Keep What You Love and Change The Rest!
Under the rubric of design pitfalls, by far my biggest thorn is the “too much stuff” look. I firmly believe in good floor plans and elevations to design a room, but if you don’t have access to a pro designer, then today we are going to play “de-stuff boot camp.” Take everything out of your room. Everything. Yup. Okay, if you can’t move the sofa, I’ll let you leave that. Everything else goes.
If you kept the sofa (or the king bed or the dining table), you now get to put back one more piece. But only if you really like it. If you don’t like it, it goes. (Ok, and then you call me because you clearly need new stuff). In a larger room, you can probably fit about one large and two mid-sized pieces before the room begins to look crowded. In a smaller room, you need to reduce the scale of those pieces.
Your first goal is to make your pieces look “deliberate,” as in “I really like it and it’s useful, and it looks awesome in the space.” NOT as in, “I’ve had it for 10 years and I sit on it, so I kept it.” Your other equally important, goal is to prevent the room from looking crowded.
So now that you have the furniture under control, let’s accessorize. Deliberately. You get to bring back:
One attractive mirror or piece of art. Avoid the gallery wall unless you are really good at proportion, scale and balance. (If you have no idea what these things are, then, again, you should probably call me).
ONE, max two, plants. No jungly things that need more than a trim. And only in aesthetically pleasing pots.
Either one or three table top accessories. Accessories look best in odd numbers. They should be somehow related (color, antiques, reflective quality, texture) and remember deliberate and attractive.
Donate the rest, and if you can’t bear to part with it, keep a box of accessories in the basement and rotate them, rather than putting them all out at once. If you want your room to look attractive and feel relaxing, toss and donate, and only allow back a select few deliberately selected and pleasing items.