5 Top Interior Design Tips

We recently held an Interior Design morning at our St. Albans showroom which was a 2 hour event that was all about discovering new design and decorating ideas to help you create a beautiful home for you and your family. As space was limited to just 10 guests, we wanted to share our top favourite interior design tips here.

Interior Design Tip No. 1 // If you look great, you feel great and it’s the same for your home.

This is so true! Our homes are such an important part of our everyday lives. The place you come home to every night is like a sanctuary, your own private space and we all know that feeling when everything is a bit chaotic and cluttered up – it feels like you can’t think straight. There is a really great book I was given recently (hopefully not a hint) “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up“. I must admit, after reading it I have been able to have such a good sort out at home and really only keep the things I need rather than a bunch of clutter I don’t need at all but felt compelled to keep for one reason or another.

Interior Design Tip No. 2 // How to choose a design scheme for a room? Use a moodboard to focus your style and stick to it. 

Using a moodboard to create an interior design scheme is hardly a ground-breaking development, they have been around for so long now. However, actually using one as the starting point is such a good idea because it really will focus your mind on the room and what you want to achieve. Most people will have a rough idea of what they want, and maybe an idea of colours, so use that and build it up from there. The key suggestions were to keep it simple, and when you’ve got your scheme together, stick to it.

This is all very well if you know what you want, but what do you do though if you’re completely stuck and really need a burst of inspiration? Pinterest is an amazing tool because you can create boards by pinning images directly from the internet or from other people’s boards. After you’ve pinned 20+ images you should start to see a few common threads – for example, the use of wooden flooring, darker walls, colourful artwork – it could be anything but looking at them all together really helps to focus on what you want – even when you don’t know what you want.

Interior Design Tip No. 3 // When using 2 or 3 patterns in an interior design project, make sure you vary the scale of the pattern.

There can’t be anyone in the world that is better at layering pattern, colour and texture than Kit Kemp. Her legendary knack for combining the most beautiful and unlikely of pattern combinations is illustrated above with this spacious, light and quiet suite at the Knightsbridge Hotel in London. Understanding this simple rule though gave everyone attending the interior design morning a real boost of confidence in how to achieve this type of effect.

Interior Design Tip No. 4 // Lighting around a bathroom mirror should always be to the sides – not above as it creates a shadow.

One of our favourite interior designers, Sophie Paterson, designs the most beautiful homes in London and Surrey. In this stunning master bathroom in the Surrey project, the lighting is expertly designed to the side of the mirrors and above and perfectly illustrates this point. I love the way the lighting scheme also includes ceiling lights which you really need on grey November days in England.

Interior Design Tip No. 5 // Designing a whole house? Consider keeping one aspect consistent to link the different spaces.

This was a fantastic tip for several of the guests attending the event as they were at different stages of renovating or moving into new homes. The one aspect you keep consistent can be anything – the wall colour or the flooring – as shown above in the New Canan Contemporary project by Carrier & Company. Always popular in the US, the dark hardwood flooring is used widely throughout the property and helps to pull the different spaces together.

We are planning to hold further interior design events with the Decor Cafe from September onwards and will be released the autumn programme soon on the blog and on social media so do watch out for it if you’d like to come along

Images credits: 1) One Denman Place, Simon Brown Photography & 2) Knightsbridge Hotel, Simon Brown Photography, 3) Elle Decor Concept House, Nick Johnson for Carrier & Company, 4) Surrey project, Sophie Paterson Interiors 5) New Canan Contemporary project, Elizabeth Felicella for Carrier & Company.