It’s time for springtime

With the official arrival of spring, I always get the urge to “redecorate” my house. Incorporating bright colors and fun patterns into your home can be the perfect way to prepare for the upcoming warmer weather. However, it can be difficult to match patterns and colors within your home. Have no fear! You can use pretty patterns and fun prints in your decor without turning the room into one huge kaleidoscope.

4 Tips How to Mix & Match Colors and Patterns at Home

1. Stick with a color scheme: Selecting a common color palette can go a long way in coordinating patterns. Stick with similar hues to draw your eye to the color – not the varying patterns. However, this doesn’t mean all of your colors have to be the same hue. Try out multi-colored fabrics, but use a color that is similar throughout all the patterns for a cohesive look.

2. Save the color for accent pieces: Use various shades of neutral colors, such as off-white, beige or cream, for the bigger pieces of furniture in your house. Couches, love seats, coffee tables and bookshelves make great neutral pieces and are more “permanent” fixtures in your home. To spruce up your space, save the various colors and patterns for accent pieces such as pillows, side chairs and tables. The great thing about accent pieces? They’re interchangeable! The pillows pictured below are fabulous for spring; however, they’re easy to change out when fall rolls around.

Products in the photo:
White Lattice Cottage Mirror
Navy Lattice Toss Pillow
Orange Ikat Pillow
Slipper Chair in Blue Diamonds
Coral Accent Table

3. The rule of threes: Most experts suggest sticking with three (sometimes four) different patterns in a variety of size and scale. If you have too many competing patterns, it confuses the eye and can make your space seem cluttered. Save the large scale pattern for the focal point of the room, such as wallpaper or patterned curtains, such as the ones below.

Jacquard Ikat Window Panels

4. Experiment, experiment, experiment! Don’t be intimated by the idea of mixing patterns and colors into your home. Sometimes the best combinations of colors and patterns aren’t necessarily logical. Focus on color, size, scale and texture and trust your instincts – if you think it looks good, then that’s really all that matters. The most important “rule” in decorating is that you love what you create. After all, it’s your space, so it should make you happy!

Disclosure: Compensation was provided by Target via Glam Media. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are not indicative of the opinions or positions of Target.

Modern White Living Room Inspiration

When in Rome, do as the Romans do, right? So here starts my Swedish home decorating project, the Swedish style. While our home decorating style has always had Scandinavian influence, I am from Finland after all, we decided to create our new home in Sweden even with more Scandinavian style. I love very modern and minimalistic Swedish homes, but I don’t think I could maintain the pure white or even black and white minimalistic design, and I don’t know if I would really even feel at home in a house like that.

I love the modern sleek furniture but I would like to create a more homey feeling with combining the white modern furniture with colorful accents, souvenirs from our travels as decorations, children’s drawings as framed art, my photos printed..

Here are a few of my inspiration rooms. They of course don’t look like “us” because the personal belongings are collected over the years by the home owners, but you get the picture. I don’t want my home to look like from a home store catalog, where you can recognize every object – I want my home to have our personal signature.

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In a very Swedish way, our living room and dining room are the same space. The house was built in late 50′s and has the look of the era with birch wood flooring, and since we are renting, we can’t white wash it like in the picture below. The wood flooring will give the modern furniture a little warmer look, and I like it. (More about the dining space in later posts).

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When the furniture is all white, it will be very easy to change the look to dramatic or more serene, depending the season of the year. Both of the rooms below have simple white furniture and a sparkly ball lamp hanging from the ceiling, but with the wall art, pillows and other accents, the looks of these two rooms are completely different. And that’s what I’m craving for – a white canvas that I can change up.

The Perfect White Leather Sofa

In my dream room I’d have the white leather couch designed by Florence Knoll in 1954. This gorgeous white leather with chrome legs is a design classic.
The Philippe Starck’s Monseigneur Sofa is newer, from 2008, and most certainly would work as a second choice. Thanks to IKEA, the heaven of modern copycat products, the KARLSTAD sofa in white leather with aluminum legs will do the trick for under 1,000 bucks.
If you don’t like the buttons, the BoConcept sofa looks great too.

