A Guide to Creating Spaces Part 2 Realization

Hi there!

Welcome to the series A Guide to Creating Spaces Part 2 where me and 4 other of my blogger friends are sharing how we decorate a space from start to finish. If you missed the first article in the series you can find it HERE and all the other gals posts are linked at the bottom.

Realization

So once you’ve pinned lots of inspiration and narrowed down what style direction you want to go in you can start pulling your favorite parts from those pins and begin recreating the look in your home. Again, I’ll be using our living room as an example of how I go about decorating, but this process can be applied to any room. I love neutral farmhouse cottage with lots of vintage touches.  If you follow me on Pinterest then you can see that lots of my pins incorporate my favorite styles and design elements.

Design Elements

In every space there are design elements to consider. These elements are important to look for when you’re pulling specific things that you’re drawn to from the pins you’ve saved on Pinterest and as you start shopping for your space. I’ll briefly discuss each element, but you can read THIS article if you need or want learn more.

• Space – This is the actual area or room you’ll be decorating. It’s always a good idea to have actual square footage measurements of the space so you know what will fit, but space does mean more than just square footage. As you start filling the space with furniture and decor there is more positive space and less negative space. You don’t want your room to be filled to the brim, but instead have decor that keeps the eye moving around the room.

For example because I crave simplicity I purposefully fill less of the space. Our living room is about 14×15 with 9 foot ceilings. One reason I loved our little home is because of some of it’s architectural elements. I love that it has all the original hardwood floors, doors, molding, large windows, and tall ceilings. These are all things I want to highlight when decorating and not cover them up. You’ll want to keep the actual space in mind when choosing the appropriate sized items.

• Line – Look at your space in terms of lines. Even if you’re decorating an entirely empty room there are already lines established. If I took everything out of our living room there would still be horizontal lines of the hardwood and windowsills as well as the vertical lines of the doorways and tall window molding. Our eyes naturally follow lines so they can be used to draw your eye up or across a space.

One way to create vertical line that draws the eye up is with your window treatments. Here’s my tip: hang them high (almost to the ceiling) and wide (outside the window trim).

• Form – I think of form as anything in the space that has shape. This basically means all furniture and decor. You want those shapes to feel cohesive, balanced, and again keep the eye moving around the room.

Since I’m combining a couple different styles I try to balance that combination in furniture and decor. French cottage or french provential is more ornate curvy formed furniture. While farmhouse has much simpler clean form. Our IKEA sofa is a timeless design that nods to the cottage style. Both accent chairs are french provincial style. But across the room of more curvy soft formed furniture I balance the room’s juxtaposition  with the huge primitive straight lined and square farmhouse media cabinet. Our vintage coffee table which is a repurposed gentleman’s chest is right in the middle.

• Color – This one’s pretty self explanatory. Color can create a huge impact in a space and set the mood. Colors also have different psychological impacts on us, which makes them even more important. It can be from painted walls to throw pillows. Our wall color is HERE.

Y’all know I’m a neutral gal. Keeping things light and neutral is calming, but I do enjoy adding pops of green with greenery. Read about some of my favorite greenery HERE. I use lots of whites especially on the bigger pieces in the space but then add some contrast with smaller items. The contrasting pieces are another way to keep your eye moving from one thing to the next in a space so it doesn’t all blend together. I also like a balance of wood and painted furniture pieces.

• Texture –. Texture can be seen and physically felt or just visual. You can create texture with textiles such as fabric furniture, throw pillows, rugs, curtains, which can all be both visually and physically felt as texture. But you can also create texture in a space with elements such as art or wallpaper both of which are visual texture.

This is another element I love! Even though I like to keep my color neutral I don’t like them to feel stark. I like to use texture to make a space feel cozy. In our living room I’ve layered our rugs (see that article HERE) to create even more textural dimension. The bottom jute rug is very neutral but still provides lots of texture however I was still wanting a bit more contrast. So to achieve that I added the top vintage inspired rug. Our whitewashed brick chimney is a great example of texture in a space. All the chippy painted things also add lots of texture! I also add lots of texture through fabric patterns and I’ll talk about that more below.

• Light – This one is important because lighting can determine how everything else in the space looks. This means both natural and artificial lighting. Windows and doors provide natural lighting and artificial can be overhead lighting, lamps, or accent lights like wall sconces. Each type has a purpose and creates a mood or ambience in the space.

I like as much natural lighting as possible another reason to hang your curtains way outside your windows 😉 You want to place lighting where you’re going to need it. An upcoming project for us is to redo our living room ceiling, bye bye popcorn, and add recessed lighting and a different center light. Right now we have a ceiling fan and then a lamp on the end table. Because the room is small this is sufficient lighting for us most days but I’m looking forward to more!

• Pattern – Lastly there is pattern. Patterns are a good way to make a space or home feel cohesive by repeating a pattern throughout.

As I mentioned I like a lot of texture and achieve much of this through pattern. I like stripes and ticking fabric or grain sack stripes are perfect for farmhouse style. A simple striped throw pillow also creates line, adds texture, form, and color to a space. So you can see how the elements overlap and intertwine.

A Guide to Creating Spaces Part 2 Realization

We all have different spaces with different hopes, as well as budgets for those spaces. I wanted this article to give a better understanding of all the components of decor and in the next article I’ll be explaining further how to take this knowledge and implement it in your home!

Grace In My Space | Aratari At Home | Citygirl Meets Farmboy

She Gave It A Go | Midcounty Journal

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