Photo Credit: cottobro via www.pexels.com

Home decor is a fickle beast. One minute things look great and everyone’s complimenting your oversized vases, the next you’re wondering what in the world you were thinking with that fake palm tree in the hallway. Are pastels ‘in’ this year? Is red making a revival? Who knows. But one thing is for certain. You can always rely on a few perennial style tips to renew the look in your living space, regardless of how far down the rabbit hole you went with your last efforts. 

Canvas Prints

Canvas prints exist to give any room a focal point (check out these canvas prints for ideas). If your living space has lost touch with all sense of momentum, with disjointed break out areas facing in different directions and unfulfilled enclaves of style standing alone in pockets of inadequacy, you need to regain that focus.

A canvas print is a superb way to draw the eye and filter the direction in which you want your guests to align their attention. Place the print on your feature wall, typically side-on to your TV. The furniture should face the TV, with the canvas print providing a sort of funnel of interest along the wall towards the gogglebox.

But how to choose a print? Simple. You need to select a photo from your extensive phone library that shows a time when something of note was happening. For example, avoid any photos of you and your family pointlessly grinning at the camera just because somebody said “say cheese!” How dull. Instead, opt for something ‘in-the-moment’. Not all of us have a photo taken at the exact moment we jumped out of the plane on a parachute jump, but think along those “action shot” lines.

Area Rugs

As the name suggests, area rugs aren’t just any rugs. They’re great big opulent rugs that dominate a floor space and tie in the room.

You may think that open floor space looks neat and tidy. Many people get rid of their coffee tables for that exact reason, before buying a new coffee table to once again fill the space once they realise the room looks cold and bare. Cut out the coffee-table yo-yo-ing from your front room style diet and instead switch to something much more filling – an area rug.

There’s no one colour or material that will work with every room, so your fashion sense is going to have to step up, be brave, and take one for the team. Even animal prints could work wonders, depending on what else is going on in the room.

Light It Up

Lighting is so much more than one powerful bulb in the middle of the ceiling to help you find the remote at night. There are three types of lighting. And you need to get all three of them right to revive your living space. They are task lighting, ambient lighting, and accent lighting.

Task lighting is covered by the ceiling fixture, for the most part. But for ambient lighting you need lamps, and accent lighting could involve furniture lights or uplights/downlights spaced out across your shelving, cabinets, and bookcases.

So, remember. Prints, rugs, and lights. You can’t go far wrong.