Ideas Inspiration

A new rug can be one of the most anxiety-inducing purchases you can make for your home. For one thing, even the small ones seem shockingly expensive. For another, once you understand the importance of rug size in creating a comfortable space (spoiler alert: bigger is better here) they become even more so. There’s also room use and orientation to contend with.

Homeowners: Lloyd Pierson and Laura Ginsburg Pierson Designer Name: Michelle Nussbaumer, Ceylon et Cie Location: Dallas, Texas As staunch supporters of color-soaked interiors, we can certainly get on board with a home that embraces a saturated scheme. So was the case for interior designer Michelle Nussbaumer’s lively pad for Lloyd and Laura Pierson, a young couple-turned-growing family in Dallas.

Last week I showed off some magical GIFS that took out—and added back in—specific types of architectural detail. This week, I’ve got even more, in a similar vein, to look at. Because we’re not all living in our dream homes, seeing how certain types of architectural details add character demonstrates that it may be totally worth the time, money and energy to consider adding them to your own home.

Charming in Charleston: Some of the Most Beautiful Homes

Are you the artful bohemian or a new traditionalist? Take this quiz to find out and don’t forget to share your results in the comments! Antsy for your results? Hang tight…they’re coming! Re-edited from a post that originally appeared 09.06.2017.

Color doesn’t have to be permanent…or even on the walls. It also doesn’t have to be super saturated or loud, either. These five renters added soft, subtle color to their homes—in ways that won’t prevent them from getting their security deposit back! From Katie, of Katie’s Shabby Chic St. Paul Apartment: “I am quite proud of my dining room table and chairs.

Though it may not be your dream material, black and white tiles can be a very affordable choice when you need new flooring in your kitchen. Need proof? These eight rooms look fantastic with black and white floors. From simple spaces to bold, accessorized rooms, let these kitchens and their checkered floors inspire your own home. As you look through these examples, pay attention to the tile size and layout orientation; you’ll see a surprising variety of looks in these rooms.

New does not always trump old. In fact, at Flea Style in Dallas, Texas, it never does. Come take a peek inside owner Brittany Cobb’s warm and inviting office full of well-loved treasures. Name: Brittany Cobb of Flea Style Location: Dallas, Texas Out with the new and in with the old! The transposed popular saying is the core of Brittany Cobb’s Flea Style. Brittany’s childhood was in many ways spent as a business tutorial and foreshadowing of what was to come.

Some artists make art not just of their canvases, but their entire homes. Today we’re taking a look at 3 incredibly creative homes of artists and designers, which will have you seeing your whole space in a completely different light.

The vintage kitchen features that came with your house or rental—old appliances, dated fixtures, interesting floor materials—aren’t always the choices you would have made if you had designed from scratch. But if you don’t have the money to renovate (or you rent and can’t) or don’t want to renovate, choose to work with your vintage features, not fight against them! These sixteen kitchens get it right.

There are two ways to work dramatic color into your home: Go for the whole wall, or use little splashes of color for a big effect. The latter takes much less time to achieve and is considerably cheaper (many of the ideas ahead call for just a sample pot of paint), yet it can still create an eye-catching display. The best part of painting a smaller area? It’s much easier to paint over if you change your mind or when it’s time to move out.

A blank wall can be an inspiring canvas waiting to painted with your style—or it can be a stop-you-in-your-tracks source of indecision. Let’s push past the wondering and see how various ideas work. Inside this post: the same empty wall filled with a variety of design elements, from paint to pattern to art and more. See how different decor choices affect the look and feel of a room.

While I love minimal, white-walled interiors with occasional bursts of color just as much as the next person, every once in a while it’s nice to spot something different — like this Little Venice apartment by Sera of London. It’s a little bit Bohemian, a little bit Miss Havisham, a little bit crumbly European chic, wholly different, and wholly refreshing.

Rental bathrooms are notoriously plagued by ugly (or just plain dated) design decisions. The good news is, there are some simple, reversible ways to cover up what you hate most about this room and add your own style to the space. Introducing color and pattern where you can, and choosing attractive storage lets you put your own touch on a temporary home. It may sound obvious, but in a small rental bathroom, the shower curtain is the first thing you should switch out.

Even though I now have the tiny, perfect apartment of my dreams, I haven’t stopped being fascinated with other people’s tiny, perfect apartments. And I’m particularly drawn to this apartment in Stockholm, which despite measuring only 193 square feet manages to be everything you want an apartment to be: airy, stylish, cozy, comfortable.

