If you believe in high drama and gorgeous rooms, you need these design principles to keep your layers of fancy working together!
About the Episode:
I’ll assume that you probably like a decent amount of drama in your home (if not, you at least appreciate the drama in MY house!). There are three simple secrets to designing dramatic rooms that don’t just make your head spin. It’s an art, but you can learn it!
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- How visual weight impacts the dynamic of your interior decorating
- Why a solid print fabric is not busy ENOUGH in my house (but it might be PERFECT for your house)
- What it means to have balance (and how it’s not the same thing as symmetry)
And so much more!
Resources Mentioned:
Follow me on Instagram @FarmhouseVernacular!
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to the Vernacular Life Podcast, where we talk about anything and everything that goes on in our turn of the century folk Victorian farmhouse. I’m your host, Paige. And if you’ve been following along with me for any amount of time, on either Instagram or YouTube, or maybe on the blog, or even here on this podcast, you really know that I’m a very big fan of high drama interiors.
If you’re looking for subtle rooms and neutral tones, there’s a lot of great resources out there for that. I’m not one of them. I love bold colors, and bold patterns, and lots of drama and lots of almost theatric decorations in my house. And this is just my personal preference, I just really like the way rooms feel when they have a very, very big personality.
So today I wanted to talk to you about a few design principles. I use that word very loosely, because I am not a trained designer by any means. But I wanted to talk to you about a few design principles, that I kind of realized that I follow, when setting up these rooms. Now, this has been a little bit of a reverse engineered situation, because I very much decorate on gut feeling.
I can look at something and know when it’s not quite right, or when it needs a little bit more this or a little bit more that, and only after the fact can I look at it and say, “Oh, this is not quite right, because this thing is out of proportion,” or, “This is out of balance.” So looking at some of the rooms that I am very happy with, I was able to kind of go backwards and figure out what makes them so appealing to me, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
So, why do I love dramatic room so much? Well, I am a rather dramatic individual, and I find it really fun when a room has a personality. I like walking into a room and being made to feel a certain way, whether that’s opulent, or cozy, or stately, or calm, or collected or sophisticated, I love when a room has a mood and that just makes me really happy.
So with each of the rooms in this house, there has been a definite mood that the room is asking for. This doesn’t have to be how you do it. You don’t need rooms that yell at you, if the that’s not what gives you peace and comfort and calm in your own house. These principles will work pretty much no matter what your style is. It’s just a matter of how loud some of these principles are, and how aggressively they yell at you, or how muted they are.
And as with most things we do, this is very flexible. These are just guidelines, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t break them if you have a piece that you particularly love, or if you have a room layout that’s just not working the way that you want it to. These rules are kind of made to be broken. But if you’re feeling a little bit off in one of your rooms, you’re feeling like something isn’t quite working properly, see if maybe one of these is kind of out of balance from what it should be.
So, the first rule that we’re going to talk about is contrast. Now, contrast happens when things are different. Well Paige, what do you mean by different? Well, we can mean they are different sizes. They can be different textures, they can be different colors, they can be different brightnesses. You might have something that’s really, really bright and saturated, like a Crayola crayon box, and then you might have something that’s really dull and muted, like mud colors. You can have a contrast of age or a contrast of style.
One of my favorite ways to style old houses, and it’s something that I could never do just because it isn’t my style, but I love when people put super modern finishes, like very sleek, very minimal chairs and lamps and tables, and they put those in a house that has 14 or 15 foot ceilings ,and a ton of plaster molding that’s really ornate.
I love the contrast between how simple the furniture is, and how simple the furnishings are, with how fancy and elaborate the rest of the house is. And contrast matters, because firstly, it prevents things from being boring. If you have a room that is perfectly outfitted in everything that’s exactly the right time period, and exactly the right age, it starts to look a little bit like a museum.
I’ve seen some of those time capsule houses from the 1950s and sixties, where they pretty much built the house and they bought all the furniture in 1962, and then never changed anything. And for some people, that’s exactly what you want. You want that time period, you want to live in that time period. I think my house probably errs a little on the side of a lack of contrast, in terms of the age of things. I like what I like, I like things from a certain time period that kind of reflect my house. And so, it tends to look a little bit more age appropriate and historically accurate, than some of these really high end, beautiful styled rooms that have a little bit more contrast, and are willing to play with the decades a little bit more.
