What looks good around the home is a subjective matter that will depend very much on your personal tastes and preferences. What you think looks good will of course be different to what I think looks good, and neither of us is right or wrong.
But nevertheless there are certainly some universal ‘mistakes’ that you can make which will almost undoubtedly make your home look worse in a way that everyone can agree on. Here we will look at some of the most common decorating mistakes to ensure that you aren’t making any serious faux pas at least…
Too Much Clutter
One of the easiest mistakes to make when decorating your home is to think that ‘more is more’. This is certainly not true: less is always more.
Think about it this way: if you were to take away half of your ornaments right now and were to leave only the very best 50% in your home, then you would immediately have greatly improved the average quality of the items decorating your surfaces. It’s better to have a few nice ornaments than hundreds of tacky one.
At the same time, by removing items from your surfaces, you will instantly make those surfaces look cleaner (and they will be easier to clean) and you will make the whole room look lighter as more light comes in through the window. The secret to great interior design is really subtraction – not addition!
Traffic Lanes
Traffic lanes are the routes through your home that you take often. For instance it’s the route from one door to another, or from the kitchen to your dining table. These parts of your home will be walked regularly, so as you might imagine it is very important that you remove clutter from them in order to be able to move around freely without bumping into things. It can also help on an unconscious level to see routes to where you want to be are not blocked.
Alignment
I’m not writing that you shouldn’t clash colours here, because it’s actually not always true and because when it is true, it’s obvious.
Just as bad as clashing colours badly though, is to clash alignments. In other words, to have two items that are almost, but not quite parallel. This is similar to having two colours that are almost, but not quite, the same hue.
Why’s it so important? Because the human brain likes to identify patterns – and when you spot a pattern that is almost, but not quite there, it can become almost like a ‘mental itch’ that makes it impossible to relax.
Forgetting the Outside Factors
How you design your home shouldn’t just be based on the space you have inside to work with. It should be based as well on the light outside that will come in through the windows at specific angles, and on the slight gradient of the floor. It should be based on where the air vents are, and on how one room leads into another. Don’t just think in terms of the room itself, but also the wider space it inhabits.