One of my favorite things about home design is the wonderful variety of ways in which clever designers have re-invented the chair. When you picture a chair you probably think of one of the traditional forms of the chair, with a back and a seat and legs.

A. Two sofas facing each other OR B. A sofa and love seat arranged in the traditional L-shaped arrangement?

For those collecting maximalists among us—who can’t have just one globe, camera, or milk glass goblet, but seem to amass them by the dozen—here are some creative ways to organize and live with the things you love. All of these ideas keep your most cherished items in sight, incorporating them seamlessly into your decor. This is probably going to become your new favorite spot in your home.

Many of us understand that adding art to a room can drastically alter its appearance. But there are so many ways you can use art to make a visual impact; making the decision on where to hang can be overwhelming. These room gifs represent common art-hanging questions—I’ve removed the artwork from the walls to show you just how powerful art can be when its used in the right place and at the optimum scale. Seeing is believing!

400 square feet may not seem like a lot — but that’s reckoning without the ingenuity of Swedish design. Thanks to a simple but very smart floor plan, this diminutive Swedish apartment makes living small look positively luxurious. It’s located in Stockholm, and was once available for sale (but sadly is no longer) from brokerage firm Husman Hagberg.

In tiny homes where a single room often serves multiple functions, color can separate a space into zones with different functions. If your bedroom is also your office and your living room is also your dining room, try using paint as a visual divider to section off areas—without sacrificing an inch of livable space.

Exposed pipes and radiators—the bane of apartment, loft, and refurbished factory dwellers everywhere. As if it wasn’t bad enough that they prevent you from nudging your bed directly against the wall, they interrupt the look of a space as they sweep across the wall or ceiling. Here’s some inspiration to help you make peace with your pipes by painting them, wrapping them, even hand-knitting them a colorful cozy.

There’s no denying that exposed brick walls always command attention. But what if you want to further enhance your beautiful brick? We’ve got wall decor ideas to help your enviable architectural detail command even more attention. Adding a subtle wash of white paint to a brick wall’s surface makes for a complex texture. The beautiful wall above seen in Rachel & Adam’s Cozy, Classic Clinton Hill Brownstone.

The home you grow up in influences not only your homekeeping habits, but your sense of style. It’s the “mother tongue” of home decor, the factor that surrounds you, gets into, and comes out of you. Here are four things I learned from my dear mother which influence my own surroundings to this day. Do the best you can with what you have. When my mother returned to the United States with two young children after seven years abroad, she was basically starting over.

Upgrading to a bigger space? Good on you! You’ll love waking up every morning without the guarantee of smashing your shins on the foot of the bed as you walk around it. But you might find your old stuff looks a little, well, small in that new, more spacious apartment.

Sometimes you fall in love with a piece of art, envision it in a certain perfect spot in your home…and are totally disappointed when it turns out to be too small. Don’t find another place for it just yet! There are four easy ways you can make a too-small piece of art seems bigger and bolder. Like the example above, using items like thick, textured rope or ribbon to “hang” the art can make it feel a lot more substantial than the actual pieces are.

When you’re decorating, you might feel pressure to add variety to your space by layering in as many different ideas or influences as you can. But, just like a wardrobe template, having a home decor “uniform” actually makes creating a beautiful space even easier. That’s a big lesson that I took away from Kristina & Jason’s Gorgeous, Graphic Australian Home.

Coat hooks. I mean… there’s not really much you can do there, right? (Wrong.) With one or two or 20 standard coat hooks and a little bit of ingenuity, you can create some pretty stellar little hallway hacks worthy of bearing an artsy label like “entryway installment” (rather than dull old coat rack).

We’re all kids at heart. So why can’t we decorate like children? Not to say we should start pinning up posters of teen idols or buying superhero sheets, but we should be able to channel the kind of reckless abandon of a child with a crayon and a coloring book. There are no rules, only color. This bold Chicago apartment seems to have it down, with three rule-breaking color details that are just rebellious enough to work for anyone, in any space.

Bathrooms have this bizarre disposition to be judged. Besides the whole peeking-in-the-medicine-cabinet trope, I guess we’re likely to evaluate people’s bathrooms because it’s the one place where we, as guests, get a chance to linger alone and really contemplate the personal style of the person who’s invited us over. For that reason, if you’re out to impress, the bathroom is one of the first rooms you need to work on.

Many a beautiful kitchen have been built on a foundation of pretty normal, neutral cabinetry. But if you ever have the opportunity to renovate a kitchen from scratch and add in something really spectacular in the realm of cabinetry, it’s like a shortcut to great style. Above: I’m sorry, but how cool is this oversized-pegboard-style upper cabinet area in this tall Amsterdam schoolhouse-turned apartment, from Dwell? We can see this evolving over time to be used exactly as you need.

