pages. You should begin to see a pattern. Your mind has a tendency to choose the same looks or favorites without your realizing it.

Also, visit shops with room settings, go to museums, pay attention to movie sets in a film, get books from the library for different periods of time, or study sources online. All of this research will help to inform your design decisions. It takes an educated eye.

I think you are on the right track and now you can say, “I know better now how to find my decorating style.” Don’t you think so?

Resources

• Virtual Architecture’s Web Home: https://virtual-architecture.wm.edu/
• The Yale University Art Gallery: https://artgallery.yale.edu/furniture-study