Home Styling 101: How to Mix and Match Home Decor

It’s Week 2 of Home Styling 101. In this episode I aim to solve a common problem…how to mix and match home decor. How many times have you bought decor for your home only to discover it doesn’t work with your other stuff?

In this video, I’m sharing the three keys to home decor success. These will help you arrange the decor you already have and help you find new pieces that will fit right in.

Show Notes

Have you ever found a cute piece of home décor that you love at the store but when you get it home it just doesn’t seem to look right with any of your other stuff? It’s the wrong height, the wrong size, and you just can’t get it to work? I’m going to help you solve that problem today.

When you’re mixing and matching home décor there are three characteristics you need to keep in mind:

• Height
• Shape
• Texture

The first thing you want to vary in your arrangements is the height of your pieces. Having pieces at a variety of different heights is the most eye pleasing. That’s why you’ll often see retailers sell the same object in two or three different heights because you can buy them off the shelf, take them home and they’ll look great.

That’s great if you just need a simple easy arrangement, but if all you ever did was buy matched sets of décor from the store pretty soon your home would start to look like the store. So in the next two tips I’m going to show you how you can break up this matched set using shape and texture.

The second thing you want to vary for good looking arrangement is shape. In this case, we have the two wood vases which are matching, they’re a slightly different shape, but they’re both vertical upright vases. Instead of adding another vase to this mix I switched it up by bringing in a large bowl. It adds a different shape to the arrangement, creating more interest.

The easiest way to break up a matched set like this is to take out the smallest piece, because we want to keep the overall size of our arrangement, and then swap in an object in a different shape. You could try a short cube vase, you could try a decorative star, or you could try a decorative sphere. The goal here is to simply break up the tall vertical items with an object that is a different shape to contrast with the finials.

The third thing that you want to vary in your arrangements is texture. You want to create a pleasant contrast between the different elements in your arrangement. Here I have the wood carved vases and I’ve contrasted that with the smooth glossy ceramic bowl.

When you’re choosing a new object to go with the finials, you also want to consider texture and you can be more intentional about creating contrast. So when we look at these finials they’re a little bit distressed, they’re a matte paint finish, so we want to contrast that with another element.

• You can create high contrast by bringing in a shiny metallic object like this mercury glass owl.
• If you wanted something a little more subtle but still with contrast you can bring in a glass vessel.
• If you want to keep your arrangement more subdued you can bring in another object with a matte finish like this driftwood ball which still has a lot more texture than the smooth shape of the finials.

When you’re working with these characteristics, you want the difference in height to be noticeable but gradual. With shape and texture you can play with how much contrast you want to create in your arrangement.

Here we have the square shaped lantern with a rounded top. I’ve paired that with two round—rotund—owls. There’s a little bit of contrast in texture because we have the matte paint finish of the lantern and the shiny mercury glass owls which plays off of the shiny top of the lantern.

We can add more contrast here by changing out the small owl for something with a little bit more texture. For example, you can swap out the little owl for this driftwood ball. We’re sticking with the same shape we had before, something round, but we’ve added a new texture to this arrangement. Now we have three different objects displayed together and they look great. I do think it helps that there’s a little bit of a theme here with the lantern, owl, and the wood.

Now if you want to create even more texture you can again vary the shape. So in this example I’ve swapped out the driftwood ball for a driftwood branch so now we have a completely different third shape going on in this arrangement but it all still works wonderfully together because we’ve played with the elements of height, shape, and texture.

When you’re rearranging your home décor or shopping for new pieces, remember to think about height, shape, and texture.

Now download the try this at home styling recipe with detailed instructions so that you can try this tip in your home.