Interior Design Ideas
Interior design ideas can start right inside your home. From working with the size and shape of the room to using an accent piece you truly love as a jumping off point, there are numerous ways to gather ideas for the perfect room scheme quickly and easily.
Working With Your Home
While the ultimate style, design and theme you choose to take through your home should come from your personal taste, use your home's bones as a jumping off point for design ideas. While you may know that you want to ultimately end up with a beach theme or a Tuscan theme, you may not know where to begin. This is where taking cues from the home itself can help you.
Room Size and Shape
Your room's size and shape should play a major part in your interior design scheme. Small rooms with low ceilings will ultimately have to have a very different look and color scheme than a large room with a taller ceiling.
Smaller rooms work better with cooler toned colors, white ceilings and deeper colors closer to the ground. These aspects open up your room, making it seem airy and larger than it really is. Consider using an accent wall in a cool toned color like turquoise or even a blue toned red. Leave it bare to give the illusion of space, and focus bolder accent pieces on tables and rugs nearby.
Larger rooms can handle darker colors and bold ceiling colors. Consider pairing unusual colors in this way; a chocolate brown wall with an orange ceiling will warm up the space and make the room feel cozy. Just remember to keep your accent colors in the same saturation or depth of color, to help keep them from getting lost.
Era
Do you own a home with a specific history or era that it belongs to? Research the original color schemes for houses built in this era and use them throughout the home. The architecture was probably built with these color schemes in mind; using them will highlight the beauty of your home.
Build Rooms Around Elements You Love
While you may have a general theme or color scheme in mind, cement it into place by pulling from an accent piece you already own and love. Wall art, vases, vibrant drapes or a classic rug can all be a great starting point for your room's inspiration.
For example, if you've chosen a large water color landscape for your walls, study all aspects of it, including the colors used in the paint, the background, the matt and the frame. Pull a minor color from the painting and make it the base wall color. This should not be a color that factors largely into the painting, such as a blue sky, but a more subtle shade like the color of small flowers placed in the foreground, or the shadows at the base of the clouds. Choose bolder colors from the piece and use them as throw pillows, slip covers, candle holders and lamp shades. These colors can be pulled from larger sections of the painting, trees, water, sky and other areas. It's fine to introduce other colors into the room as well, but make sure they are either complementary to the colors in the painting, or they maintain the same hue and saturation.
If you choose to use two colors on your walls, or your walls and ceiling, pick the more subdued color as the main color of the room to highlight the accent wall or ceiling. Make the inspiration piece the focal point in the room and display it prominently. Your eye should be able to move from fabrics and colors in the room back to the inspiration piece with ease.
Work Your Way Up
If you aren't working from one specific piece, work from the bottom of the room upward to build your final design. Start with the flooring in every room but the kitchen; in that case, begin with the countertop.
Once you've selected the floor material and color, move to the wall colors. Make sure the tone of the floor and the walls coordinate in some way. For example, a warm toned floor like heated bamboo should have a wall color that is either directly opposite it on the color wheel, like rich green, or has the same warm tone, like a pumpkin spice.
Once the walls have been done, move on to throw rugs, then furniture, drapes and finally wall art and accent pieces. These are the areas in which you can inject more shades of color, both bold and subtle. By moving upward, you keep the scheme of the room fluent and continue to tie the new piece to the old ones.
External Inspiration
If you're completely stuck for ideas and need a visual jumping off point, there are numerous places you can go to gather information and ideas. Keep a notebook handy, and gather samples, photographs or photocopies of all the things that inspire you, including:
- Magazine photos
- Fabric swatches
- Wood or tile samples
- Paint samples
- Stone or counter samples
Lay out the all the pieces at once on a large table and see if you can spot a common theme. You may find that you are continuously drawn to a specific color or shade, or that a specific style or theme is repeated again and again. Look for any common links between the pieces you've gathered, no matter how small, and use these as your starting point for the whole room.
Arrange Samples Together First
Whether you purchase all the components for your new design at once or you build slowly over the course of years, be sure to hold all samples and colors together in the room where they will be placed. Lighting has a big impact on how a color is perceived - always look at a color in the light it will be permanently displayed before committing. Make sure each new color or tone introduced works with what's already there.
Pulling It All Together
Design is a process but following the steps is worth it to create the home of your dreams. Start with color, search for inspiration and start from the ground up. The results will be the cohesive design you've always wanted.
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