So you’ve decided to redo your living room. Once you’ve emptied the space and primed the walls, it’s a blank canvas- time to fill it with color and decor and flourishes that reflect you are and what you love. Where to begin? You can always start with interior design books or magazines, but flipping through these can often be a daunting (and even discouraging) experience. Sure, they’re excellent resources for finding styles and techniques you like, but a lot of times they seem geared to people with years of experience and a limitless budget. Here are a few unique places to look for interior design inspiration. Who knows? Inspiration might just find you.
Mom’s Attic
Interior design is often about finding that one essential thing that inspires you and then using it as a springboard for your creativity. This could be a particular shade of purple from your favorite flower or that old chair you rescued when your neighbor sat it out with the trash. Not only do these things speak to you, but they tell a story. Remember, you’re not just decorating a room. You’re trying to give it meaning.
And without a doubt, one the best place to look for meaningful inspiration is your mom’s attic, or your aunt’s attic, or any attic you can gain access to. Every item in an attic has a story to tell, and incorporating them in your new room is a way of expanding that story. You may have to brush up on your furniture restoration skills, but from a design aspect, attics just makes sense. As trends change, attics become the archive for classic styles that are ripe for a comeback.
Your Local Bookstore
Yes, interior design books can be a great place to start looking for inspiration, but you don’t necessarily have to open a book to be inspired by it. If you’ve spent any time in a bookstore lately then you may have notices that books are going through a bit of a design renaissance. As more readers move to their iPads, Kindles and various other e-readers, book publishers are looking for creative ways to get people to buy actual, physical copies of books. One way they are accomplishing this is by designing books that are beautiful objects in and of themselves-the kind of thing that you might want to display on the coffee table of your new living room. The “New Releases” section can be a sneaky shortcut to the latest design trends that you can easily translate to your space. Take a peak at this Flavorwire post about the most iconic book covers and you’ll see what we mean.
A Stock Photography Site
It you’ve ever done a Google image search for design ideas, then you know what a chore it can be. You have to sort through so many irrelevant results that it becomes a mostly futile exercise. That doesn’t mean you have to count the Internet out completely, however. The best advice is to stick with sites that can cater specifically to art and design. Shutterstock has millions of well-organized images and a great search function that lets you set multiple parameters. If you’re just looking for a random jolt of inspiration, then you can do no better that Shutterstock’s intuitive categories. The Abstract, Textures and Patterns sections can be especially useful for finding unique color combinations and shapes to incorporate into your design.
Inspiration can be found anywhere, even the most unlikely of places. Where do you get your ideas for re-invigorating your design?
