8 Home decor styling tips - Design hacks you should know | Clean & Decorate

Hey everyone, welcome back to my channel. My name is Kristen and today I'm going to be sharing with you eight different home decor styling tips for a beautiful looking home. These are different tricks and hacks and rules that interior designers, home decorators use for a perfect looking room every single time. So if you're looking to redecorate your home or just need some help on how to get started, what to do, how to do it right, this video is just for you. So if you enjoy watching and find this helpful, make sure you give this video a big thumbs up and hit that like button and let's go ahead and jump right into it. So I think we should start with pillows. Pillows are absolutely the easiest, most affordable way of really amping up the look of your space and making it look really well designed. Firstly, it's really affordable because you can buy inserts, just plain inserts to go inside of pillow covers. And you can continuously change out pillow covers to really match with your decor that's happening, to match with the season, to match with new color palettes that you're bringing in. So definitely consider doing pillow inserts and pillow covers instead of buying whole new pillows. When styling your pillows, remember to style them in groups of three, but also at different sizes and textures. A lot of us have the standard 18 by 18 square pillows across our couch, maybe across our bed, and it looks a little plain and flat and just doesn't look too wow. So if you want to get that wow factor, layer in a large pillow behind it, lumbar pillow across, bring in those different shapes and sizes, and it will definitely make it look a lot more dynamic. When I'm decorating with pillows, I always think about mixing different textures in and color and pattern and really getting a layered look so that every little piece stands out in its own separate way, but you get an overall beautiful looking space. You could also karate chop your pillow to make it look really perfect. I know it sounds really weird, but almost every designer does it. I learned it when I was in a design internship. You literally karate chop your pillow right down the middle, you get this nice pinched look in the middle, it kind of looks really plush, and then you pull the corners tight so that they look tapered. That makes your pillow look like it's professionally placed, and you can easily do that in your own home. All right, this styling trick is so easy. I know you guys can do it, and it's just something that makes such a big difference for some reason. It's really just styling in groups of three. It always kind of creates a nice triangular diagonal look because I use things of a large scale, a medium scale, and a small scale, and that really gives this dynamic look. When you bring together just two items, sometimes it just looks incomplete, so adding in a third element really makes a drastic difference and makes the decorating look like decorating instead of just clutter that might have just been left around. You can implement this in pretty much every single place around your home, decorating in groups of three with your pillows, your coffee table decor, your mantel decor, shelf decor. It works everywhere, and it works every single time, so just make sure that you think about scale, texture, color, so that you're not placing three of the exact same things together. So you can repeat that all around your home, and you'll get this beautiful grouping that looks intentional and well-designed. Here's a really easy way of implementing the group of three but in two different ways in the same area. This is a group of three with the candles, the vase, and the mirror, but also a group of three across the table. So you have two different elements of the group of three, and all together it looks so cohesive and well-placed. All right, now on to wall decor. Wall decor can be tricky, it can be done really wrong or really right, so a really easy rule of thumb to follow when hanging your wall art is to hang your wall art at 57 inches, so that's about four foot seven, and that is known as the average human eye height. So when you're scanning around the room, your artwork and your wall art is really hung at an appropriate height that your eyes can see. Sometimes when wall art is hung too high, it looks really separated from your decor and your furniture, and it looks like it's kind of floating, so try and follow that 57 inch height and your space will drastically change. This also works for hanging gallery walls, so if you don't know where to start, start at that midpoint at 57 inches, and you can build out from there to really have a balanced look. And remember, don't put your picture hanger or your nail at 57 inches, have 57 inches be the midpoint of your photo, so you're gonna have to hang your little wall hanger a little higher than that to make sure that it ends up right in the middle. See, it's all about tricking your eye, it's all about what feels natural to look at, so if you're finding that something's really standing out, maybe that's just a little sign that it's not working. So bring everything down to eye level, make it look cohesive so that the whole space can really come together. All right, now let's talk about pattern. Patterns are kind of scary to work with sometimes, they're pretty intimidating, sometimes they can look really messy, so a few rules of thumb that you should think about when styling with patterns is scale and type of pattern. So scale is all about maybe pulling in one large scale pattern and bringing in two small scale patterns, so that you're not doing three overwhelming sizes of patterns and your eye just doesn't know where to look. You should focus on one pattern, have that be the highlight, and mix in some smaller scale patterns to kind of balance out a textured look. This is usually easy to do when you have a big pattern rug or a large scale wallpaper pattern. When you're decorating in a room like that, make sure that your pillows or your little accent pieces have smaller scale patterns on them and it will definitely work for you. Now when you're mixing in those different scale patterns, think about what kind of patterns they are. Usually it works well if you do a geometric pattern mixed with a floral pattern, maybe a solid, so that you have this variation and they're not