How To Create Harmony In The Home
What are the key design elements required to create harmony within your home?
Harmony is achieved by unifying and repeating elements throughout a home. If you have an existing home or you’re changing your flooring, use the timber, carpet or tile colour as a base for your palette.
Whichever colour or material that you decide to use for your flooring, can also be used throughout the home to create accents. In my home, I have grey vinyl plank floors which refer nicely to the grey sofa and metallic cabinets in my kitchen.
My cabinet handles are also a dark tone of metallic grey, so the unification of the grey base within my home creates harmony. I also have repeated elements of white - from the painting, architraves and skirtings, to lighting and furniture. I have a further layer of oak timber, oak laminate and oak toned colours as accents through furniture, joinery and décor. This allows me to layer colour on top through artwork, books and decor.
How do you use space, light and materials to create harmony in your home?
SPACE
in my home isn’t such an issue, though I am planning renovations to further open up the interiors and allow for a clear view to the greenery outside.
LIGHT
is affected currently by the internal walls and doorways that I inherited with the purchase, though I have added skylights in the living space to circumvent that issue. However, the house will be transformed with the renovations to create further light that will stream into the living spaces.
MATERIALS
are consistent throughout my home. I favour layering textures rather than adding a lot of patterns, though the artwork, rugs and internal doors all feature colour which links elements together across the home, giving it another layer of harmony.
Does the positioning of your furniture impact how you create harmony within your home? If so, how?
The position and scale of your furniture is extremely important when aiming to create harmony within your home. The visual and physical flow through a space is key in creating a feeling of harmony.
Often having larger scale pieces of furniture can make your spaces feel bigger, while also taking up otherwise wasted opportunities for seating.
What role does flooring (hard or soft) or carpets play in creating harmony within your home?
Your flooring is an integral base for your palette and will have a massive impact on your home’s aesthetic and feeling of harmony.
It’s important to ensure that all of your flooring selections for the different areas in your home work in harmony with each other, such as the staircases, bedrooms and living spaces. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to make them all the same colour or texture, but it does mean that you need to consider all of your flooring as part of your palette.
What are your top three ways of creating harmony within your home?
- Select a consistent palette of materials, colours and patterns.
- Repeat elements within the spaces.
- Create cohesion by making sure you haven’t mixed styles in your selections - select one style and then continue with the elements that define that style throughout your home.
