Finding Your Style: Getting Started

Last week, I discussed how my style has grown more defined as the years have passed. This week, we’ll focus on you, and how to refine your interior style to suit your personality.

But where to start?

Many of my friends are purchasing their first homes, and they know how they want their rooms to feel – warm, traditional and welcoming; industrial mixed with modern; the cool Belgian look popularized by Axel Vervoordt before being mutated and spread like a virus by… well, I won’t name names. Figuring out how to achieve what they want is an entirely different matter.

My advice: look at what you have, and think about the things you will never get rid of, whether it’s that funny squirrel-shaped candy dish from your great aunt, or the trio of prints you bought from 20x200. Do those things have a common thread? Are they all quirky, or mid-century kitsch? Be sure to pay careful attention to your art and accessories: are there common colors that run through the them? Do they contain lots of oranges, reds, and yellows? Or a mix of cool blues and greens? Or both?

When deciding the colors for my home, I looked to the art I collect (most of which is in a storage unit, because a small house=small walls). The main colors I saw were blues and oranges, so those are the colors I ran with.

I considered a blue sofa, like the Chesterfield stunner below, but when my sister, mother and I went to pick out the fabric for my custom sofa, we realized that the blue velvets made me appear tired, to be charitable. While standing in front of an orange fabric, however, I looked great! My inherited under-eye circles practically disappeared! And what good is a beautiful living room if you don’t look your best in it?

Next, find images of spaces you would want to live in, be it a cozy cottage aesthetic full of quilts and antiques tables, or a modern loft with concrete floors and leather furniture.  No matter the style, the image should sing to you, hold your attention, and emotionally transport you to a place where you feel at home.

Find a place to keep those pictures: for bazillions of women, that’s Pinterest, and it’s a wonderful resource, as I’m currently discovering. For my mom, it’s a pretty blue linen box from The Container Store. I’m rather old-school, so I have a collection of Moleskine’s A3 Sketchbooks on my bookshelves; the interior pocket on the back is a great place to collect images culled from magazines and swatches of fabric before I affix them to the pages, which usually occurs a few times each year in a blitz of archival double-stick tape and lots of iced tea.

The point is to find an organizational method that works for you and how you live. If you mostly find images on your phone while browsing Houzz or Pinterest, then use those resources. If you love to curl up with a stack of glossy magazines, then use the pages for your references; once you’ve collected what you love, you can jettison the magazines: hoarding is never a sign of good design.

Once you have the images, annotate them: write down what you love about the image: the light fixture over the kitchen island? The pattern of tile in the backsplash? The appearance of the cork flooring? In Pinterest, you can do this using the space they provide for notes when you’ve pinned an image to your board. In a sketchbook you can do it with a black pen or narrow-tip felt marker.

After you’ve collected a bunch of images and notes, you can start to narrow down the elements you want to have in your rooms: if you’re devastatingly hip, you might decide to buy an orange velvet sofa, or a 1950s MCM console. Regardless, there are a few things to consider before you become married to a design scheme:

What are your cleaning habits? Selecting gloss white floors, for example, will require almost daily cleaning. Are you willing to take on that responsibility? If not, it’s probably a good idea to change your aspirations, or at least decide how to alter your desired design. Maybe those gloss white floors become natural oak floors, or a soft grey ceramic tile. 

Do you have children or pets? Are they allowed on the furniture? (The pets, I mean.) If so, you’ll want to look at fabric options designed to take some abuse. Crypton and Perennials have some amazing fabric choices that can help.

What makes you feel happy emotionally? Though I used to be drawn to darker spaces full of deep red velvets and navy blue jacquards that sucked up all of the light, I’ve since come to realize that those colors can cause me to become depressed if the dark hues are enveloping. For me, dark green walls, a navy bedspread, and dark grey sheets mean some serious psychiatric issues!

And of course, if you’re married, you have to include your spouse’s preferences. For instance, my husband’s favorite color is Egyptian blue, so I’m keeping that in mind for the day we can bring one more tiny speck of matter into our house, because right now, it’s stretched to the point of explosion. He’s also interested in ceramics and pottery, so I plan to incorporate them into the décor in future. My sister’s husband is fascinated with the universe, galaxies, the solar system, etc., so they have an enormous photograph of Pluto on the wall above their sofa. Not only does it incorporate something my Brother-In-Law loves, it’s also a visually arresting piece of artwork.

Now that you’ve considered all the variables, you’re ready for the next step.

To Be Continued…