fighting against each other. So having all the different pattern pieces have their own little moment is definitely the way to go. So remember to think about the size of your patterns, the type of patterns, and you will definitely be safe. All right, now onto something that's really big. This is something I always love to follow when I'm decorating a room and it's balance. Balance and symmetry. Really bringing in elements that are going to allow your eye to be calm and look at the space as a whole instead of being drawn in one direction or the other. This can be done in every single direction you look around a room. Your sofa can be balanced, your artwork can be balanced, your lighting can be balanced, the use of plants can be balanced, your furniture placement can be balanced. So really all elements of the space really have to have some kind of balance to them. When you see a room that's not balanced and one side of the space maybe has all of the furniture on it or it's only decorated on one side, then it feels very unbalanced and it doesn't look right really. So when you bring in some different elements that kind of match each other on both sides of the space but aren't the exact same, that's when you get a really nice touch of balance. Another thing to really think about when styling a space is scale. And scale is pretty much just the size of things. Again, you don't normally notice scale until you see it way off. So if you have something that's way too big for the space or way too small for a space, it looks really off and there's just a better way of doing it. So it's really important to measure out your space and pick items that are perfect for your ceiling height, for the size of your room, in comparison to your furniture. I feel like a really common thing that I see is artwork that's too small. Things that look like they're just kind of floating, they're not really anchoring anything. When you correct that and you do appropriate size pieces for your spaces, you will see a huge difference and your space will look really well designed. All right, now let's talk about color. Color can go really both ways. It can go really good or really bad and it's really all about the little rules and little design tricks that you should follow when using color. So firstly, you can use color and do it in a very monochromatic way. So you're using maybe all blues and doing shades of blue and they're all similar but kind of contrasting and you get layers to the color. So that looks really cool, really bold if you want to do a lot of color. Or you can do pops of color, have a really neutral palette and bring in one pop of color. And again, you can use different shades of that singular color to get a really beautiful layered look. Or you could bring in multiple colors and really work off of complementary colors. You don't have to think about the bright obvious kind of primary colors like red and green and blue and yellow, but think about the shades that come along with those colors. So maybe it's navy and a neutral color. Those really go well together. If you're working with color, it really helps by balancing the colors around the space so that there's not too much color on one end and not in others. You can really use color around a room in different elements like artwork, pillows, rugs, furniture, wall color and it will really bring your space together. Alright and lastly, let's talk about something that a lot of us want to achieve and that is a cohesive looking home. That can be really hard to achieve sometimes because people decorate in phases, they put more energy into one place than the other and sometimes it's hard to really get a cohesive space. So an easy way that I found to really create a cohesive looking home is work within the same color palette. That will definitely help really even out color and style around your home and it will really balance out the entire look of your space. Right when you walk through the door, that same color palette should be used throughout your home. You know bedrooms can be an exception because sometimes you want to have a lot of fun with the design in there so those rooms that you can close the door to can be different but when you're thinking about your floor plan, the dining room, the living room, the kitchen, the hallway, the entryway, all of those things should really flow together. Having a cohesive home is really all about consistency so if you keep that consistent color, consistent texture running throughout the home in different ways, you will absolutely end up with a cohesive looking home. Alright so that's it for my home decor styling tips that I absolutely think you should know about. Try them in your space if you're redecorating or doing a little makeover. Think about all these different elements. Use it as a little checklist and you will absolutely get a beautiful looking space. There's kind of a little formula when it comes to interior design but it's also all about having fun and doing what you like so if you don't want to follow these, definitely don't. Do your own thing but these are just little things that you should think about if you want to create a really perfect looking space. Anyways let me know down below in the comments what design tip is your favorite, which one you want to implement into your home, or which ones you already are implementing. If I missed out on any design tips that we should all know about, definitely comment them down below so we can all check them out. If you enjoyed watching, make sure you give this video a big thumbs up and hit that like button and make sure you guys are subscribed to my channel and have my notifications all the way turned on so you never miss my upcoming videos. I have so many room makeovers coming, specifically bedroom makeovers, maybe even my bedroom makeover, so I'm really excited. I've got a lot of work to do but make sure you guys are here for it. I also just uploaded the backyard makeover so if you missed that, definitely go and check that out. We used all home decor interior design elements in there to really create a perfect looking backyard space so if you're looking for some inspiration on that, definitely check that out. So click that red subscribe button down below and make sure you guys have my notifications turned on so you never miss those upcoming videos. Love you guys so much and I'll see you in my next one. Bye!