When you enter any room in your home, you should feel a sense of comfort. Because you spend so much time in your personal spaces, you should do what you can to ensure they ease your mind and body and bring you peace and relaxation.
Unfortunately, small things can send your room into disarray, creating imbalance that can prevent you from finding any sort of comfort or joy. If you notice some intangible sense of imbalance in your interior spaces, here are a few quick fixes that can relieve your stress and return the calm consolation of your personal space.
Overflowing With Ideas
It is easy to feel passionate about interior design. With the right decorating decisions, you can create personal spaces that are utterly your own, that achieve your unique goals for your home. Yet, there are so many interior design styles to pull inspiration from, and oftentimes, inexperienced amateur designers try to mix and match too many aesthetics at once. The result tends to be somewhat chaotic, with a mishmash of styles competing for viewers’ attention and a lack of clarity regarding how a guest is supposed to feel in the space.
There are a few ways you can resolve this issue and achieve greater balance in your home décor. First, you need to be more aggressive in editing your interior design to achieve greater coherence in your aesthetic. You might restrict yourself to two or three interior styles, which you can blend using the 80/20 rule.
If your space is not necessary clashing in styles but overcome with clutter, you might need to work toward achieving more negative space. This might require you to return to the foundational elements of your room design, carefully selecting large pieces like furniture and removing décor like wall hangings and knickknacks to allow your space to feel larger, more spacious and more comfortable for those who visit. Then, even if you opt for a bold and busy design aesthetic, like maximalism, your room will never feel claustrophobic.
Improper Accessories
Emptiness can be just as off-putting as clutter. If you do find that you have invested too readily in too many design ideas, you need to be careful not to over-edit and integrate too much negative space, which will make your rooms feel undesigned and uninviting. Depending on the aesthetic you choose, you will need to fill certain overly large negative spaces with a certain number of accessories.
Some interior design styles necessitate that accessories have an obvious utility within the space. For example, you might fill ample overhead space with modern ceiling fans, as they function to keep the room cooler during the warm-weather months. Minimalism, industrialism, Bauhaus and other related aesthetics will also require you to keep your accessories to a minimum. However, there are many aesthetics in which some degree of clutter is key, such as eclecticism, Bohemianism and maximalism. Yet, even if you ascribe to a cluttered design style, you need to keep balance and order in mind.
Not Enough Color or Contrast
The human eye is drawn to elements that stand out, which is why accents are common components of effective interior design. People want a focal point to pay attention to; if an entire room is monotonous and bland, it tends to be boring if not outright unpleasant for viewers who will struggle to identify any visual interest in the space.
You can prefer a neutral color palette for your home, but you should work to include plenty of color variation and contrast to create balance in your design. You can add small pops of color to throw pillows or small accessories, and you can integrate contrast in the form of different textures or light and dark variations of the same hue. There is hardly such a thing as too much color or contrast — as long as you are adhering to a reasonable number of design styles, as explained in the first point above.
No matter what your unique goals are for your interior décor, you should always pursue comfort in your personal spaces — and that means working toward balance in your design. By considering design attributes like negative space, themed accessories, color and contrast, you should be able to make decisions that improve your décor now and into the future.
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