Contrast also keeps things from being flat and from being one note. And this is one of my favorite theories of design that I’ve ever heard, and I heard it on a blog called Restoring Ross. It’s a great blog, he’s restoring this big old house in Kansas. And the Discordant Element theory of design is basically that you set up a design. You have a room that you really love, and all of the things in it are quite perfect, and they all go together and it’s really beautiful. And then you throw in something that completely doesn’t match, doesn’t go, doesn’t coordinate at all. And because you have the one thing that doesn’t quite match, or doesn’t quite go, it elevates the whole design to something a lot more interesting.
What are some examples of this? Okay, I want you to either close your eyes if you’re in a place where you’re not driving and you can do so safely, or I want you to pull up that imaginary movie screen in the back of your mind, where you see things in your imagination. Okay? And I want you to imagine with me, an all white room. Let’s say it’s a living room, okay? So you walk into the living room, there are white couches, there are white chairs, there’s a really beautiful creamy off white rug, the coffee table is kind of a Birchwood, sort of very muted white color, the walls are a beautiful white color, all of the window treatments are white. So you have this really calm, peaceful white atmosphere. Okay?
Now, imagine that on this white couch, this beautiful white couch that clearly doesn’t have any cats, or has a white cat only, imagine on that couch, you drop a red pillow. Think about how much impact that one red pillow would have in that entire white room. If you change that out for a white pillow, you’re going to maintain that peaceful, calm kind of neutral vibe.
But if you just add one red pillow, suddenly it doesn’t go, it doesn’t match. Very obviously, the theme of this room is white, and neutral and pale. And then you come in and you say, “I found a red pillow at the thrift store, and I want to put it on my couch,” and you throw that red pillow in there. Suddenly you have a discordant element, suddenly you have something that doesn’t go and doesn’t coordinate.
But I personally find that when you have that one thing that’s just unexpected, that just doesn’t match, that’s just a little bit out there, it makes the room so much more interesting. Because now you’ve been surprised. You walk into this room and you expect everything to be white, on white, on white, on white, and you have this thing that pops up out of nowhere and kind of makes you go, huh. That’s really interesting. So, I love that in a room. I love things that are kind of unexpected, I love things that really heighten the contrast of things in the room. I love different colors, I love different textures, I love different sizes of furniture. I love things that just aren’t exactly what you expect.
Now, because this is design, it means that we’re not really going to have hard and fast rules about what constitutes something that doesn’t match. So in this case, I would say follow your personal instincts. If you have something that you want to put somewhere, but it scares you a little bit, because it’s like, “Oh, I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t know if I’m allowed to do that. I don’t know if that matches,” but it makes you really happy, then that’s something that you should put in that room and just live with it. And see if it bumps up the energy of the room, if it makes it a little bit more exciting, or a little bit more different or interesting.
I just realized, this might be an example more in table scapes than in anything else, but I did Thanksgiving this year. I hosted it for my family recently, and we had this beautiful table. It was all white china, with silver, and crystal, and pressed glass, and white tablecloths and white candles. And I kept it all very neutral, because it was in the dining room, and the dining room has enough drama for everybody.
So, I really didn’t want the table to be too overwhelming. So everything on the table was very beautiful, and very feminine, and very delicate, and very just kind of frilly. And then on each place setting, I put a piece of burlap ribbon, and three little sprigs of weeds. I found these out in our fields and they kind of have like a fuzzy top, they look a little bit like wheat.
And it was such a nice contrast. Because even though the color palette was the same, we were still in those creams and those whites, by having something that was rustic, by having something that was totally different than everything else on the table, in my mind, it just made everything look a lot more interesting and a lot more unexpected. And I love that in design.
So, I do think this is one thing that I personally struggle with a little bit about a lot of modern farmhouse inspiration pictures, is I don’t dislike everything. I think some things individually are very interesting, but for me personally, the lack of contrast is just not exciting enough. My house is built on being exciting. I want the colors, I want the drama, I want the patterns.