It’s a unique problem, but no less worthy of attention than how to dress a gallery wall or what to do when your kitchen’s too small. The presence of a piano in the room can be seriously demanding on decor. Here are more than a dozen rooms who’ve mastered it. Do you have a piano at home?

We’ve always said that art is one of the most important elements in a room, one of the things that helps it feel complete. But this, like a lot of other decorating mantras, is more of a suggestion than a commandment, and as with a lot of other rules there are plenty of exceptions. Case in point: these eight rooms with no art (or very minimal art) and almost completely bare walls. Instead of seeming boring or incomplete these rooms read as balanced and delightfully minimal.

You guys. It’s February, the days are dark, and I really need some color in my life right now. I saw the photo above pop up on my Pinterest feed, and it was an immediate panacea to my mood: rich mustard yellow and pale mauve-pink is an unexpected, invigorating, and straight-up cheerful combination. Read on for more examples and ideas for this surprising duo.

What we have here is a dozen unabashed, Warhol- and Lichtenstein-inspired rooms that would look right at home in a pop art museum as they do inside these homes. If you love bright colors and retro styling, get thee to Pinterest and save these shots for later. It’s part aspiration and part inspiration. As big and bold as these rooms are, there are some pretty do-able ideas in here. Do you have any pop art-inspired pieces at home?

In a bit of a rut in the bedroom? I mean, design-wise? (We can’t help with the other thing.) Good news: We’ve collected eight creative, unconventional ideas that will surely refresh your space and give you something to really get excited over when you pop into bed each night. Above: We see a lot of rug layering in living rooms, but it’s fresh for the boudoir.

Why settle for an oversized piece of art when you could have a piece of art that covers the whole wall? These 11 murals will have a big, big impact—hang one on the wall and your decorating job is pretty much done. A quick note to start: a wall mural differentiates from wallpaper in that it does not repeat. It’s an entire scene stretch across a determined width, while wallpaper matches up and repeats indefinitely.

How much joy does your home bring you? Do you have a lot of design moments that make you smile? Do the rooms in your home showcase things that make you happy? Filling your home with visual joy doesn’t need to be a complicated task; we spotted seven easy (and affordable) ways to celebrate happiness using your home in one of our recent tours. (Pictured above) Pick a corner, any corner! Can be a guest room that you don’t go into every day. Can be a cramped bathroom. The laundry room.

Track shelving might be the most common in a pantry, office or garage, but if you know how to style it right, it can be beautiful enough to sit front and center right in the living room. Just check out these eight rooms, which each put their own spin on the track shelf thing. Above: Mounting art to the wall between the shelf standards gives this wall unit from Old Brand New a more upscale look.

Let’s face it: as much as we’d all like to think of ourselves as the sort of people who throw dinner parties all the time, the formal dining room is mostly obsolete. So what’s a modern family to do? You can set up a dining table and chairs in there and then let stuff collect on the table (I’m pretty sure this is the default), or you can take it one step further and transform your dining room into a multi-purpose space that you’ll use every day.

It's a versatile workhorse you can use almost anywhere.

...and one that's too big.

Are you looking to carve out a small little spot in a corner of your living room or dining room (or maybe even bedroom) for a work or hobby space? Just a little bit of room that’s all for you to flex your creative muscles? You might find inspiration for what should be in that corner from this beautifully appointed home office set-up.

Humans don’t hibernate, but we do an approximation of it. If you live in the northern climes, chances are there are a few months where you just barely leave the house. During these months your home becomes more important than ever before: you want it to be a place that’s cozy, that’s welcoming, a place where you would feel good being trapped in a blizzard.

Art — framed, sculptural or on canvas — makes a stylish statement to hang on the wall above your bed. Your bed is a natural focal point in your bedroom, so deciding what to do above it is an important task. Go beyond “art,” if you dare, with these eleven stylish ideas that will definitely wow in your bedroom. Create a pattern easier than painting by using vinyl wall stickers. In the bedroom above, a gold polka dot pattern makes for one serious above-the-bed look.

Benches look great in hallways and under windows. They function perfectly in an entryway. They’re a surprising but useful addition to a dining room furniture set. But in living rooms they’re often to relegated to the sidelines — along the walls — and usually housing some decor vignette. There’s nothing wrong with benches in your living room looking pretty. But they can do so much more.