Essential Design Tips

When designing your home or even just a simple space, it's essential to use some basic interior design rules on how to improve your home decor. JAC can impart firsthand our interior design tips! To start, select a style you like and want to achieve. Sometimes deciding the purpose of the room is helpful in deciding the style. This helps to promote the design principles of harmony and unity, considering the entire home with a unifying theme. It can be super simple, like choosing casual over formal, or traditional instead of contemporary. Once that's decided, you can refine it even more to a specific style, like boho chic, modern Victorian, mid century, or sleek minimalism just to name a few. JAC usually likes to style our designs with a modern and contemporary vibe and depending on the client and the space, we throw in some eclectic touches to add some personality to the equation.  

Balance is another design principle that's very key to making a room or a home feel good. Use our living room design tips to help get that balance just right. When the visual weight in a room is balanced, our senses often follow, meaning that we feel better and more grounded when we can make sense of a space, and that often comes with symmetry. For example, if ever you are feeling uncomfortable for no discernible reason in a particular space, look around and see if the room feels off balance. It could be that the furniture is more closely concentrated on one side of the room versus the other, or that all the art is located on one wall only. These are factors in making you feel off balance and slightly disoriented, and are easy to fix with a quick change of the surroundings. More traditional interiors usually have a very symmetrical look, and more casual spaces can get away with the whimsy that an asymmetrical space offers.  

Focal points are super important in a room to help give the eye a place to focus. Fireplaces and windows are natural focal points, but if you have neither of those then you can always create one with a large scale painting or even a gallery wall. Focal points can set themselves apart by scale, color or texture. It can also be a wall treatment or wallpaper too. Contrast and variety add visual interest to a room. Keep rhythm in mind with repeating elements of the same color, texture, or pattern, and a progression of sizes or colors.

Choosing a color palette is an essential part of interior design. While you could have a different style and color scheme in each room, often you will want to tie the whole dwelling together. You'll want to consider the right colors for a small room, as well as the right colors and palettes for a larger room. They all make a difference and contribute to the overall cohesion and flow.

Before purchasing any furniture, keep scale in mind as well as the layout. Furniture that is too big can ruin the whole look, and make sure your pieces have similar scale-- coffee table and side tables should all be a similar height, and work with the size and scale of the sofa for example. Developing a budget with a bit of research will always pay off in the end!  One of the most important pieces of good design is making sure you have a place for the eye to rest, especially useful when using our bedroom design tips. in other words make sure you leave some free space in a room, don't over do the decor or knick knacks, less really can be more! And finally, remember your other rooms, every space should flow into the next one ideally.