“How do I make my house look more like a home?” is a common question and applies to first time homeowners as easily as it does to people moving into their first apartment. Whether you are a minimalist or not the secret lies in the same answer, accent pieces. These are those small touches that make a space feel inviting, imposing, or overwhelming.

A basis of accent design is to create a counterpoint to whatever we have embraced as the primary colors for our room. The idea of this is simple enough, but what can we use to implement this counterpoint? There are many options so let’s talk about a few of them.

Picking up an Accent

Let’s look at some examples of different types of accents used to create a unique experience with décor in our home.

Cierra Aluminum Vases

Vases are not just for flowers anymore! They have become versatile enough that they can be filled with any number of decorative items. There are also many home accessories that can simply stand alone and fulfill our design needs.

Pillows are one of the simplest and most cost effective to add color and depth to the interior design of our home. We want to choose colors that either very closely match the furniture they are going on or choose a color that is on the opposite end of the spectrum to make the room more visually stimulating. Just remember, there is a fine line between “these pillows really compliment the sofa!” and “who needs this many pillows?” so choose wisely.

Statues and Figurines or what our moms called “knickknacks”, offer us a way to infuse our own personality across our living spaces. Choosing the style that suits our home and our personality is likely to be the most challenging step of utilizing such items. It can be easy to get carried away and end up with a cluttered look in our homes. This almost always leads to a sense of dissatisfaction. Strategically placing these items to make them stand out will always have a better result than overwhelming the senses.

Accent furniture can become one of the most memorable ways in which we make our home look whole. Whether we use a soft hued chaise in the bedroom or a boldly colored lounger in the living area, these decisions can become a reflection of our whole selves and create the living space we feel more comfortable in every day.

Personal Items that we’ve collected from different travels or life events can add an especially nice conversation piece to an end table, coffee table, or vestibule area. They allow us to share more of ourselves with guests that come to our home and offer a warm welcome for us when we return from our time spent away.

Ivory Limestone Coffee Table

 Come Together, Right Now

Now that we have discussed some of the means we have available to improve the style of our rooms, how do we use accent pieces to decorate? Once we have worked out our main color theme and picked the pieces we want to employ, we can go to work on choosing the best colors to use. In our blog “Sprucing up Your Space” we get into using the percentage method as the best for selecting the colors of our accent pieces. If you are feeling very ambitious you can consider using what is known as a color wheel to determine what opposing colors will work the best that also match the mood we desire for the space. A quick Google search of color wheels will yield several useful resources for starting points, but due to the size of that topic we won’t get into it in this blog.

Armed with these tools, we can now complete the design of our rooms. Don’t be afraid to try different arrangements throughout the year. This gives us the ability to utilize the same items in various ways to keep the look of our home fresh and up to date. Not only will this make our spaces more inviting to our guests, but it will make every day we spend at home more comfortable.