The Fabulous Home… Create Room Themes in 5 Easy Steps
On this segment of the Fabulous Home, we tackle the sometimes overwhelming concept of working with themes. I mean, who doesn’t want to come home to a beautiful haven that looks as though David Bromstad stopped by the house while they were away? I most certainly do! Well, I have good news. You don’t have to hold a design degree like David or win an impossibly strenuous contest as Emily Henderson did when she stomped all over her competition on Design Star a few years back. All you really need is to know what you love and how to work elements of that obsession into your room design.
I call this design Butterflies in Paris
1. Start with a focal point – In the Butterflies in Paris design, we chose the Eiffel Tower as a focal point. From there, we added elements of the wonderfully intriguing Paris into our design.
2. Choose two main colors – I would suggest sticking to two hues, especially in the early stages of the design, simply because it’s too easy to get overwhelmed by this stage of the design process.
3. Tone down a color saturated design in a room by using white pieces – My home is filled with color. Deep colors. We remodeled the entire house in the style of a villa called Bramasole, Author Frances Mayes’s beautiful home in Tuscany.
4. Brighten a white design by using splashes of color – There’s a reason David Bromstad’s show Color Splash has survived so many years. And that’s because he truly knows how to make any palette work inside a room. Gone are the days when everything had to be either an all white design or a monochrome mish-mash of color. Experiment with both. I love color, but there’s a reason they say there can be too much of a good thing.
5. Use small elements associated with your focal point to tie everything together. In our featured room, we chose to use the Eiffel Tower as our focal point. Think about it. What does the Eiffel Tower represent? Paris, of course. What other elements could we use to complete the room’s design? Paris is just one city of many gorgeous locations in France. I envision scrolls and gorgeous fleur-de-lis and soft pastels and butterflies when I think of France.
For my bedroom’s redesign, I intend to use elements of the Mediterranean. But instead of using pastels for my walls, I’m choosing a richer Tuscan design that uses elements of rich shades of brown. I’ll keep you posted on my progress!
If you decide to try out a few of the tips I mentioned in this article, then please drop by and let us know!
