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Finding Your Style: Wrapping Up

Ladies' Home Journal, 1948

Ladies' Home Journal, 1948

You’ve figured out how you want you home to look: its style, the colors you want to use, the aspects of your spouse’s preferences to incorporate, and you’re ready to start buying!

Well, almost.

Layout

First, you need to decide what furnishings you want for your room(s) and what they can hold. 

Grab some graph paper, measure your room(s), and draw their outlines on the graph paper (I recommend quadrille paper, aka 4’-0” in real life equals 1 inch on the page). Make sure you measure window and door locations, along with outlets and heat or air conditioning grille locations, too, as those can all affect the room’s layout.

Then decide what pieces you want for your room(s)? In the living room, do you want a sofa and two chairs, or a sofa and a loveseat? Or, heck, go crazy and plan for two sofas! How will they be arranged in the space? Find pieces similar to what you want, either online or in-store, and measure them. Will the size you’ve found fit into your room the way you’d like? Or will you need to add three extra feet to the living room to fit your design scheme?

A few general rules of thumb, to help in planning:

      *  Where’s the center of the room? Or, do you want to center your furniture layout on an
          architectural feature, like a fireplace or window?

      *  How do you usually move through the room? Will your desired layout interfere with traffic? If
          so, you might need a different option.

      *  Do you want the furniture to float in the center of the room, or have some pieces – sofas and
          chairs, generally - against a wall? If you plan to float your furniture, make sure you have a    
          walkway about 36” wide between the walls and the furniture to allow for ease of movement.
          Though others may disagree, I’ve found that 24” (or even 18”) between pieces within the
          group is fine for moving to a piece of furniture, and you don’t have to get out of your seat to
          put your drink down on the cocktail table.

      *  Every seat should ideally have a flat surface on which to set a drink (and have enough coasters
          so they can!). Don't just think tables, either: garden stools and ottomans with trays are
          perfectly serviceable drinks tables.

      *  If you’re laying out your dining room, try to ensure that each seat at your table will have 36”
          to the wall or other pieces, like a buffet, so there’s plenty of room to get up and walk around, if
          necessary.

      *  Buy furniture that can handle the scale of your rooms: an enormous overstuffed sofa might not
          work well in a cottage living space, and conversely, a tiny settee will probably be swamped in
          a family room with 20’ ceilings.

The Forbidden Conversation Topic, a.k.a. Money

Via Wikimedia Commons

You also need to think about your budget. Decide the maximum you’re willing to spend on the room, as a whole, and stick to it. You’re going to spend $5,000 on the dining room over the next 3-5 years? Great! You have $20,000 to spend on a blowout living room? Awesome!

But you also have to decide how that budget is going to be apportioned.

Look at the rooms you love: you didn’t toss all those design images, did you? Which of the rooms’ elements really jump out at you? Or, which of the elements do you want to jump out. What’s the focal piece going to be? A large artwork? A French deux-corps? A pair of Art Deco armchairs?

Once you’ve settled on what you want to be the standout star of your room, you need to decide how much you’re willing to spend on that item, versus the rest of the furnishings you want. You have to be patient and understand that The Knockout might not be the first thing you buy. It might be the LAST thing you buy, but you need to be patient.

If you’ve been buying “stand-in” furniture until you can afford The Knockout – an IKEA credenza, or a loveseat from Target instead of that mohair upholstered baby you really want – STOP. Don’t spend your money on things you intend to toss in the future, or items that will wear out in 5 years and require re-purchasing.

Whatever you do, don’t buy anything you don’t love, or that won’t fulfill a function in your home. If you can’t decide whether you love that area rug, don’t buy it, even if it is 50% off. Once you’ve lived with it for a year, you might loathe it, and then out it goes! And a portion of your design budget is wasted. Remember William Morris’s maxim:

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or

believe to be beautiful.”

Instead, save that money you were going to spend, and deal with the fact that your grandmother’s porcelain dinner service is going to live in cardboard boxes a little while longer; you can always unpack them if called upon to host Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, and repack them when everyone’s gone. After you wash them, of course.

The money you save should be set aside so you won’t spend it on other things. If that means opening an online savings account to help, then do it! When you get those Christmas checks from Aunt Rita and year-end bonuses from your boss, deposit them in your savings account!

Why? Because you might not find The Knockout immediately, but when you do find it, you want to be ready to seal the deal. Whether you decide you’re willing to spend $3,000 or $15,000 on a credenza, you can’t buy it if you don’t have the money for it. Did you spend $1,000 of your Knockout money on a half-price mink vest? Too bad: The Knockout isn’t going home with you, and you’ll have to deal with the fact that someone might buy it before you scrape together the cash to purchase it at a later date.

Unless there is an emergency (your roof blows off, or your house floods), don’t dip into your Design Fund.

Ken Teegardin via Wikimedia Commons

Patience is a Virtue

Meanwhile, remember that it’s okay for a room to be “unfinished” for a while, where “a while” means “several years”. (Just tell everyone you're trying out Minimalist Interior Design for a while.) Rooms take time to mature and show their personality – and to reflect your personality – and you don’t want them to be decorated haphazardly.

You didn’t spring from the womb fully formed and with predetermined character traits, and your style won’t either. Over time it will take shape into a style and layout that is comfortable for you and your loved ones, be they spouses, children, parents, or pets. If your living room looks like a skating rink for a while due to the expanse of bare hardwood floors, then so be it.

Jose Goncalves via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re patient, you’ll eventually end up with a room you love to be in, as will your family, be they children, spouses, parents, or pets. Above all, remember to follow the words of ole' William Morris and the folks at Baker Furniture:

“…choose things well instead of often.”

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…