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How can I make my home beautiful? By creating a sense of personality, cohesion, and warmth (both literal and figurative). These things are the cornerstones of what makes a beautiful house or home, but when it comes to tangibles, this can be a little trickier as everyone has a different idea of what constitutes beauty.
This blog post will talk about what makes a beautiful home interior, and share tips on how to make a home beautiful without money to spare, if budgetary constrains are very important to you!
How can I make my home beautiful?
Everyone has a different idea of what constitutes beauty, and yet not everyone is aware of this; many of us tend to think of our own idea of beauty as self-evident and universal, when this is not actually true.
Many people immediately think of flowers as being beautiful, if pushed to articulate what they mean; but everyone has a preference for a different type of flower, and even if you do find flowers beautiful, a floral theme might not fit in with what you want from the interior of your home.
So, how can I make my home beautiful if I’m not sure where to start? By defining what you mean by “beauty,” and moving on down the bus from there.
What is beautiful to you? Flowers? The human body? A certain shape or geometrical form? The sea? Certain colours? I could fill a page with listing off the types of items, ideas, and inspiration that most people might consider beautiful, and still be no closer to naming yours!
However, this is something that you can determine for yourself, and then theme from there.
For instance, if you find the human form beautiful, incorporating artwork, sculptures, and abstract shapes in this theme would be one way to express your preferences. A neutral colour palate would support this, along with tactile accessories in materials like leather, silk, and velvet.
If the sea and coast is your idea of beauty, the colour palate that this offers you to play with is extensive and likely to be very personal to you. Driftwood accessories, shells, and décor and art follow the form of the theme with ease once you get going.
These are just a few basic ideas on how to identify your own idea of beauty, and how this would translate within your own home. This itself means that two objectively beautiful homes would quite probably look very different to each other too. Also, the same theme or approach, expressed differently in two different homes, might work fantastically well in one but fall short in the other.
How come? This is what I will look at next; the cornerstones (pardon the pun) of building a beautiful house and a beautiful home that works, comes alive, and achieves the desired result.
What makes a beautiful house or a beautiful home?
As I summarised above, beauty is not a binary thing, and two beautiful homes are apt to be quite different from each other. They will, however, share a number of common traits that altogether contribute to making a beautiful home; and that if absent, can cause it to fall short of the mark.
Here are the eight keys to making a home look beautiful or to successfully supporting a beautiful home theme.
Personality makes a beautiful house come alive
First up, personality. You might think of the set of a show home as being beautiful; but is it really? Without personal touches (and this means more than just the odd family photo) any house will feel cold and impersonal, regardless of décor. Putting your own personality into your home means making your own choices on colours and styles, and sometimes, choosing things you like purely because you like them, or they generate a good feeling; even if you can’t strictly say that they’re totally consistent with everything else you have.
After all, most families have some of the kid’s artwork on the walls somewhere, but you would not decorate the whole home in “child’s fingerpaint” as the theme; and yet altogether, it works!
Cohesion makes a house beautiful
Cohesion means creating a sense of consistency throughout each room and throughout the home as a whole. For instance, it would be inconsistent to decorate each room in hugely different styles (such as shabby chic in one room and modern minimalism in another) although you definitely don’t have to keep every room singing from exactly the same hymn sheet in this regard; you might want a romantic bedroom, but a calm and fairly formal home office.
Maintain some sense of cohesion and consistency or flow throughout the home, in all of your key elements.
Life is essential to bring your home alive
Aside from you and the other humans that live with you, living things really make a home beautiful and make it feel alive. Plants are an obvious and effective way to achieve this, as are fresh cut flowers, and pets; this latter obviously only if “they make the house look beautiful” is an incidental reason for adopting them, rather than the main one!
Light up your home to make it beautiful
Good, bright, natural light is essential to making a home beautiful, and if possible this should be achieved by enabling as much sun into the home as possible, within reason!
You can use light-filtering window blinds like Venetian, wood, and faux-wood blinds to filter and soften the light without blocking it entirely, and choosing the right spectrum and tone for your light bulbs can correct any issues caused by insufficient light from outside, or to help on dull winter days!
Symmetry achieves a pleasing visual effect in a beautiful home
Symmetry can be a little hard to explain in terms of how to make a home beautiful, and you certainly don’t need or probably, want to take this fully literally! However, your rooms should have a sense of balance and ergonomic symmetry, so that they’re both comfortable to use and also comfortable to look at.
A consistent tone is essential
Tones in this context refer to colour, in terms of either being warm or cool. Both warm tones and cool tones respectively can be beautiful and so, make a house beautiful; but mixing warm with cool in the same room appears jarring and out of balance.
Warmth makes a house a home
Warmth – both literal and metaphorical – are essential for a beautiful home. This means not only the temperature of your thermostat, but that of your colours and choices of fabrics and materials too! Metaphorical warmth isn’t so easy to put down on paper, but we all know what it means, or rather, we know when we feel it.
It’s a sense of feeling welcome, comfortable, and able to relax, either in your own home or the home of someone you are a guest in.
Memories help to increase a home’s beauty over time
Beauty comes with age, both for people and homes! The longer you live in a place and so, put your own stamp on it, make memories, and build associations there, the more like yours it will feel and so, the more beautiful it will be.
If you’re moving to a new home and particularly, a newly built home, this might seem like something you’re going to need to wait a few years for; and that is true to an extent. But you can and should also bring your own memories (the good ones) into your home too, with personal touches, pictures, paintings, and simply, the things you like and value, and that generate positive associations for you.
How can I make my home beautiful without money to spare?
Having unlimited funds undeniably makes pretty much everything easier. But how can I make my home beautiful without money to spare for anything? A lack of money doesn’t automatically disbar you from having or being able to create nice things, albeit a few quid in the bank always makes things easier!
Looking at the eight points I mentioned above, none of them specify going out and buying anything. Obviously, again, having funds for things like buying blinds and upgrading your lighting, repainting a room, or buying accessories contribute, but every one of my eight points can be tackled without necessarily having to spend anything at all, or only a very small amount of money.
There are also several things anyone can do to make a home beautiful; one of these is keeping it clean, which immediately brightens up a room, and makes you feel better about the room in general too.
Grimy bathroom grout, for instance, is pretty much the opposite of beautiful, and resolving this issue doesn’t need to cost anything but elbow grease, and achieves both a visual and an intangible improvement.
Avoiding clutter also helps; and a couple of things that can work against making a home beautiful is hoarding things unnecessarily, keeping broken things that don’t work and/or that you don’t use, and blocking the light.
With a small amount of money to make your home beautiful, you can also make some fairly far-reaching changes. New throws, cushions, and smaller ornaments (particularly second hand) can be bought very economically if you shop around.
New made-to-measure window blinds (roller blinds and vertical blinds being the least costly, and rollers having the greatest variety of colours and styles too) can make a huge difference to a room, as they take up so much wall space when closed, and only have a small footprint when open, maximising the natural light.
These are just a few ideas to explore; and once you get started or start looking around for inspiration, you will find many more, particularly if you’re prepared to learn some new skills and say, have a go at upcycling existing furniture!
