Wednesday, March 23, 2016

4 Tips For Styling An Empty Room | Home Decor ♥

You’ve probably noticed from a lot of my home decor and interiors posts that I love to search Pinterest and interior design sites for the latest trends and for some much needed inspiration too. I have so many ideas for our home, but it’s a work in progress, and with a new arrival on the way we have lots of updating and decorating to do, especially for the nursery, which at the moment is an empty shell waiting to be transformed.

I like to start each of my room makeovers as though the room is completely empty, so I’ve put together four key tips for anyone needing a fresh look for their spare room (like ourselves) or a living area makeover.

Use each wall as a separate canvas
Whenever I start on a room makeover I like to get lots of paint testers and swatches, just so I can find the perfect shade - this is something I'm currently doing for the nursery because nowadays there really are hundreds of shades of the same colour. You can pick these up from any DIY store for free (or almost), and it means you can try different tones on different walls in the room you want to change. At the moment I'm looking at subtle, off-white shades with hints of mint, I think this is far nicer than plain white.


One big trend (and one which is evident in our living room and kitchen) is mixing pale tones of a colour you really love and having one feature wall for wallpaper or a more vibrant coloured paint. You can experiment by getting different wallpaper samples, leaving them all to dry on the wall where you want to feature something bold and look at them in different lights to see which ones give the best effect for your room. You can see how I experimented with a wallpaper feature wall in our bedroom here.

Take function into account
Never forget that the room you're making over has a purpose. I always get a little too focused on what’s pretty and have to rein myself in. If it’s a study or office space, make sure there’s plenty of desk space to work and lots of light, by using white furniture and pale walls. If it’s a bedroom, think about where the bed, draws and wardrobes will physically fit (this is so important, especially if you're house is on the smaller side). Once you have your colour scheme sorted, it will help you to narrow down the kinds of furniture you’re looking for and avoid making any mistakes when buying.

Try a furniture rental company
These kinds of services can be really useful. If you’re not sure how to style a room or you can’t afford to buy everything right away, why not rent some furniture for it instead? For one thing, it helps you to narrow down what colours and styles you want, as you’ll know almost instantly whether or not you like it. Plus, you can decide on the functionality of a style by living in and using it.

Companies like Emblem Furniture also do home-staging too, so they often have great design expertise that you can use to your advantage, as they’ll be able to give you an idea of how to use the space.

Add bold colours in accessories
I love bright colours like pink, turquoise and gold (as featured in my dream office moodboard), but these don’t always look good when there’s too much use of the colours together in one space. As well as decorating a feature wall, use the bold colours you love as accessories to a room, so that if you tire of any daring colours you can easily change them. I find shops such as Penneys/Primark great for picking up decorations and knick-knacks for our home quite cheaply when I fancy a change in decor. I just picked up some bits for my sons room yesterday, to give it a fresh new look and a few small items really did inject some much needed colour and personality into his room.

Are you doing any interior design projects at the moment?

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