Beautiful Contradictions: Finding Your Personal Interior Design Style

Even though we have a perfectly good office, there's a good chance you'll find our laptops, a stack of mail, and at least one or two random Amazon boxes taking up residence on our dining room table.

The irony isn't lost on me.

Embracing Your Personal Interior Design Style

As a designer and stager, I'm probably the last person who should be talking about simplifying. When it comes to beautiful accents, and having the right piece for just the right place, more is more! I love beautiful things...maybe a little too much. To be surrounded by color, unique objects, pieces from my past. There is life in the harmony when they all come together. Some days I love maximalism. Other days, I'm drawn to quiet, tone-on-tone simplicity. Some days I embrace the clutter. Other days, it drives me absolutely mad. I've learned to welcome whichever version shows up at the door that day, and maybe that's the point. I remind myself that home and life aren't about getting it "right." It's about embracing what works for you and allowing yourself to ebb and flow along the way. Your personal interior design style doesn’t have to fit neatly into one category or remain exactly the same from one day to the next.

An example? I try to make our bedroom a study in quiet and most days keep it tidy (I throw overflow clothes into the closet…out of sight out of mind;) Design wise you’ll find soft whites, warm tans, linen, cotton, and an oversized muted modern canvas create a space that practically exhales. Downstairs, it's a completely different story - a happy mix of blues, layered prints, greens, touches of gold, and accents of black. Lots of patterns greeting each other. Different personalities. Different moods. Somehow, they both feel completely at home under the same roof.

I won't buy decor' item for our home unless I absolutely love it, and one of the unexpected perks of owning a staging company is that our house occasionally gets to borrow from our inventory. Those design treasures I've collected over the years still make me ooh and ahh, and make for an easy way to update a space, both personally and professionally. But the stacks of bins and rows of shelving it takes to store it all is a completely different story. Even with all those beautiful pieces at my fingertips, I can still walk by a shelf in our home and think, "Yep...one less thing would probably make this look better." and make it a heck of a lot easier to dust.

Maybe the beauty isn't in choosing between more or less.

Maybe it's in knowing when your home and your heart are asking for one or the other.

If your kitchen table is covered in laptops, kids' bookbags, mail, and Amazon boxes because life is wonderfully full right now, embrace it. If your shelves feel heavy instead of happy, maybe it's time to let something go.

Listen to your home. More importantly, listen to yourself.

And if tomorrow you decide to add one more plaid throw pillow? Well, you already know where I stand. ;) Either way, I hope you let your home be you. Wherever your pile of papers land.