So you’ve decided that it’s time to make over your home but you have no idea where to start or what your interior design style is. You’re bombarded by tons of images, ideas, and inspiration on Pinterest and Instagram, but you’re overwhelmed, and you’re not sure what will work for you. So today, I’m going to share with you what my process has been finding my interior design style.
Discovering Your Interior Design Style
You can use this process to design your whole home or just one room in your home. Knowing what your style is is a useful tool that can help you narrow things down when you’re looking for inspiration, but it will only get you so far. The more important part of this is learning how to look at image references analytically, digging deep in order to understand why you like or dislike something when you see it, identifying commonalities, and piecing things together. It’s like working on a puzzle that you don’t know what it’s supposed to look like, where the final image only reveals itself as you actually put the pieces together.
The Importance of Feeling Keywords
Step one: It’s all about the feels. Trying to decorate your home without knowing how you want your home to feel is like trying to make a cake without knowing what the flavor is supposed to be. The two things go hand in hand. And keep in mind, for this video when I say your home, you can also pretend I’m saying your room or your kitchen or your hallway, any space you want. So this very first step actually doesn’t require you to do anything except stop and think. Of course, you will eventually start focusing on how you want your home to look, but it’s also very important to pinpoint how you want your home to feel.
We’re bombarded by visuals every second of every day, so before we start searching for external inspiration and potentially overwhelming ourselves with visuals from left, right, and center, we need to search for inspiration within ourselves. I know it sounds a bit cheesy, but stick with me. This could mean remembering the way you felt in a beautiful place you visited in the past, like a luxurious hotel you stayed in or a spa or even just a really nice restaurant. There is no wrong answer here.
The important thing at this stage is not to focus on what you dislike about your home right now because that isn’t helpful. And there’s no need to imagine how you would like things to look specifically because that’s overwhelming. Just imagine how you want it to feel. Some popular words that come up when people are asked this question are words like cozy, relaxing, restful, peaceful, fresh, clean, inviting, airy, elegant, and soothing. So this is your first step. Identify the words that express how you want to feel in your home.
Step two: Choose your feeling keywords. Once you’ve picked two or three, what I call feeling keywords, write them down somewhere. If you have more keywords than that, that’s okay too. The more words you have, the clearer picture you’ll have of how you want your house to feel. If you’re working on multiple areas of your home, remember that your feeling keywords will probably be different for the different rooms of your home, and that’s fine. Every time you look at an inspiration image, refer back to those words. Every time you’re about to purchase an item, refer back to those words. Don’t lose sight of the way you want your home to feel.
Being in touch with the feeling you want your home to convey is so important, and ultimately, it’ll guide you through this whole process. Also, it’s okay if over time your feeling keywords change. It’s natural for our tastes and personal styles to change and develop over time, but if that does happen, be conscious of that change of direction and make sure you commit to it.
Navigating Modern vs. Traditional Design
Step three: Modern or traditional. At any given point, it’s easy for it to start feeling like it’s all a bit too much, trust me. So I like to separate things into two big main branches: modern and traditional. Or if you’re a stickler for details, you can say contemporary instead of modern. But for the purposes of this video, we’re going to say modern.
This makes it a lot easier to narrow things down when you’re feeling like you’re in a design haze. In a nutshell, modern is often characterized by clean lines, clean surfaces, and sleek furniture. It can have a minimalistic feel to it, with lots of negative space and not a lot of clutter. Some examples of styles that fall under modern or contemporary would be styles like minimalism, Art Deco, mid-century modern, post-modern, the majority of Scandinavian style including the hybrid style Japandi. Traditional is often characterized by more detailing, rich textures, and heavier furniture.
Think moldings, elaborate trims, rich architectural details, sometimes more stuff and symmetry. Styles that fall under the traditional umbrella could be styles like colonial, Victorian, neoclassical, grand millennial, and modern farmhouse. This doesn’t mean that you have to choose one or the other. In fact, often most people like a combination of both traditional and modern, but it’s good to know what direction you lean in primarily. Neither is right or wrong, but knowing which of the two major style directions speaks to you more will really help guide you in the right direction if you’re ever feeling lost.
