Home Decor and Design Specialists

Company:	Location:	Contact Info:
New Ante Interiors	Serving Westrand area	011 – 679 3639
Catherine Stadler Interiors	Serving Westrand area	082 – 834 2768
Hello Home Interiors	Roodepoort	011 – 958 2311

 

Articles on Home Decorating

 

Interior decorating tips and ideas for your home.

• Make your house a home,  it’s a reflection of who you are.
• You live there, so it’s important that you’re comfortable and happy with the decorating decisions you make.
• Keep it simple, don’t get carried away
• Plan before you start decorating and especially before buying anything.  Look around, in magazines and shops and get some ideas of what you like.
• Focus on one room at a time, be it the bedroom, study, lounge, dining room or patio.
• Buy good quality furniture.
• Choose an interior decorating style that suits you and one that you like and enjoy. This is very personal and can change. Try and keep the style classic so it won’t date.

 

Defining Style

Pulling together a look by defining your style

If you’re a normal, everyday homeowner with a family and pets, chances are your living room has no particular decorating style.  Cottage décor is a dream and contemporary decor a frightening prospect of a total room makeover.  You have a mish-mash of furniture and accessories that you try to pull together every once in a while and then get discouraged. 

Style in its true sense is about your essence – your personality, your family and your lifestyle.  Chances are if you have a mash of looks in your living room, you just never defined your decorating style.  How do you do it?

Analyze your Furnishings

Stroll through your living room and dining room and choose your favourite pieces.  What style are they?  If you’re choosing chintz and floras, you may prefer country, but don’t care for the complete country look.  If you’re choosing the more simple furnishings, chances are you prefer contemporary but didn’t have the nerve or money to commit fully to that style. 

Analyze your Life

If picking out particular prized pieces isn’t helping you, look deep within yourself to find your style.  Ok, barring that, how about opening your closet and taking a look in there instead.  What colour do you see the most of?  Chances are, that’s one of your favourite colours.  Perhaps part of a new colour palette?

What about your favourite vacation?  Was it in a luxury resort or a charming country inn?  What was it about the room that you loved?  Answering those questions can define the space in which you enjoy living or have felt the most comfortable.  If you loved that B&B and never wanted to leave, perhaps a country or casual rustic style is what you crave.  If you loved the Old World elegance of your luxury hotel, perhaps you’re looking for a little culture or formality in your living space.

Analyze your Choices

Go through decorating magazines and tear out pictures of rooms you like.  Don’t think about what’s actually in the room and how it could work in your home, just choose your favourites.  Do you see any trends?  Are the couches all soft and upholstered or straight lined and contemporary?

Hopefully, somewhere within these exercises, you at least defined if you prefer casual or formal and came up with a preferred colour.  Use these to start pulling the room together.  You don’t necessarily need a total room makeover.  Just decorating your room to match your style by getting rid of the pieces that are holding you back and keeping you from defining your living style.
 

Ten Tips for Better Interior Decorating and Home Improvement

1. Choose a paint that you can live with for a long time, especially in your bedroom.  In 6 months will you still think bright pink is cool?

2. Make small rooms seem larger. In this day and age, people are moving into smaller and smaller spaces. Learning how to make the most out of the space you have is essential.

3. Don’t modernize everything. If you have a house with an old fashioned kitchen, turn it into a retro kitchen.

4. Decorate the walls with framed pictures and paintings. But, the key here is to make sure that the frames are good quality, good looking frames.

5. Use good lighting effects. Find what needs to be lit (is it the room, or just a painting), and do it in a stylish way.

6. Trash cans are not just trash cans. Think of the little things.  Just because a trash can is where your dirt goes, doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice trash can.

7. Create a focal point in a room. This is a key issue in interior decorating.

8. Create easily accessible “paths” around your house. Don’t make your guests (or yourself) climb over things or have to dodge furniture.

9. Give each room a function. And make sure that each function can be fulfilled in the room.

10. Take a look around. Browse the internet, look in the shops… You can get ideas from a lot of places.
 

Flooring – Room by Room

Living Room

Living room flooring needs to be durable, comfortable and stylish.  It needs to be able to withstand medium foot traffic.  Your best bets when choosing living room flooring are hardwood, wall-to-wall carpet, berber carpet and rugs.

Family Room

Flooring in family rooms needs to be more durable than in the living room, as it gets more use.  Choose flooring that is durable, comfortable and looks good with the decor.  Hit picks for the family room are hardwood floors, rugs and carpet, and for more game-room type usage, even brick and tile.

Kitchen/Bathroom

Kitchen and bathroom flooring needs to be first and foremost slip-resistant for safety and also able to withstand moisture and constant cleaning.  Good choices for these rooms include tile, linoleum and vinyl.

Bedroom

Flooring in the bedroom demands comfort and often is dependent on the taste of the homeowner.  Hardwood is a good choice if suffering from allergies, but can be cold on your feet.  Pile carpet and rugs are popular choices for bedrooms.

Entryways

An entryway needs to be impervious to the elements that are brought in through the front door.  Hardwood and carpet are often used with an area rug over them for protection.  Tile and marble are alternate choices, but can be slippery when wet.

Hallways

Hallway flooring needs to provide a nice transition and be able to handle high foot traffic.  Carpet, rugs, tile and hardwood are popular choices for hallways.

Utility Room

The main concern when choosing flooring for a utility room is durability and cost.  Concrete, berber carpet, vinyl and tile are the best bets for utility room floors.
 

Lighting

There are several types of lighting to consider as you plan a redecorating project:

General or Ambient Lighting

Ambient lighting is the overall lighting that illuminates the room. The light is diffused throughout the room and produces an overall glow. It should be inconspicuous and blend into the surroundings.

Accent Lighting

Accent lighting emphasizes a particular part of the room or an object.  Accent lighting can create the most drama in a room and defines your focal point.  This can be the most overlooked type of lighting when redecorating; just adding a touch of accent lighting can make a big difference in any room.

Task Lighting

Task lighting provides lighting for a specific area and task, as the name would imply, and includes lighting for reading, hobbies, or writing.  Usually task lighting consists of a table lamp, such as a light on your nightstand for reading in bed.

Decorative Lighting

Another overlooked category when lighting a room is the decorative lighting.  Treat this portion as a design element.   It is not used so much as to give off lighting, but to add a decorative touch to the room.  For example, a pair of candelabras on a dining room table.

So you only have so much room and money for lighting – what do you do?  Well, even lighting can multi-task.  That sweet porcelain lamp on the vanity in your powder room serves not only as task lighting for washing your hands, but decorative lighting as well.  A chandelier in a dining room is ambient lighting for general light in the room, task lighting for eating your meal, decorative and accent lighting for the dining room table.  With all those jobs it has to perform, your best bet is to put it on a dimmer switch to help it serve all those functions in one room.

Dimmer switches, by the way, can be a homeowner’s best friend when you need your overhead lighting to multi-task.  They’re fairly inexpensive and can be installed by anyone who’s handy around the house.