And I probably could benefit from toning it down a notch, or 15. But I feel like if you have everything the same and there’s nothing unusual, there’s no contrast, it’s just not quite as exciting and vibrant to me as something that has a little bit of contrast.
I do love when they come out with Christmas though, because then they start putting red and green in their all white decor. And I’m like, “Oh, this is so exciting. This is so much more vibrant. I love this.” So, if you’re trying to put contrast in your house, look for it where you can. See if something is boring, see if everything matches your style.
See if there’s something different that you could add, and just try it out. And you’re not just looking for color. You are looking for style, you are looking for size, you are looking for quantity. If every wall in a room has big pictures with lots of presence, try putting a small picture somewhere, or try putting a small gallery wall. That contrast between things is what keeps rooms interesting.
Now, while you are working on contrast, you are also going to be paying attention to the second principle, which is balance. And all of these broad terms kind of can apply to any facet of the room that you’re looking at. So, contrast can apply to floors and walls, or the difference between a couch and a sofa, or it can apply to all sorts of things. Balance is the same way.
You have to look at the balance of the colors, you have to look at the balance of the patterns, of the size of the furniture, of the art, of the lighting. You want to make sure everything is in a balance that you like. It’s making sure that everything feels like it works for the vibe you’re going for, and no one thing is totally overpowering to the point that you can’t look at anything else.
Now, we just talked about this whole discordant element theory of design, where you intentionally want something that draws your attention, and has a little bit more presence and weight than everything else in the room. But let’s go back to our all white room, okay? Previously we just had the red pillow, the one red pillow or the one red blanket. And that was a nice amount of discordance, or a non-matchiness, because it still keeps the whole room nice and neutral, and light feeling, but there’s one thing that’s different.
Now, imagine if you had all white furniture, but you had a red rug, and you had red curtains and you had a red pillow, and you had a red piece of art on the wall. It’s not necessarily that this is bad, if that’s what you’re going for. If you really want a strong white and red theme, this might be perfect.
But if you’re trying to maintain that neutral feeling, this red might overpower it just a little bit. It might be just a little bit too much, it’s pulling your eye too much, and it’s taking away from how nice and calm and pleasant you would like the room to be. One of the elements of figuring out balance, is to understand what visual weight means.
Visual weight is kind of the term that’s used to describe how heavy something looks in a room. So, we’re going to stay in our all white room, okay? But from the living room, we’re just going to go over to the kitchen, okay? And let’s imagine that the kitchen is all white, so we have white tile on the floor, we have white cabinets, we have white appliances, we have white everything.
Now imagine you drop a six foot by 10 foot, solid black island in the middle of that kitchen, okay? Think about how heavy that’s going to look. It is a solid thing, it is a big block of darkness and heaviness. And when you compare it to all of the other white in the room, it’s going to look like it has a lot more presence than it does. Now, compare that to a tape that was say, the same size, say it was six foot by 10, say it’s a huge table.
But imagine that it’s a table that’s painted white, okay? With the table, you’ll be able to see through it. You’ll be able to see the cabinets behind it, or see the floor behind it, instead of that big, solid black block. So, we would say that the large, solid black island has more visual weight than a neutral white island, or a white table functioning as an island.
There are a lot of different things that play into visual weight, obviously scale is one of them. If you think about having a white couch that seats six people versus a white love seat, the couch is going to have way more visual weight, just because it’s simply bigger. Physically, the item is larger, it has a larger scale.
Color also plays a very big role in visual weight. And if you think about the rooms in my house, they’re very dark, they’re very bold, they’re very colorful. And so when you walk into them, I love them, but light and airy is not really the vibe that we have. We kind of have this heaviness, this drama, this sort of cozy darkness, because the colors are so deep and so rich.
So, color is a huge one. Texture is another one. So, if you think about an acrylic end table, okay? It’s clear, you can see through it. It has a little bit of texture, but for the most part, it just kind of fades into whatever the background is behind it. Think about that versus a solid wood end table with a cabinet. They’re going to have different textures, not only because of how solid they are, but the different texture between the acrylic and the wood is just going to change, whether or not you think they take up space in a room.
