Whether you’re moving into a brand-new home or are looking to freshen up the look of your current space, designing a room can be an exciting and fun DIY project. But it can also be overwhelming and confusing if you don’t know where to begin. Here, we break down the basics of how to design a room into seven manageable steps, along with some insight from interior design professionals.
1. Get Inspired
Maybe you have an idea of what you want your space to look like. Maybe you have no clue at all. Either way is fine. Part of the fun with room design is getting inspired by other interior design trends and aesthetics to figure out what will work for your home.
2. Decide on the Purpose of Your Space
Yes, there are some rooms like the kitchen, bathroom and home office that are already designed with a distinct purpose in mind. But even then, how do you want the room to function and flow? Do you want your kitchen to be the place where family and friends gather as you prepare meals? Do you want your bathroom to resemble a tranquil oasis as you’d find at a high-end spa? Design your space accordingly.
3. Choose an Anchor Element
Like the name suggests, an anchor element is something that anchors or ties the room together. It could be a piece of furniture, like a desk in a home office, or it could be a sectional sofa in a living room. It could even be a striking piece of wall art that serves as a jumping-off point for the rest of the room’s color palette.
4. Select a Color Palette
If your anchor element is a particular color, you could use it to choose a complementing or contrasting color palette for the rest of the room. You could simply decorate your room in shades of your favorite color for a monochromatic approach. Or, you could see to it that every color of the rainbow is represented somewhere in the space.
5. Select and Arrange Furniture
Furniture not only provides a comfortable place to sit and relax, but the way you arrange it helps determine the flow and layout of the space, especially if you’ve got an open-concept floor plan. Assess what is important to you such as comfortable seating, storage and durability and shop with your must-haves in mind.
6. Design a Lighting Scheme
Lighting design for your home need not be as complicated as that for a theatrical production. But assuming you’d prefer not to grope around in the dark, you’ll want to have the appropriate lighting for your space. This could be hardwired fixtures like track lighting or ceiling fans with bulbs, or it might be individual lamps placed on surfaces like end tables or desks.
7. Decorate
Many consider this to be the best part, not only because it’s fun to shop for individual pieces of decor, but because you can take this part at your own pace. You might want to fully decorate a room down to every throw pillow and area rug from the beginning, or you might want to start using the space before you are inspired to decorate it.