How couples can decorate together
Sharing a home with someone you love can be wonderful. But decorating together isn’t always easy, especially when your tastes aren’t the same.
If one partner loves filling every space with mementos and the other is clutter-averse, who gets their way? It can be hard to find good compromises when one loves bold colors and patterns, while the other favors calming shades of gray.
Interior designer Penny Drue Baird draws as much on her doctorate in psychology as on her design training when she works with couples decorating a home.
“I’m there as the mediator, like a marital therapist,” Baird says, “working out how to approach it so both persons don’t feel like they’re the one that can’t get what they want.”
Here, Baird and two other New York-based interior designers — Deborah Martin and Michelle Gerson — discuss how couples can tackle the sometimes challenging task of decorating shared space.
Sharing your vision
All three designers begin by doing an intake meeting with a couple to find out “everything that they are hoping to achieve, and the look they feel like they’re going for,” Baird says. Clients will bring photos they’ve ripped from magazines or show pages from design books to help explain what appeals to them.
A couple can sit down together and have this sort of meeting even if they aren’t working with a designer. By showing your partner what you envision, you may find that you have more common ground than you realized. Martin says that sometimes a client begins with a preconceived notion that they don’t like a certain pattern or style, but when they see it in context they do like it.
“It’s about discovery,” Martin says. Just as a designer must “take some risks and present what you feel will work very well in the home,” a partner can take the risk of showing their vision and taking in their partner’s vision with an open mind. Both may end up happily surprised.
In some cases, one partner might say they’re fine turning over the reins completely. If you’re redecorating a home or moving to a new one and your partner says you can make all the design choices, keep them updated along the way to avoid any unpleasant surprises.
Cohesive compromises
Gerson recommends making a list of items you both need in the room or home you’re decorating. These are the shared musthaves you can agree on, like plenty of seating in the living room if you both like to entertain.
Find that common ground, she says, and try to agree on one major piece of furniture. Maybe it’s a sofa that one partner loves the shape of and the other likes the fabric.
Once each person feels like their biggest requests have been heard, it may be easier to compromise on other details.
Another way to compromise: If one person likes a space full of colorful things and the other dislikes clutter, Gerson says, “then we try to organize the stuff. When stuff looks organized and purposeful, and not just like stuff all over the