Keep Calm and Use Neutrals

The secret to the feeling of home is to create a space that represents who you are-- your personality, your dreams, and your inspirations. Expressing the complexity of a person through a single object is at best, a challenge, and understanding the interdisciplinary art of interior design provides so many ways to accomplish this task.

There are few more common, daunting tasks: starting with a vacant white box and trying to make it feel like home.

One of the greatest challenges of personal interior design is trying to cram every aspect of who you are into a dish, a paint swatch, an Ikea laptop cart. The only progress this leads to is to becoming overwhelmed and deciding that the task is impossible, your ambition dwindles, and you find yourself skipping the painter's tape, buying every blue lamp at Target, and an "Italian villa" tapestry.


The trick to sanity in developing an interior design is developing a base palette of colors to work from. As per the Sherwin Williams color forecast for 2013, we recommend starting with some expensive looking neutrals, many of which are featured in this collection of colors called "Honed Vitality". After you've decided two-three baseline colors, select one-two vibrant colors to feature throughout the space. These will be used in accent pieces. Take color theory interpretations with a grain of salt, but here's a pretty great resource for learning about color in interiors: http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-meaning.html

That's it! You've got your color scheme nailed down.

Next, we'll discuss how to select furniture and objects to fill your space.