And another big one that I am very guilty of in this house is pattern. I love pattern, I love having patterned rugs, I love having patterns on my fabric, on my chairs. And so if you have say, a couch that’s just kind of beige, one color, very neutral. Or you have a couch that is beige and white stripe, the beige and white stripe is going to feel like more in a room, because that is just busier. Visually it’s busier, it draws your eye more, and so that’s going to give it more visual weight.
So what you want to do when you’re working on balance, is to make sure that there is nothing in the room that has too much presence, that has too much visual weight, that just doesn’t quite go with everything else in the room. So in this case, imagine, we’re going to just hang out in our white living room today, because I think that’s a very good way to visualize some of these things. Imagine you have the white living room, okay? And there’s a fireplace right in the middle of it.
And so, on one side of the fireplace, you have two chairs, and on the other side of the fireplace you have a couch. If the couch is white and the chairs are white, they’re going to be fairly balanced, okay? You’re going to have this neutral on both sides, and even if they’re slightly different scales, like a couch that seats three people or two chairs that seat two people, they’re not quite the same size, but together as a unit, the couch is about equal to the two chairs. Maybe you put an end table in between the chairs, so that they’re kind of the same size.
Now, imagine if we take the exact same couch and the exact same chairs, but we make the couch red and purple striped. And then say the couch is up against a wall, and over that couch, we hang a big four foot by six foot, very colorful painting. So, you have this white room with white rugs and pale chairs, and white walls, but then on one side of the room you have this really loud, busy couch, and you have this really loud, busy painting, okay? If that’s what you’re going for, and you want that statement piece, by all means, knock yourself out. I would come sit on a red and purple couch with no hesitation, I would park there and you would never get me off of it.
But if you are trying to go for that kind of neutral vibe, that vibe where it’s very calm and everything is sort of peaceful, your room is now going to be out of balance, because you have these two things that have way too much visual weight on one side of the room, and then everything on the other side of the room is kind of light and airy.
So when you’re in that room, you’re almost not going to pay attention to any of the nice, neutral furnishings, and the neutral art, and the pretty curtains and the nice rug. You’re not going to notice any of those, because your attention is being drawn so heavily by that picture and by that couch.
Now, this is actually something that I very much rely on in this house, because this house is not straight. It’s not built straight, it is 120 years old. Everything is crooked, the floors are sagging, and so we’ve had to do a lot of clever geometry and clever fixes with the trim, so it looks reasonably level and reasonably straight. If you examine a lot of the crown molding, or you examine the tongue and groove in the kitchen, you will notice that all of it is kind of wonky.
But because the colors on these rooms are so bold, because they are so bright and so eye catching, and I’ve got all these gold picture frames everywhere, and all of the rooms are super high drama, you don’t notice those smaller details that may show up if the room was a little bit calmer and a little bit quieter.
So, if you are trying to find balance in a room and it’s just not working, like you just can’t figure out why the room feels off, you can’t figure out why the furniture placement seems wrong, look at the pieces that you have, and then figure out what you’re trying to go for and what pieces are pulling too much attention from that, or are just making the whole thing feel not quite right.
The other thing with balance, and I run into this a lot, is sometimes I find things that are just underwhelming. Most of the things in this house are very bold. So I’m sitting in the study right now, we have three chairs in here and a rug, and all of them have a pattern. Most of them have a pretty graphic pattern, a pretty busy pattern, but the interesting thing is because everything is patterned, they all almost act like neutrals. You don’t quite see them, because everything is patterned. We were thinking about a couch, and should we buy one or something? So, I got these fabric samples and all of them were solids.
And I brought, I think I had a red one in here, I had a beige one in here, and they looked so wrong because they were actually not busy enough. They were too calm, they were too subdued. And because they were so subdued, they ended up calling out busyness of all of the other patterns, and then everything looked wrong because the balance was off.
So, it might be one of either direction. You might have something that’s too busy, or you might have something that’s not busy enough. And if it’s a couch or a painting or something, you can always add more busyness, with pillows or throw pillows, or just switch something out altogether.