Utilizing Pinterest for Inspiration
Step four: Get acquainted with Pinterest. Okay, so remember those keywords we saved before? We’re gonna use those now. The easiest way to start determining how to decorate your home is by starting with an actual room to decorate. It doesn’t have to be real. You don’t actually have to be redecorating any room at all, but if you want to do this exercise and practice, you need to pretend you’re working with a specific room so that it gives your brain something concrete to work with. So let’s say you want to redecorate your bedroom, and let’s pretend one of the keywords from before that you picked was in fact cozy. Write “cozy bedroom” in the Pinterest search bar, then start sifting through the results. You’d probably see a lot of results for that particular query, but the more you start to figure out the various puzzle pieces, such as what color you might want to use or whether you like more modern bedrooms or more traditional bedrooms, the more you can narrow down your Pinterest searches by using more specific keywords. Save only the images that you love that communicate the feeling you’re going for. Remember that if you click on an image in Pinterest, underneath it will show you other similar images. This is super handy because you can quickly narrow things down and find a lot of images that share strong similarities. If you do a search and you don’t like what you’re seeing, start over with a variation in your keywords. There’s never a time when you must or should stop saving images. Pin and save for as long as you need to.
Analyzing and Learning from Inspiration
Step five: Study your inspiration. So you’re saving your favorite images. You’re making sure that they’re all images that communicate the feeling that you’re going for. So you’re on the right track. But now it’s really important to learn to observe the results from your searches and start asking yourself questions. Spend time studying everything, but in particular, you’ll want to dissect the images that stop you in your tracks. So here’s an example.
Let’s pretend you stumble upon this image and it stops you mid-scroll. You love it. You should get into the habit of asking yourself what draws me to this photo? Why did it stop me in my tracks? Maybe you’re drawn to the paint color. Is it because it’s dark? Is it the cool rounded crown molding? Maybe it’s the ornate gold mirror. Try to understand if you’re responding to a traditional element or a modern element.
Also, if you see an image that has features that you don’t have in your home, like for example, the claw foot tub, that doesn’t mean that the image can’t be inspirational to you. Or sometimes you’ll find an image that you love, but maybe there’s one thing about the room that sticks out to you that you really actually dislike. Like let’s say you dislike the chandelier in this bathroom. Well, maybe that’s a sign that glass or crystal chandeliers might not be for you.
Or maybe you’ll discover that you don’t like traditional light fixtures at all. In that case, you could look to more contemporary pendants. See, it doesn’t matter at this stage what style the bathroom is. People get so caught up in what the style is, who the designer is, is it trendy, is it not trendy? None of that matters. All that matters is, do you like it? Why do you like it? Does it communicate the feeling you want to feel? The more you break down each image that you’re drawn to and ask yourself these questions, the more the answers will reveal what you actually want.
Each image is an opportunity for you to figure out what feels right or wrong. Study the images that stop you in your tracks, mid-scroll. Whatever, you know what I mean. Really study them and figure out the exact things that make you tick. Then try and figure out how you can bring those elements into your own space so that it also fits within your budget and lifestyle. And remember, it takes time, especially if you’ve never done it before.
Refining Your Design Vision
Step six: Refine and define. It’s important to keep refining your Pinterest boards. You should always prune out the images that no longer fit your vision. If you have an outlier image, delete it. If you change your mind about the way you feel about an image, delete it. If you forgot why you put something in there but you don’t like it anymore, delete it. You’re going to keep narrowing it down until there’s a clear answer that speaks to your personality and style.
You should start to see and be able to identify the patterns emerging in the images that you save as well. So to recap, by now you should: a) have an idea of how you want your home to feel and have your feeling keywords, b) know whether you prefer an overall more contemporary or a more traditional look and understand how to identify those elements in a picture, c) have Pinterest boards that contain your favorite inspiration images.
So now what? A Pinterest board full of dozens upon dozens of images can get overwhelming fast. So this is why now you need to take a step back and look at all the images you’ve saved and try and figure out what commonalities they share. If you’ve come this far, you obviously have a genuine interest in this. So if it’s still important for you to define what style you are, I would wager that by this stage you should be able to make an educated guess or even better, make up your own definition of your style.
Maybe you’re rustic cottage with a touch of mid-century, or maybe you’re, I don’t know, Victorian wabi-sabi. Now that would be interesting. Finding your interior design style is an ongoing process that takes time, so don’t get too hung up on needing to label your style. What matters is having the tools and the confidence to be able to make decisions about your interior and express yourself in a way that ultimately makes you feel happy. If you’ve figured out what your personal design style is, congratulations! I would love to know, so please leave me a comment.