Decorating Tips

Formal vs Casual  | Styles  | Start Decorating  | A Decorating Plan

Decorating begins with determining the purpose of the room.  Is it formal or casual and which decorating style will be used? 

Before you can decorate a room, you must know who you are.  PERSONAL STYLE determines many things and knowing your own personal style is a matter of realizing what you like and dislike.  Visit different areas of our store, and other stores too, to get an idea of what works for you.  Look for areas that show the entire room, furniture, rugs, tables, and lamps. You can also visit home decorating web sites Review magazines and tear out pictures of your favorites.  Arrange the pictures and look for common elements.  These are your personal style.  A certain look, style, mood, or color scheme you like.  Once you determine your personal style, you are ready for the next step of determining the main PURPOSE of the room 

What will you use the room for?   How many people will use the room?  What is the main purpose of the room? Pick from the list:

• Relaxing
• Watching TV/Reading
• Formal entertaining
• Informal gatherings
• Playing board/family games
• Hobbies
• Eating/Snacking
• Home Office
• Studying
• Guest bedroom
• Other

Analyze the room with the idea of noting what’s wrong with the room.  Does it have enough space, is the lighting adequate, does it have enough storage, is privacy an issue, require special lighting and space considerations?  These questions will help you define the purpose of the room. 

Think in Terms Of Numbers

How many people live in the house?  How old are the kids?  Do you expect the size of the family to change?  Do relatives or friends visit frequently?  Does your family have any special needs?  Have any pets? 

Formal vs Casual   Top

There are two main choices for any room, formal or casual. Many want their living room formal for entertaining guests, while keeping their family room casual and comfortable. Once you have decided between casual and formal, there are four styles to choose from.

Truly formal rooms have an opulent quality because of the sheen, luster and twinkle of the furnishings used in them. Fabrics used in formal upholstery and draperies are tightly woven of lustrous, fine yarns with little or no texture. Leathers have a shinny glazed finish. A formal room’s accessories are usually made of brass, glass, chrome, cut crystal, porcelain, china, or marble. Due to their dark shinny finish, polished hardwoods such as cherry, mahogany, walnut, or rosewood are considered more formal furnishings.

Casual rooms use matte (not shinny) finishes and textures. Generally, arms and cushions are much more rounded. Casual fabrics are woven more loosely, with thicker, lofty yarns of a more textured, touchy-feel nature. A casual room's accessories are usually stone, aged metals, baskets, textured pottery and carved wood pieces. Tables and wood furniture are usually built from lighter colored woods with little or no sheen, like oak, pine, ash, or maple. Leathers used also have a matte finish.

Styles   Top

There are many variations of the basic four styles. Traditional, Contemporary, American Traditional, Transitional.

Traditional

Traditional styling is fashioned after antiques made before 1900. This period includes designs influenced by people such as King Louis XIV of France, King George, Queen Anne, Queen Victoria, or furniture designers like Chippendale of Sheraton. Other traditional styles are named after specific styles of architecture, i.e., Gothic, Baroque. Whatever the traditional style, attention is paid to detail. Fluting, beading, and delicate carvings are often found on the wood furniture. Gold leaf picture frames, statues (Rodin’s “Thinker”) and realistic oil paintings (the “Mona Lisa”) work well in traditional rooms, as do porcelain pottery and china. Sofas and chairs are often upholstered with velvet, mask, prints and jacquards and can be complemented by coordinating pillows with a fringe or cord trim. Furniture is styled with camel, bustle or channel backs, button tufting and nail head trim. Most seating has kick-pleat skirting with rolled arms, and is finely tailored.

Contemporary

Contemporary is really just the opposite of traditional. It’s simple, refreshing, and its design is based on function. Contemporary includes all styles from 1900 until today (Bauhaus, Arts& Crafts, Art Deco, and Art Nouveau, to name a few). Accessories are larger and more abstract. The wall art is usually larger and fewer are used. Table and wall units have clean, crisp lines with little detailing or trim, sofa and chairs have no skirts, seldom have welt trim, never have buttons and are generally bigger, often with overstuffed cushions.

Country

Country is a casual version of traditional, incorporating the rustic feel of the early settlers and pioneer days. Picture tables of bleached pine and plump sofas with rounded arms and ruffled skirts. Accents of braided rugs, Folk art, heirloom quilts or copper pots create a room that is warm, natural, welcoming and unpretentious.

Transitional

Transitional furniture mixes contemporary with traditional. For example, contemporary patterned or textured upholstery would be applied to a traditionally styled sofa. Or, a contemporary table design would be constructed in a traditional, burl0patterened wood. Even slight accents make a difference: a contemporary styled sofa with large rolled arms can become transitional by incorporating a tall dressmaker skirt in its design. Modern Shaker furniture is an example of transitional styling. 

Start Decorating   Top

Begin, Piece by Piece

The sofa is a perfect place to begin. When choosing the size and style, keep in mind the size of your family and the main function of the room. Enjoy entertaining friends and family? A motion modular theater group might be what you need. Have overnight guests often? A multi-functional sleep sofa could make life easier. Squeezed for space? Try a lave seat of an apartment-size sofa.

Add More Seats

Using the sofa as a guide, think about adding recliners, rockers, occasional furniture, love seats, classic wingback chairs and ottomans to the picture. Varying seating not only complements a room, but allows for different personal seat preferences as well. It also adds more settings for informal conversations.

