Regardless of your room’s size, styling it with the right furniture can be tricky, especially for the first time. Each furniture piece is unique, and the colors, styles, and themes vary. It can be challenging to determine which piece goes well in each room you intend to decorate.
In this article, we'll guide you on creating unique arrangements with the pieces you've selected from various furniture stores.
Form Your Vision of the Room
Before you work with the items you’ve got from Austin furniture stores or anywhere else, you’d want to visualize the result of the room. Form the mood, palette, and desired aesthetic as you plan. From there, you could come up with the ideal furniture composition.
Checking Key Elements
To make your work easier in finding the right artistic combination, you’d want to look for common ground among your furniture. You can use colors, shapes, or a specific design detail for the items you’ve purchased from furniture stores. Finding these recurring elements among them can create visual connections that you can use to form unique compositions.
However, it's crucial to strike a balance when arranging your furniture pieces. You would want to ensure that your space doesn’t get overpowered by a single style or color. Rather, strive for a balance that allows each furniture piece to have its moment to shine in your room.
How to Mix and Match Your Pieces of Furniture?
Combining specific elements from your furniture ensures that you will get a unique composition, but let’s cover it in detail. Here are the steps on how you can mix and match your items that you bought.
1. Use a Color Scheme
As mentioned in the key elements, you’d want to use a color scheme for the room so you can place the right furniture easily. For example, your dining area could use neutral shades and two accent colors so your selection of items will be flexible.
To elaborate on this, let's consider your dining room furniture. If you have a wooden table with a varnished finish, you would want to complement it with seating that matches its color. Alternatively, you could settle for seating that has cushions with neutral colors such as white or tan.
2. Patterns Can Make or Break Your Composition
While patterns can be essential in forming unique compositions, their overuse can ruin your design. To illustrate this, let's consider your living room furniture. Suppose you already have a patterned carpet in your room. The sofa that you’d want to use alongside the carpet needs to have a plain look, no patterns; just one color.
The point here is that you’d want to strike a balance in the usage of patterns. Unique compositions with moderate use of patterned items can make them stand out in the room. Too much use of patterned furniture may cause the markings to look like they’re mixing, making it confusing to look at.
3. Adding Unrelated Pieces to Your Composition
Should you have additional unused furniture at your disposal, consider adopting a mix-and-match style by incorporating these unrelated items into your room. For example, let’s use bedroom furniture for this instance. You have beds with cozy mattresses and lovely blankets. There’s also an antique cabinet and an elegant-looking corner table with a lamp.
However, suppose you have an antique-style desk lying unused and there's a vacant area in your bedroom. You could position this desk in your bedroom, aligning with the rest of your antique furniture due to its similar style.
4. Shapes Matter a Lot
Shapes significantly influence interior design. It’s possible to create unique and out-of-this-world combinations of furniture when using shapes alone. Even if the furniture pieces you’ve used hail from different styles and periods, they can harmonize through their shared outline.
Let’s use another living room furniture example again. Let’s pretend that you have a fireplace with a round carpet fairly distanced from it. You intend to place the chairs near the carpet but they’re all of a different style and appearance - two modern chairs and one that is antique. Despite having differing styles, they do share a similar outline or shape. You’d be surprised how they’ll go well with each other once they surround the carpet.
5. Use Accent Pieces
Accent pieces serve as fantastic compliments to your furniture arrangements. They also add a bit more color and emphasis to the furniture that they’re placed on. Now let’s use two instances of examples for this case. The first example is using patterned cushion pillows on a plain-colored sofa. The cushions would add a bit more texture and color to the sofa but also make it pop out more.
Another apt example would be positioning an antique lamp on a sleek, modern side table in your bedroom. As in the previous example, the accent piece brings added color and emphasis to the furniture it adorns.
6. Remember the 80/20 Rule
The 80/20 ratio rule is the ideal way to know whether your decor work is overdone or is good enough. To put this rule in a nutshell, it’s similar to selecting the main character and the side characters in a story. In this case, your “characters” are the style of the furniture pieces you’ve obtained from the furniture stores.
Let’s use another example that uses the dining room furniture this time. The majority of the items present in your dining area use the modern style, whereas there are some antique items such as decors and pictures thrown in the mix. The modern-styled items are your 80% whereas the antiquated pieces are your 20%.
7. Add Small Details to your Room
No matter which room you're decorating, incorporating small details to finalize your design is always a worthwhile strategy. It fills in empty and unused spots and makes certain areas pop out even more. Take the dining room, for example; empty shelves can be adorned with ornamental porcelain, and vacant corners can become ideal spots for vases or potted plants.
Get Creative and Mix and Match your Furniture!
While the art of mixing and matching furniture pieces demands dedication and practice, the rewards are well worth the effort!
Mastering this skill enables you to devise extraordinary combinations with your furniture pieces. You will also develop an eye for complementing furniture styles that would otherwise clash in most situations.
Don't be surprised if, one day, your visitors stand in awe of your artistic capabilities, perhaps even suggesting you could become an interior designer.
