How To Choose The Right Furnishings For Your Home

How to choose the right furnishings for your home.

When it comes to choosing home furnishings for your living space, there are several important things you need to consider if you want to get it right the first time around. The way we furnish and decorate our homes says an awful lot about us as individuals, and furnishings are a way of stamping your mark on a space and making it your own. They also, however, must be practical as far as being the right size and shape for your room. If you’re trying to decide on how to furnish your home, here are a few of the top things you should think about before you part with your money!

The importance of choosing a theme

Before you even start to look at home interiors and furnishings, you need to decide on a theme. You could go for a contemporary look, which might involve metallic or angular pieces of furniture, or take the traditional route which makes use of antique pieces, dark red woods and lampshades with tassels or pleats. If you want to inject some quirky personality then you might embrace the eclectic look, with artisan or ethnic pieces of furniture and accessories. The choice is entirely down to personal taste, but it pays to give it a little thought before you start browsing.

Determining how you use your furniture

Think carefully about how you want to use a room and what purpose the furniture you’re choosing will serve. Items which are going to get regular use need to be hardy and stand up to day-to-day wear and tear, whereas those which are purely decorative can be a little more fragile in their construction. If you’re looking at sofas, for instance, then something made from leather will be hard-wearing and wipe clean if there are kids around. If there aren’t and you will rarely use that sofa, then it’s safe to opt for a paler shade in a less hard-wearing fabric.

Starting with a statement piece

The best way to furnish a room is often to start with a statement piece and build outwards, whether that’s the table in the dining room or the sofas in the living room. This item of furniture takes centre stage and will probably dictate the layout of the rest of your furnishings, so choose something which is made from high-quality materials and will last and be loved long into the future. Once you have that statement piece, it’s a case of looking for things to complement it.

Bringing personality to your home decor

Don’t be scared to mix your furniture up a bit. Sometimes buying multiple pieces in the same design or materials can leave a room looking a little bland or uninspired, so introducing variety can bring a space to life. That might mean choosing a different material, different shade of wood or completely contrasting the colour of your sofa with the colour of your lighting when selecting a lampshade. However you decide to spice things up, it can bring personality into your home decor.

Take an outsider’s perspective

Try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes for a few minutes and think about how your furniture might look from an outsider’s perspective. Our home furnishings say a lot about us, as does the way we present them. You want to ensure your home lighting shows your furniture at its best, so think not just about the pieces you’re buying but how you’ll position them in the room for maximum effect.