Erin Napier Is Bringing Back This 18-Year-Old Decorating Trick (Use It in Every Room!)
It’s hard to imagine life before Pinterest. The inspiration platform has become a go-to for compiling design ideas and organizing your thoughts and plans in one space. But Erin Napier and her daughter are making a case for bringing back the OG Pinterest: vision boards.
In a recent Instagram post, Napier shared that her daughter Helen is learning how to pull together design inspiration the old-fashioned way and, I don’t know about you, but they’re making me want to get out an old stack of magazines and a glue stick.
“Old-school Pinterest with my old Cottage Livings,” Napier captioned the video she shared to her feed. Helen is expertly compiling pics of furniture, bedding, and even windows and doors from Napier’s collection of Cottage Living magazines that all fit her “vintage” vision.
Who didn’t used to do this as a kid? The nostalgia is real.
“I used to cut pictures out of the Sears catalog and paste them into cardboard box ‘houses’ for my Barbies,” one person commented on Napier’s post. “My own Barbie dream house!”
“I’ve done this forever, and I still have clippings of houses and rooms from 25 to 30 years ago,” another person wrote. “The dreams you can dream and pictures you can touch make all the difference. Go Helen go!”
And someone else added, “Nothing like tearing a good picture from a magazine.”
Vision boards first became popularized as a trend in 2006 when, according to The Wall Street Journal, author Rhonda Byrne’s self-help book The Secret introduced her readers and the general public to the idea of manifesting. Her logic was that the law of attraction coupled with positive thinking would bring positive experiences into a person’s life. She recommended vision boards as one tool to do that, and it’s since become an incredibly popular means of manifesting what you want creatively.
It’s true that online interior design tools like Pinterest, Canva, Spoak, and more make it easy to source and collect images that fit your vision. But the act of actually clipping pictures and assembling them on one page can really bring your unique vision to life and help you get specific about your likes and dislikes. You literally get to cut (and cut out!) any images that don’t spark joy.
Plus, you can hang the vision board on the wall of a room to better see how your idea works with the space you have — as great as online tools are, it’s hard to physically see how things feel and look in your space and when you’re doing it all virtually.
If Napier has made you want to go analog with your design ideas and spend more time with the images that strike inspiration, it’s time to start flipping, cutting, and gluing and let nostalgia take charge. And by signing up to be a member of Apartment Therapy, you’ll have free access to hundreds and thousands of House Tour images and ideas to get you started. I can’t wait to see your boards!