8 Tips for Choosing a Home Interior Design Style

When you look through a home design magazine or scroll through social media, you often see beautiful homes in specific design styles. Once you see them, you may want to do the same in your home, but you don’t know how to get started. First, you must choose a home interior design style, and then you must bring it to life. Choosing a look and bringing it into your home can feel overwhelming, but we have eight helpful tips to guide you through the process.

Explore Different Design Styles

There are dozens of different home design styles that you can pick from. Narrowing down the options so that you can actually pick one can feel impossible. Many people worry that they’ll pick the wrong look or never find the right one for their home.

Instead of worrying about drowning in possibilities, take them at surface value. These are possibilities you get to explore. Look at pictures in magazines and on social media of the seven most popular home decorating styles and themes. Explore room and home setups in different styles. Visit loved ones whose homes already match a specific style. The more you interact with the styles you see, the more you’ll realize what you do and don’t like in different designs. That will help you narrow down your style options.

Gather Images of Your Preferred Style

As you start to narrow down your style options, you should start saving images you like. You may want to take pictures of the design elements in a friend’s home, save a screenshot of a movie set in a specific style, or cut out pictures from your favorite home design magazine. Whatever your method, start building a physical or digital board of images depicting your preferred look.

Once you put your board together, you can identify whether it fits a specific style. For example, you may notice that a lot of your saved images contain neutral colors, depict utilitarian furniture, and feature straight lines. These are common characteristics of a minimalistic design. Now you can start looking at minimalistic interior design looks for specific inspiration.

Clean and Declutter

Now, with a new specific look in mind, you need to start transitioning your home out of your old style. This is easy if you’re changing your furniture and painting your walls. It allows you to see your home as a blank slate, ready for a new design.

Start cleaning and decluttering wherever you want to implement your new style first. For example, if you want to turn your office space into a minimalistic dream, you should clean off your desk and remove any wall hangings or rugs. Place decorative items you may want to keep somewhere new. This gives you a new perspective so that you can better judge whether the items should stay.

Start Small

Notice that we mentioned starting your new home design in an office. It’s best to start small when you’re implementing a new design. You’re more likely to finish smaller projects, which will help you build confidence for bigger changes elsewhere in your home.

Small changes also give you the opportunity to interact with the new design style you’ve chosen. As you live in your re-done space, you may realize that you love it even more than you originally thought. This will inspire you for the next project.

You may instead realize that this style doesn’t work with your lifestyle or you don’t love it as much as you originally thought. That’s OK! You can change your mind. Since you started with a small space, you won’t have too much work ahead of you to convert this space into a different new look.

Transform Before You Replace

Another way to test whether this new style is right for you is to transform beloved objects for the new design instead of replacing them. This way, you know you’ll love the item even if it turns out that you don’t love the style.

For example, you may love your current eclectic dresser in your bedroom. The drawers work great, and it’s the perfect size for your room. However, the hardware has too much texture for a minimalistic bedroom. Instead of replacing such a good dresser, swap out the hardware. If you love the change, then you know this is a good style. If you find yourself missing the old hardware, then maybe you’re not ready to change it up yet, or you need to rethink your design choices.

Measure Before You Buy

After you pass these style tests, you can start buying furniture to fit your new look. Before you spend money on the first stylish item you see, measure the space you plan to change. You need to know what furniture items will fit in this space. Additionally, you should know the journey a furniture item will take to get to the right spot.