HOW TO MAKE YOUR HOME COMFORTABLE

Atlanta Home Decorating

Behind every beautiful interior is a sure sense of personal vision. Whatever your decorating style, make it comfortable… make it a space for every day living. Whether your home accommodates a busy family or just you. From bungalows to city apartments, from a romantic French CountryHome to a place in the mountains, the way you choose to live should be an enriching and comfortable environment.  You should create your private retreat in your own unique way. It should be a space that is personal, and incredibly comfortable. Decorating, contrary to popular opinion, isn’t easy. It takes work of knowing what you love. Home is a word that hums with familiar, warm emotion. Decorating is a word that evokes perfection and order. Cottage Style is a marriage of the chic and the comfortable, the beautiful and the truly livable.

Creating an aged look for fabrics creates comfort – wash a chintz fabric in hot water to dull its sheen, or add a bit of bleach to fade it. Black tea mixed into a tub of water when whites need to be aged. These are just a few ways to create comfort. Vintage fabrics used for a slip covered chair will completely change a room from a stuffy uninviting space to a room filled with the look of comfort and welcome. Treat yourself to a special time, pull out your fine china and silver for everyday use. Old-fashioned elegance is using silver and crystal for dinner, even if dinner is hot dogs and linen napkins unironed and silver mismatched.

Flea market finds bring comfort into any room. I like put-your-feet-up Country French coffee tables. A room with several ottomans has comfort written all over it. Exact color match creates a stiff feeling and requires a sure hand in decorating. It looks like you tried too hard. I love to mix different tones of a color. I never use exact shades. This mix of tones will create a more relaxed feeling to your room. Exact shades of a color will create a fixed and fake atmosphere. Different tones will create a look and style of comfort. I like to throw in some coral colors to a room with lots of reds. This doesn’t mean you can just throw any colors together and they work. You know if colors mix well. They just have a good feeling and you will know it works.

If you look closely at a fine piece of Cottage Wall Art, you will notice the artist will use lots of colors to complete her canvas. Look at a room the same way an artist looks at a canvas. An empty room becomes a designer’s canvas. Add a vase of fresh cut flowers to a tabletop. This gives the feeling that you’ve just walked through the French Country Garden. What a casual comfortable emotion and you will feel it in the room. I love to mix wood Country French Furniture finishes and textures in a room. I often use an old pine table with painted wicker chairs accented with a dark wood sideboard.  Completing the background of a room with a dramatic wall color of a pepper red is the perfect combination for a comfortable room with lots of dramatic details. A dining table accented with flowers of hydrangeas completes a country garden style.

Whenever you can bring in a casual style to a room, you will add comfort. Formal Chippendale dining chairs with the backs slipcovered completely changes a formal style to a more casual room introducing a look of comfort.  I like to throw in an aged chipped finish to a room, it’s something unexpected. A rag rug accenting the floor to any room says comfort and charm. Shinny silk fabrics just don’t seem to work any more for upholstered pieces. They say, “Look at me, I’m pretty, but don’t sit on me, just look”.

A good way to make a bedroom more casual and comfortable is using French Country Decorating to dress the bed with layers of blankets mixed with a matlesee’ for the main bed covering, accented with large European pillows using lots of different fabrics. A shorted bed skirt or no bed skirt at all will create Cottage Style charm. I like to change bedding in the summer to something lighter such as cutwork cotton accented with pillows of brighter colors. One of my favorite designs for a Country French summer bedroom is a mahogany rice bed dressed all in white cotton cutwork, something that you can just throw in the wash. One of my clients recently told me, “I don’t want my home to be pretentious, I just want it to be inviting and comfortable.” We’ve all had the formal styles in the past. The look of decorating today is that of comfort with good taste. Be brave and mix things up a little. You’ll love the way it looks, and you’ll love the way it feels.  

Email me at caiken1@alltel.net if you would like to discuss a decorating idea or dilemma.  This is another in my series of home INTERIOR DESIGN IDEAS from your Atlanta Interior Designer; I hope that you use them to help you create a home interior that makes your home comfortable.

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