You’re ready to decorate. Your house will be your blank page, your clean canvas, your fresh start—but where to begin? Can’t you just hear Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music, with the best advice of all . . . “Let’s Start at the Very Beginning”

Start With the Basics
The most common advice for someone with a design project in the works is to keep an idea file. You’ve probably heard that before, and you’re a step ahead of the game if you’re already following it. The reason the “start an idea file” is so often repeated is that it truly is sound advice. Your collection of images can take the form of a scrapbook or gathered images kept loose in a file box or a folder; it’s possible now to even keep one virtually, collecting images and ideas from online sources and saving them electronically. The true key to making the process work, though, isn’t in how you make your collection, but how you use it.

The idea file you assemble isn’t meant to be treated as a shopping list, or even a wish list. While you may eventually end up decorating with the colors or concepts (or possibly even the exact object you spot in a magazine or on a web page), that comes later. The most powerful way to use the images you collect is as a window into your taste, your style, your dream design. Once assembled, a collection of images that catch your eye and hold it will serve as a powerful key to your design desires. Patterns and preferences will emerge, and you (or a design professional that is assisting you) will have an unbeatable head start in selecting the actual colors, styles, and pieces for your home.

Color: An EASY Fix to Set the Mood
It can be tempting, perhaps, encountering a house with neutral tinted walls, to stick with the status quo. No doubt you’ve been in rooms where the wall color might as well have been stamped with a long expired “sell by” date. Preferences and fashions in colors do change, but that shouldn’t be a reason to avoid diving into color. And while choosing colors for your walls might feel like a big commitment, it’s only paint. You can change it when the time comes; in fact, you should plan on it. Color and light have an amazingly powerful ability to make your home a place that feels familiar, comfortable, and welcoming, and to influence your mood, whether you’re looking for a calming effect or an energizing one—all the things you want your house to be for you.

The world of color is very wide: you might never be able to spend as much time as you might like shuffling paint chips and studying swatches, but professional designers, stylists, and decorators do, and it’s wise to profit from their expertise and imagination where it’s offered, especially when their guidance is part of the customer service provided by the color industry. Sherwin Williams, the nation’s largest specialty retailer of paints, wall coverings, and related supplies, to take one prominent example, each year presents a Color Trend Forecast.

For 2007, Sherwin William is presenting five themed color collections, each in its own way designed to make sense out of the many options home owners have for choosing color. Here’s what Sherwin Williams offers for your consideration for the coming year:

Collection I, “Balanced Living,” focuses on being green—both visually and in the environmentally attentive sense of the word. Shades run through blues to aqua and are complemented by bronzed gold, plum, and sun-warmed yellow.

Collection II, “Sultry Origins,” takes the wider world of global cultures and brings it home. The collection’s motifs and colors derive from sources as diverse as Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, in tones of deep wine, ginger, leathery brown, and brass.

Collection III, “Understated Elegance,” looks to “complex neutrals”—rice, greige, stone, ivory, and java—to suit an environment inspired by clean lines and textured finishes.

Sherwin Williams’ Collection IV, “Virtual Remix,” offers not just nostalgia, but also visual cues to celebrate and even recreate vintage good times, re-enlivening retro colors like orchid, black, deep coral, and watery aqua.

And Collection V, “Kinetic Contrast,” revs things up with graphic, vivid, high contrast choices and “assertive shades” including blue, gold, red, and green, playing off dramatic black and white. Themed groupings like these from Sherwin Williams—and similar clusters of colors from other manufacturers—can be a very helpful compass to find your way through the rich world of color.

Furniture: Your Style, Your Comfort
If color helps set the mood for your home, the furnishings set the tone. The table where you dine, the storage pieces you chose to shelter and display your possessions, the places where you and your family and your guests will sit—all of these will both express and shape how you live in your home.

No question, walking into a furniture showroom can be overwhelming—exciting, but overwhelming. As with color, it’s enormously helpful to approach the adventure of choosing furniture with an initial sense of what sort of style appeals to you and will work in harmony with your home’s interior architecture. Thinking in terms of three major furniture styles—Traditional, Contemporary, and Transitional—will provide a good starting point for selecting furnishings that compliment your personal style—and your home’s style as well.

Traditional: This style can be thought of as furniture with a pedigree. Often associated with—and borrowing a name from—a period of European or American history, traditional furniture comes with a genealogy, a place in a family tree. But regardless of whether it’s Louis XIV or Louis XVI, Sheridan or Shaker, all Traditional furniture makes use of styles from the past that have endured because they please the eye. And whether you choose surviving pieces from the era itself, heirloom reproductions, or pieces newly built to the pattern of a previous era, a choice of Traditional style furniture shows not only respect for the past, but also confidence in the future, in the style’s continuing appeal.

Contemporary: Furniture that’s called Contemporary is about now, and about looking forward. Materials are often lighter than those associated with Traditional furniture; the Contemporary style turns to glass, metal, and paler woods to create comfortable, easy to live with furnishings. Whether sleek or overstuffed, no one would ever dream of calling it “stuffy.” Contemporary furniture is well adapted for use in multi-purpose rooms, thanks to its rounded edges and liberated form.

Transitional: Used to describe blended interior architecture as well, for floor plans that unite formal spaces and details of traditional architecture with open, multitasking ones, the “Transitional” concept translates well into furnishings, too. Transitional furniture can communicate simple elegance; it’s furniture that knows how to mind it manners, without ever forgetting to have some fun. And Transitional is a style that can accommodate accents of the eclectic and the unexpected—an extra burst of color, a surprisingly detailed bit of ornament.

Bringing It All Home

Making use of these simple steps will transform the potentially daunting process of designing your interior into a pleasant and inspiring one. You’ll surely appreciate the effort you took each time you experience the pleasure of opening your door and realizing, once again, that “this feels like home.” Embrace color: let your walls set a mood that reflects your outlook on life; furnish it to welcome you, your family, and your guests into the life that’s lived within the walls of your home, and you’ll be well on your way to a home that’s truly expressive of you.

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Article provided by and reprinted with permission from Urban Home Magazine (Issue: October/November/December 2006).

For an archive of this and other magazine articles, visit urbanhomemagazine.com.