Interior Design Basics: how to start decorating a home

February 15, 2023 Posted by La Maison Oval Dining table

Redecorating or planning your new home can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to start. Mastering the principles of interior design can be tricky. That’s why we want to make it easier for you to understand the interior design basic.

Learn the basics of home decorating and design principles to create your dream home.

Think practical

One of the principles of interior design basics is practicality. Don’t spend all your time designing a room if your furniture doesn’t fit in. If you can barely walk between the furniture you won’t enjoy your home at all.

Therefore the best place to start is a room plan. Think about the space of a room and the layout of your furniture. Start sketching your ideas on the plan based on what look you want to create. But the most important point; work out whether your furniture fits in your room and how you can make the most use of it.

Placing an armchair in front of the window because it looks nice doesn’t work if you block all other arrangements. A simple way to figure out what fits in your room and where is to measure everything and draw it out to scale. With this easy tip you can move things around on your room plan and see what fits where.

Collect inspiration

If you weren’t born with the ability to imagine a room complete with furniture placement and decoration, search for inspiration from interior designers.

It’s one of the best ways to get inspired. Look at the spaces other people are designing. So you can see what is on trend while making the most of their interior design concepts.

Take inspiration from interior design magazines, interior design websites or social media. People sharing their designs to inspire you and to show you what can be done is an easy option to interior design basics.

Create a mood board

It can be hard to visualise exactly what your room could look like with so many ideas. One of the interior design basics is to inspire yourself with visuals. Collect your ideas on paper (or on your computer/tablet/phone) and create a visualisation of your home.

This is also a great way to figure out what looks good and what doesn’t. From here, you can navigate colour schemes and fabrics to come up with the ultimate design for your home.

An easy and effective way to organise your ideas together is with a mood board. You can do it the old-fashioned way and cut out pictures from magazines and tape samples of fabric to a board. Or you can use apps like Pinterest to create a space in which you can keep your ideas together. Visit our Pinterest boards for some inspiration here.

Take it slow

Don’t put pressure on yourself to have a finalised design in one week. When you are designing your home there is no rush, there’s no schedule and it doesn’t need to be done overnight. Getting it done right is more important than getting it done quickly. Cause being happy with a home you are going to live in for years is worth it. Even if it takes a few weeks longer than you wanted it to.

Show your personality

You’ve followed all interior design basics, but your room just doesn’t reflect you or your personality.

When you follow your collected inspirations, it might happen you end up with rooms that look like they belong to anyone but you. When decorating your home it’s important that it represents you. Think about what you want people to think and see when they walk into your home. Therefore consider what your home says about you.

Whether you are a cool, calm and collected person or someone full of life and personality, evoke that feeling into the design of your home.

It's all about the details

Details are what brings a room together and makes it feel like your space. It can be a stylish lamp in one corner, a plant next to your dining table or the collectables styled on your shelving unit.

Dedicate time to realising the details of every room in your home. Things like matching the colour of your cushions to the colour in one of your pieces of art, or a complementary pattern on a rug which looks great against your couch, these small details can make all the difference. Keep your eye out for quality products and put thought into where everything is going to go as details make all the difference.

Now you know the basic interior design principle and can start decorating your home. Pair this knowledge with practice and experimentation and you’re on your way to creating a beautiful home.