OK, Now Fill In The Blanks

Bookcases, coffee tables and entertainment centers complete a room. To maintain your rooms balance, keep in mind appropriate proportions when selecting the kinds of pieces. And don’t forget that often the same piece of furniture can serve several purposes: a table may double as a desk, an antique wooden ice box might also serve a display area or a cabinet, etc.

Storage

Most homes have too much stuff, and not enough places to store it. Where are you going to store all the things you don’t want to see everyday? Select storage units in terms of your needs, as well as overall size and construction. Modern furniture will often have pullout drawers for blankets, magazines and remote controls.

Let There Be Light

Even well designed rooms seem kind of dull without proper lighting. When choosing lighting fixtures, think of the different needs light serve. General lighting from indirect sources (recessed and ceiling-mounted fixtures) provides a sweeping wash of light and comfortable background.

Task lighting from table and floor lamps allows you to on a given activity. Tract or accent lights instantly add drama, directing the eye to artwork or special pieces.

A Decorating Plan   Top

There are a lot of things to consider when decorating a room, which is why it’s smart to put it all on paper.

Measure Your Room

Using graph paper with a grid, draw the perimeter of the room. You will need several views and be sure to include the height, width, window locations, doors, fireplaces, etc. Keep these measurements with you when you shop.

Identify a Focal Point

Decide which area will be the center of attention: a fireplace, window view, cocktail table, TV or whatever you want for the highlight. Once you’ve decided, your new furnishings will grow from and enhance this “center”.

Start With What You Have

Measure current furniture you plan to incorporate into the room’s new décor. Using graph paper, and a consistent scale, cut out templates representing your current furniture and pieces you may want to purchase. Based on your room’s function and capacity, the templates will help you determine what type of furnishings you need to shop for.

Anticipate Traffic Patterns

A good room arrangement allows unhindered traffic flow. As you create conversation areas or areas for watching TV, be sure people can easily pass around these areas, not through them.

For comfortable passage, allow about 2 feet between furnishings. Doors opening into your room should have at least 3-foot clearance.

Make the Necessary Arrangements

Experiment with different floor plans, keeping in mind the function of the room. Think about balance as you move the templates around the grid. Heavy pieces should be spread about the room instead of concentrating in one area. To break up a large room and create multiple centers of activity, move furniture away from walls.

If you have a small space to work with, try to place less furniture in the room, or use open-armed chairs and smaller pieces, like an apartment size sofa, to create a more spacious feeling.

The Rules of Three

To combine colors, patterns and textures effectively, a good idea is to “think in threes.” Identify the three major colors in your sofa upholstery, and use them as a basis around which to build your color scheme.

Then, repeat each of those colors throughout the room a minimum of three times. You can add color instantly with coordinating throw pillows and area rugs. If your sofa is neutral, select your three colors from your room’s paintings, vases, rugs, quilts, or other accessories you plan to put in the room.

Choose Correlating Fabrics and Finishes

A range of fabric patterns peppered throughout a room adds interest and appeal. If you stay within your color family, you can put together fabrics with entirely different patterns (a boldly stripped sofa with a floral wing chair) to create dramatic results. A similar mixture of fabric textures can create a more formal or casual emphasis. While matte leather is generally casual, when placed with formal fabrics it takes on a more formal tone.

Experiment with a wide range of leather and fabrics swatches to create the overall feeling your room requires. The tone of your wood, metal, or stone furnishings should complement your upholstery and help set you room’s overall formal or casual tone. Generally, the shinier the finish, the more formal the tone. (Metals now come in a variety of finishes from formal to casual, traditional or contemporary, dark to light.) As with wood, the matte the metal’s finish, the more casual the effect. Heavily textured stone tables are casual, whereas polished marble is definitely formal.

Floors, Walls, and Windows

Floor coverings create a varying sense of space. From durable coverings like masonry and wool to the wealth of carpeting textures and composite flooring varieties, clearly a number of choices exist. Choose your floor based on formality of your room, the amount of traffic you anticipate and the overall feel you want to create.

Wall coverings come next. Dark wall colors or more ornate patterns can be quite dramatic but tend to close in a room. Simple patterns or light colors create a feeling of expansive walls and soaring ceilings. Smooth walls lend a more formal feeling, while textured walls are more casual. Once again, decorate your walls to complement you room’s total décor.

Select window treatments the same way. Fabric coverings of a more formal nature like curtains, draperies, shades, and swags can be adapted to virtually every window shape and size. For a look that’s sleek, crisp, and casual, non-fabric shades such as blinds and shutters enhance a room in a far more subdued manner.

Don’t Forget to “Accessorize”

Give your room a personal touch. Pictures, paintings, mirrors, clocks, and other wall décor should fir the scale and proportion of the wall they hang on as well as harmonize with your furnishings. If you intend to hang a lot of pieces, lay them in groupings on the floor to get an idea of placement before putting any nails in the wall. A 4 to 6 inch space above seating pieces is typical.

When arranging tabletop accessories, consider their placement in relation to one another and the table, as well as to the room as a whole. Also, plants bring warmth while filling out open areas. Use them as finishing touches throughout your room.

Great! You are ready to begin creating a room where you’ll feel comfortable, and take pride in knowing you were responsible for putting it together. For more information or additional decorating help, stop by and visit Runge Furniture.