Now, the last design principle that kind of happens accidentally around here, because it takes me a little while to get rooms to the point that I’m totally happy with them, but the last element is decorating in layers. So, you are probably not going to have a finished room perfectly, exactly how you want it right out of the gate when you start decorating.
You might, but I tend to find that rooms that are all bought at once and then put together, to me they lack a certain amount of depth and a certain amount of character, that comes from being curated over time. So with working in layers, you are trying to build up room slowly, so that it feels more genuine, I think. So that it feels like it’s been collected over time, like everything was thoughtful, and not like you added everything to your Target cart, and then came home and just put it all up. You want the elements of you in that room, which comes from decorating in layers.
So to think about decorating layers, we really want to start with the biggest, most non-negotiable pieces. So, this would obviously be your wall color, your furniture and your rugs. And as a little tip, see if you can pick your wall color after you find a rug that you love. Because the rugs, it’s a lot of harder to tweak rug colors than it is to tweak wall colors.
So I would suggest finding a rug that you really love first, and then making sure that your wall color coordinates with that, instead of the other way around. So, those pieces are kind of big. They’re going to take up the most visual weight in your room, anything that’s going to be the most, has the most presence, that’s going to catch your eye the most, that’s your first layer.
So in our house, for the dining room, it was the rug, the dining table and chairs, I have a very large china cabinet in there, and then I have a couch and a game table. And those were the pieces that I knew were just, they’re the big ones, they’re going to take up the most space. I need to figure out where those need to be, so that all of them feel balanced relative to each other.
Once that was done, you want to go to your middle layer. So if we consider that the bottom layer, that’s like the bedrock, the foundation that’s driving where you want the room to go, then your middle layer, it’s where a lot of people stop actually. And I consider that things like lamps, art, and things that add your personality on top of the furniture. They make things feel a little bit more lived in. So with art pieces, it’s so personal, I could probably do an entire episode just talking about picking art.
But the art pieces are going to define your mood, and define the mood of the room. So, once you have all your furniture pieces in to where things are going and making sure all of those are balanced, then you can balance your middle layer. And make sure that all of your art pieces are balanced, and you have enough lamps around here, and the overhead lighting is bright enough. So you have a balanced foundation, then you have a balanced middle layer.
And then the top layer are the embellishments. And I think personally, this is a layer that I struggle with, because I’m not really a knick-knacky person. I don’t really like vignettes, I don’t really like tiny little things all over the place that I just have to remember to clean around. But adding little details on top of where all of your other art is, can really elevate a room.
So for example, I’m sitting in the study right now, and I’m looking at the wall between the kitchen and the front hallway. And on that wall, there’s a strip of paint color that’s only about 10 inches wide, that’s it. And there’s a doorway on either side. So, I would consider a bottom layer in this room to be obviously the furniture, and the chairs and the rug. The second layer, we have a few large pieces of art on the wall. We have a train print, have a big piece that I got at Goodwill, we have a bunch of large pieces that take up a good chunk of some of these walls.
But in that skinny little space between the hall and the kitchen, we have a pointer, a teaching pointer. And it was actually made by my great grandfather, it was his teaching pointer. And it’s an unexpected little place, where the proportions of the wall and the thing that’s hanging there match perfectly. And to me, that is that top layer. Finding those interesting little places to put a small piece of art, or to put a candle or to put something that’s just a little bit unusual, that kind of freshens things up. And if you can balance each of those layers, I think you’ll end up with a really wonderful, balanced room.
So again, these are not really hard and fast rules. These are not anything that I learned. These could be completely opposite of what all the designers think. But I think if you can have a good amount of contrast in your rooms, if you can make sure that your room is balanced, and specifically make sure that each of the layers in the room is balanced, you will have an easier time decorating, because you’ll be able to identify what in a room is not working.
So, I hope that made a little bit of sense to you. I hope you enjoyed that, and I hope maybe it gives you a different perspective as you’re walking around your house, and maybe seeing things that are heavy visual weight or light visual weight. And just start training your eye, to see what designers see, and see your room in a way that pays attention to this contrast, this balance and this layers. So, I hope you enjoyed that. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. I hope your homes are wonderful, and happy and fantastic, and that you love them, and I will see you next time. Bye.