WOULD YOU ALWAYS USE A MOOD BOARD?
Do you need one to decorate or do you wing it? Readers tell all
YES ‘Mood boards make a huge difference in the planning stage’
Saima Ahmed (@saimasays) lives with her husband Sohail and their three children in a 1930s detached house in Redbridge, London ‘Doing a mood board fills me with more confidence that everything will work together, and helps me develop what I want to do. In our last house, the colour palette was really neutral, but in our new house, I’m trying to be bolder with colour.
‘In our living room we decided on a green velvet sofa but I had no idea where to go with the rest of it. I put it on the board, then introduced wall colours, coffee tables and soft furnishings. It makes such a huge difference to the planning stage. And because buying things like paint is expensive, you don’t want to get it wrong.
‘Things can look a certain way in my head.
I’m redoing my boys’ room, so I did a mood board and realised the rug I thought would be perfect doesn’t go. Now I’m looking for something else.
‘One thing I’ve noticed is that when I didn’t use a mood board, the rooms didn’t have that wow factor – they felt quite plain. Now I’m using colour and the mood boards are really driving it. You go into a room and it feels really designed – not like you’ve just slapped white paint on. That’s what I always regretted about our old house: because I hadn’t given it as much thought, it felt like it lacked personality. It was more like a show home than somewhere people lived. Plus, a mood board cuts down on the number of parcels I have to return! I wouldn’t do anything without one now.’
NO ‘It’s fun doing things without a mood board. They just aren’t for us’
Adam Finch (@the.finch.home) lives with wife Katie and their son and pet dog in a modern detached home in the West Midlands ‘There’s never a mood board when we do our rooms. We never piece things together and come up with a final vision, purely because we have different tastes. My wife and I will usually throw ideas into the pot, choose one and that’ll have a knock-on effect. When we did the bedroom we bought some bedside tables we liked, then got a bed that went with them, then paint, then the lights – but it started with the bedside tables.
‘I think a lot of how rooms are decorated is dictated by light and how it affects them, so it can be a bit pointless creating a mood board. You can see the most perfect picture on Instagram or Pinterest but you try and recreate it in your house and it doesn’t look the same because houses on Instagram have massive windows or skylights. In our lounge we’ve got a pergola outside the French doors at the back and it’s quite a dark space. We painted it in Farrow and Ball’s Elephant’s Breath, but it never looked the way we wanted it so we had to go with another colour – it’s trial and error.
‘We’re not ones to put patches of colour on the wall. We go gung-ho for the full experience. In the study we tried F&B’S Skimming Stone and it felt wrong. It was almost magnolia. I wanted it to feel more regal, so we went super dark blue and it’s fantastic now. You don’t get that with a swatch.
‘Mood boards can’t give you the same feeling as being in the room with the fire roaring, the light on or the sun setting through the windows. They just aren’t for us. It’s fun doing things without one. The rooms are our canvas where we can do what we like – no one has to sign off on it. We can find out what we like and get it to a stage where we’re really proud of it.’
Without a mood board, rooms don’t have that wow factor – it’s like I haven’t given them as much thought