How To Determine Your Design and Decorating Style

Part 1 – Outside Inspiration

There are many ways to create a design plan for the rooms in your home. Some people are perfectly comfortable with sourcing a few ideas and then copying them to a T. And why not? There are millions of photos of spaces that that don’t need one single thing changed. There’s nothing wrong with imitating something beautiful.

However, some people feel the need for personal expression when decorating their home and these folks are happier intertwining great ideas with their own notions. This often presents a challenge though. You know that you must have a “style” of your own but you have no idea how to harness it into a clear vision. Let us help!

Here is our guide to transforming your ideas into a concrete idea of what your personal style is, so you can live in a space that makes your friends say, “This is so YOU!”

Here are our suggestions for harnessing outside inspiration:

• Aggregate inspiration. Rather just passively looking through magazines or surfing the internet, create a space to collect the images that speak to you. If you’re mostly on online maven, join a site like Pinterest where you can create a pin board that features your favorite photos of interior spaces. If you still love traditional magazines, start tearing them apart and keeping what you love best. Or, do both! You’ll quickly start to see similarities among the photos and this will help you better define your personal taste.
• While collecting inspiration make an effort to filter it. Images of dazzling modern homes in Los Angeles don’t necessarily belong in your collection if they aren’t actually the space you want to create. Stick with images that closely represent what you envision for YOUR home.
• Pay attention to brands or styles that continually appeal to your home-decorating aesthetic. For example, if the magazine Shelter is more appealing to you than the magazine Domino, that tells you a lot about your style. Same thing if you are always swooning over Ralph Lauren in the home department but can easily breeze right by Vera Wang.