How Important is a Unified Interior Style? 7 Reasons to Embrace Beauty in the Chaos
Most homes feature an eclectic mix of styles combined with personal mementos and items the person loves. Finding some unity between competing elements gives your interior consistency and creates a harmonious place to live and entertain others.
By embracing elements of a unified interior style, you’ll wind up with something beautiful and showplace-worthy.
How Many Achieve a Unified Style
Unified design offers a consistent look throughout your space via a theme like farmhouse, modern or Art Deco. Similarities allow visitors to flow from one room to the next and feel as though they're part of a whole. Similar colors, patterns, textures and items happen in all the rooms of the home.
For those who have a mish-mash of objects they love, going to a fully unified style may not appeal. Instead, you can embrace some elements of consistency while still keeping the funky vibe you prefer.
How Unified Interior Style Beautifies Your Eclectic Space
A structured style is crucial to feeling comfortable and proud of your home’s interior. People have special items they’ve inherited from loved ones or collected on trips and during other special moments.
Incorporating these pieces into a cohesive look while still maintaining an individual sense of style matters.
Here are some scenarios where you should embrace beauty from your lifelong collection and how to achieve a finished look.
1. Keep the Personal Items
Although a cohesive look appeals to the masses, you have to live in the space. Never give up the items you love that have special meaning. When you keep only what brings you joy and arrange it consistently, you’ll begin to appreciate your unique sense of style and understand why you’re drawn to certain objects more than others.
If you have unique collectibles or vintage finds, adding them into a modern mix can make your home stand out. You can keep what you love without distracting from the beauty of the space by grouping like objects and trying to stick to a color scheme.
2. Match Interior Doors and Windows
Paint colors can tie an interior together, even if the decor is a mix. If you’ve lived in your house a while, the colors and styles of interior features may vary.
For example, your garage door might be red and your front door blue. One way to bring a bit of singularity is to color all doors the same shade.
Your doors are a significant part of the first impression your home makes. Try to make them cohesive inside and out, which could even mean painting them in similar yet subtly different shades. Carrying the style outside makes a seamless transition from one point to the next.
Even painting every interior door white or black to match your window frames can add some detailing people may not notice but will understand from the impression the room makes.
3. Use Items You Already Have
With an eclectic interior style inspired by unified design, you’ll utilize items you already have but group them in new ways or change the colors.
If you have some oversized throw pillows in the bedroom in the same hue as a vintage vase from your grandmother, move the pillows to the living room or the vase to the bedroom.
Another example might be to paint your kitchen table to match other furnishings or accessories in the room, adding some material to lampshades to change the hue.
Look for ways to simplify. Remove what doesn’t match your new style choices and adapt others to work alongside what you already love.
4. Buy in Bulk
When you use a consistent look throughout one element of your home, you can benefit by buying in bulk and saving money. Go for a single item or two in a classic style that stands the test of time. You can also easily replace ones that break or get worn with something similar. Having items that somewhat match creates chaos that works.
For example, you might decide you want to let more light into your home, and sheer curtains fit the job. People who are exposed regularly to daylight decrease the risk of premature death by 34% and brighten up their space.
Using the same curtains in most spaces allows you to buy larger numbers and save money by buying in bulk.
5. Reduce Hoarding Tendencies
If you love all your things, adopting elements from a unified sense of style can reduce your tendency to hoard them. You’ll stick with what you love the most in each room, while everything else gets donated, thrown out, adapted or stored.
When you stick with a single color palette or pattern, it’s much easier to figure out what to eliminate and what to keep. You can still embrace the unusual without totally conforming, but less stuff means less chaos.
6. Have Fun With Patterns
Eclectic style with elements of unified style often has a modern look. You’ll have a chance to play with patterns and create a fun look that is edgy and bold.
For example, you might place a solid color rug in front of the couch, a polka-dot footstool in the middle and a textured, plaid couch on one side. Use the items you already have, but think outside the box and move them around.
What brings all those materials and looks together is a limited color palette or sticking with vintage, modern or classical design. You can mix or match as long as something ties the items together cohesively.
7. Give a Sense of More Space
When you add small elements of continuity from room to room, each area seems part of a larger whole. The space appears bigger as one area streams into the next.
A monochromatic color scheme with light neutrals like off-white or beige can also add to the feel of bigger rooms and more space. When you do sprinkle in eclectic objects, they stand out more and give your home a bigger personality.
Even small apartments can seem larger when you apply a few unified interior design techniques. If you add enough interesting elements, people will focus on their uniqueness rather than how cramped they may feel.
Experiment With What You Own
Achieve a finished look by considering the design from a distance. If you were a visitor entering the room for the first time, what would your impression be? Can anything be moved, changed or taken out to create a nicer whole?
You can keep your personal preferences and still create harmony in your space because eclectic style is a lot more flexible than some other methods.
Blending what you already own with new color options and consistency makes for a beautiful and centered look, even if you start with complete chaos.
Evelyn Long is the Editor-in-Chief of Renovated Magazine, where she writes on interior design and home organization content. She is passionate about making home styling easier for all homeowners and renters by writing about home interior trends. Subscribe to renovated.com/subscribe for more posts by Evelyn!
