Finding Your Personal (Home) Style

With so many interior styles it's difficult to know which one to choose for your own home. You only have to scroll through Pinterest to come across hundreds of different bathroom/kitchen/bedroom styles you love, but most of us only actually have one house to decorate so we need to whittle down all our ideas into just one. I'm a big advocate of personal style and I think this concept applies to interiors just as much as it does fashion, but just as with fashion you've got to find 'your style' and sometimes that takes a little experimentation. Saying that, you can't really put in a bathroom and then change your mind and I personally find it quite scary committing to a certain style even when I know I'll love it. In this post I thought I'd have a little chat through how I've found my personal home style (for now).

T A K E  I N S P I R A T I O N  F R O M  T H E  H O U S E  |  If we'd bought a brand new house I have no doubt that we would have decorated it completely differently to the one we have. Obviously if you can clash styles and make it look amazing then you do you, but personally it helped to build our style around the house, while putting a slightly modern spin on it. Our house is over a hundred years old, it still has a fair few original features such as fireplaces so we wanted to exploit them as much as possible so that it actually looks like an old house, but at the same time modernise it into something that works for us. So while we've exposed the fireplaces, reinstated the floorboards where possible and added coving where there wasn't any, we've also opened up the living room, made the colour scheme a bit more muted than it would have been back in the day and made it functional for everyday.

P I N T E R E S T  |  I realise that I said at the beginning of this post that Pinterest can be a hindrance because there are just SO MANY amazing things on there (and I quite often wish I had ten houses so I could try all the ideas I like), but if you create a dedicated board and pin everything you like then look back over it, you'll start to see some common themes appearing. For example, I pinned a lot of bathroom styles, but at least half of them included white metro style tiles so I was pretty certain that was something I wanted to go with. The more you pin, the more you notice patterns and come to recognise your style. 

I N J E C T  Y O U R  P E R S O N A L I T Y  |  The thing that really makes your home style personal to you is how you put your personality into it. I'm sure lots of people have exactly the same IKEA kitchen as we do, but it's the accessories and the personal touches that really make it your own. For us that means a lot of house plants, but I also like including unique things that are personal to us - photographs are the obvious one, but I also have a few original prints by friends and family that I love having on display. 

T R I A L  A N D  E R R O R  |  As I've already said, this only works to a certain extent. You can't really trial the big things like your bathroom or kitchen and then decide you don't like them (unless you have an extremely large pot of disposable money then go for it), but it does work with things like paint colours and the like. It's an annoyance because it does mean losing out on a bit of money, but it's worth changing if you're not happy with it. We're nearly at the end of our project and there's one room where, although I love the paint colour, it really doesn't fit with the rest of the house so I think we'll repaint it at some point. What trial and error does work really well with is accessories and where to put them/how to style them together. I could play around with things like that for days (and I do!).

Have you found your personal home style?

Amy x