MAKE NO MISTAKE
Why your home doesn’t look cohesive — and what to do about it
IF YOU WANDER around a show home, you may be impressed by how put together everything looks. Each room probably has a certain something that makes it feel as though it fits in with the rest of the house.
But many real homes just don’t feel like this: they come across as unfinished or might be a mishmash of things that don’t really go together. If your home feels disjointed, chances are you might unknowingly be making one of these common colour mistakes:
Mistake 1: Tackling one room at a time
Today, you might be decorating a bedroom. Next month, maybe you turn your attention to the living room. This stop-and-start approach seldom results in a cohesive look.
This doesn’t mean you have to decorate your whole home at once, but if you want a cohesive look, you do need to come up with a plan for your whole home.
Show home designers start by creating a whole-home plan and a master mood board, which lays out the colours, fabrics and finishes to be used throughout the home and within each room. By pre-
selecting your colours, furniture, fabrics and accessories, you will be limited to what you can include — and it actually makes it easier to shop once you restrict the options. Rather than just buying whatever catches your eye, purchases have to fit in with your whole home plan.
Mistake 2: Choosing too many different colours
Blue for the bedroom, red for the dining room, green for the bathroom, yellow for the kitchen — we’ve all been in a home like this. Generally the approach of choosing a completely different hue from room to room stems from a fear of being boring.
This doesn’t mean that you have to paint every wall the same colour in your home; it means that you use colour consistently throughout your home. By using similar colours in different ways, each room will looks as though it belongs in the same home.
Think of it as choosing colour palettes for individual rooms whereas you’re looking for an overall colour personality for the home. A colour personality could should include colours that tell a similar story. For example, a villa could have a softwashed colour personality and have a
blush pink console with birch stools in the entry and celadon cabinets with white honed counters in the master bath.
Mistake 3: You haven’t thought about sight lines
To make sure that your rooms flow from one into the other, consider how much of each room you can see from adjoining rooms, and make sure that the flooring, colour scheme and fabrics flow well between them. This is especially true of entranceways. If you can see several rooms when you enter your home, you will need to make sure that each is cohesive with the decor of the entrance, as well as with each other.
Mistake 4: The mish-mash
Avoid experimenting with different styles in different rooms. Going Scandi in the bedroom, Country in the kitchen and Glam in the lounge. That’s the fastest route to having a home look like a jumbled mess with a mish-mash of items that just don’t go together, even if you quite like the individual rooms.
The key is to figure out what you’re are drawn to the most with colour, pattern, decorative objects and art and then find the thread the ties them together. Once you have named your style — be it traditional, modern, eclectic, rustic, shabbychic, contemporary, coastal or a combination of two — and know what it is you like about it, it will be easier to achieve a coherent look.
Make sure you also consider the fabrics and patterns you use too. Collect swatches of all the fabrics you will use and lay them side-by-side to see how they work together. Don’t forget about your flooring.
If you have a mix of tiles, wood and carpet across your rooms, it will likely look disjointed. This doesn’t mean that you have to have exactly the same flooring throughout your home — although that can be one solution — but you should consider the colour and tone of the flooring. If choose a pale timber, pick a pale carpet and pale tiles.
Mistake 5: You haven’t taken lighting into account
In well-designed homes, colour consultants look to the lighting to define each of their selections. They may even go so far as to pick a different colour for a single wall because of how much the lighting can change the way it appears within the space.