I have a confession: I can’t tell you the name of my decorating style.
And I’m a graphic designer who has spent years decorating, DIYing and changing pretty much every room in my house.
I know what I like. I know what I don’t like. I can walk into an antique store and immediately spot the weird (or amazing!) thing I want to take home.
But ask me whether my house is traditional, eclectic, vintage modern, English cottage, collected, transitional or whatever new design style the internet invented this week?
I don’t know.
And I don’t think you need to know either.
If you’ve ever thought: I have no freaking idea how to decorate my home. I don’t think your problem is that you haven’t figured out the name for your decorating style.
You probably already know more about what you like than you think you do.
You just have to start paying attention to it.
Stop trying to name your decorating style
There are approximately 4,683 decorating styles on the internet.
Okay, I made up that number. But seriously.
Modern. Traditional. Modern farmhouse. English cottage. Grandmillennial. Coastal. Eclectic. Mid-century modern. Vintage modern.
And apparently we’re supposed to pick one?
I think trying to name your decorating style too early can actually make decorating harder.
Because once you’ve decided I’m traditional or I’m modern or I’m whatever, suddenly you’re looking at something you lvoe and wondering if it fits in your style or in your house.
Is this the right kind of wood?
Can I mix this with that?
Does this room still count as whatever I’ve decided it’s supposed to be?
I would much rather you ask one question:
Do I freaking love it?
That is a much better place to start.
Start collecting evidence
If you really have no idea what your decorating style is, don’t take another quiz.
Start collecting pictures.
Pinterest, Instagram, screenshots, magazines, whatever you use. And don’t overthink it. If you see a room and immediately think, Ooooooh, I like that...save it.
Don’t worry about why yet.
Once you’ve collected a bunch, go back and look at them together.
That is when things start getting interesting.
Maybe almost every room you’ve saved has dark wood furniture.
Maybe you keep saving patterned rugs, old painting, brass lamps or furniture that very clearly did not come as a matching set.
Maybe every room feels layered and collected instead of brand new.
Those repeats are clues.
You don’t have to know what to call them. You’re just figuring out what your eyes keep choosing when nobody is telling them what they’re supposed to like.
Pay attention to what you keep choosing
This is something I’ve really noticed in my own home over the last few years.
My taste has changed.
There are things I chose several years ago that I genuinely loved at the time. They weren’t mistakes. I didn’t choose them “wrong.”
I changed. I evolved.
Lately I keep finding myself drawn to older pieces. Darker and warmer woods. Vintage art. Things with a little age and history to them. Rooms that feel collected instead of decorated all at once.
And once I noticed that pattern, I started following it.
Not because I took a quiz that told me I was now officially a Vintage Something-or-Other.
I just kept paying attention to the things that made me stop and look twice.
That is probably one of the easiest ways to figure out your decorating style.
Look at what you keep choosing. What you come back to. What feels like a reflection of you.
Not what you think you’re supposed to choose. Not what’s currently trending on Instagram. Not what somebody has declared is “in” this year.
What do you keep coming back to?
Your decorating style is allowed to change
I think sometimes we treat decorating style like the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts.
Congratulations! You’re Traditional!
And now you shall remain Traditional until death.
No.
You are allowed to change your mind.
You can love something now that you would’ve walked right past fived years ago.
You can get tired of something you once adored.
You can paint over the paint color you were absolutely positive was THE ONE.
And changing your mind doesn’t mean you made a decorating mistake the first time.
Your home is where your actual life is happening. Of course it is going to change and evolve as you do.
I don’t want my house to look exactly the way it did ten years ago because I’m not the person I was ten years ago.
That’s part of what makes a home interesting.
Try something before you understand the whole room
This might be the biggest one for me.
You do not have to figure out the entire room before you do anything.
I think this is where a lot of people get stuck
You think you need the paint color, the rug, furniture, curtains, art and accessories all figured out before you start.
Meanwhile, six months lager, you’re still staring at the same room because making ALL of those decisions feels completely overwhelming.
So make one.
Hang the art.
Buy the weird lamp.
Cover your photo mats in fabric.
Change the baskets you’ve hated for three years.
Do one thing and then stand back.
Did you make the room feel more like you?
Great.
Now you’ve learned something.
And that one decision might make the next decision a whole lot easier.
Make your home 1% better
This is something I’m trying to do in my own home right now.
Instead of looking around and seeing the approximately 700 things I still want to change, I’m asking:
What could make my home 1% better today?
Sometimes it’s pretty.
Sometimes it’s functional.
Sometimes it’s fixing something that’s been annoying me forever.
And sometimes it’s putting absurdly giant school supplies on my front porch four weeks late because they make me happy.
None of those things require me to know exactly what my style is.
They’re just little decisions that make our home feel a little more like us.
And enough little decisions eventually add up to a home with a whole lot of personality and stories to boot.
Your home doesn’t need a label
If someone walked into my home tomorrow and asked: “So what would you call your style?”
I’d probably says:
Mine.
And I think that’s the kind of the point.
Your style will start emerging along the way.
And eventually you’ll look around and realize your home feels like you.
Even if you have no idea what to call it.