Armchair

The inspiration pieces here are the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair and the matching stool. To stay in the budget, you can find a knock off of the Barcelona set for much lower price.
IKEA has a matching KARLSTAD arm chair with the couch, but I don’t care for it as much – it’s little too heavy looking, I’d prefer something more elegant.. like Barcelona chair.

I like large coffee tables, and the Knoll couch and the Barcelona chair could perfectly be matched with the Zion coffee table from Living Furniture or even the large one is from Bagge Design.

I think a designer armchair is a must to complete the modern look we are going for, and luckily there are a few options in addition to the Barcelona chair.

Alvar Aalto’s Paimio chair.
Arne Jacobsen Egg chair.
The Eames rocker…

And see more of my modern chair loves.

Lighting

Since the winters are so dark in Sweden, the homes are filled with light coming from light fixtures. Swedish homes have lamps even on windows, so houses look pretty even when you drive by. I absolutely want to get more lamps than what we typically have had in our homes in the US. For the living room I’d like to have a large floor lamp, ideally the famous Arco lamp, but here are a few other options, even one from IKEA.

Arco Floor Lamp designed by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Flos.
Block lamp by Design House Stockholm.
Regolit lamp at IKEA.
Mama lamp by Thibault Désombre for Ligne Roset
More modern large floor lamps here.

So what do you think? Too much white on white? Can I pull it off and can I make it my own with colorful accents?

If you want to see all of my inspirations and more products I like, follow my Pinterest boards

I wrote at Lifetime Moms this week how Georgia O’Keeffe’s art has inspired me this week, and I also have been trying out Polyvore.com to make design boards of fashions that draw inspiration of O’Keeffe’s art at Skimbaco Lifestyle. I love how easy Polyvore is to create looks and resize and find anything you can think of that inspire you. I have been using Photoshop so far, but if you don’t have the program, Polyvore is a great way to get started with digital design boards.

I like Polyvore better for fashion and clothing, but I’m sure I will use it more for interior design too, once I get little better at creating the design boards… Here is one that I created – also inspired by modern design and Georgia O’Keeffe.

modern living room by Skimbaco on Polyvore.com

After we moved and now live right next to a tennis court and we were at US Open last week, I am really inspired by tennis. It’s been too hot for me to play (and other excuses) but tennis inspiration means that I’ve been wanting to buy some Lacoste shirts and argyle sweaters. And scout for tennis inspired home products… While I think tennis inspired home decorating is at it’s best when vintage style, I wanted to create a modern preppy style tennis inspired room. The bed and the bedding are available both for single and double players, so it is up to you to make this room for one or two. Also, this design is gender neutral (different posters might work better then), and would be perfect for siblings sharing a room.

COLORS
I used navy blue and light blue for the walls, lighter base color and navy for thick stripes. You could also use stripe wall decals to get some contrast on the walls. Red is great accent color, and so is dark brown (the furniture) and white. With red, white and blue basic room design it is easy to change the theme to something else too, that’s such classic color combination.

BEDDING
I adore the argyle Lacoste bedding set, it comes with comforter, standard sham, flat sheet, fitted sheet and pillowcase. A cable knit throw gives the bed and the room the preppy tennis look, Lacoste and Ralph Lauren (pictured) have great basic throws, that go so well with the tennis look.

FURNITURE
The Sova bed from CB2 with handwoven natural rattan headboard gives the room nice tennis feel – whether it reminds you of the net or the racket. I also found natural rattan storage baskets that fit in the Harmonica Wardrobe and dresser leaving the storage baskets visible – great for those tennis shoes and tennis balls! The Casa table lamp is also natural rattan weave finishing the same look. The lamps look great on the Engan nightstands from IKEA.

The traditional director’s chair brings in the vintage charm and the white cover lightens up the room a little too. The red LACK shelves from IKEA are perfect for trophies.

FLOOR AND WINDOWS

Dark hardwood flooring and white rug would be ideal, I love the contrast of a white rug on dark floor and it would fit this room perfectly. If you have light colored carpet, I’d recommend a contrasting it with a darker rug. Since the walls already have purple, and the furniture is dark, I’d match the wood tones with natural blinds and contrast them with sheer white curtain panels. Also a white roller roman shade would go nicely.

ACCESSORIZE

Bring in some color with accents like the red alarm clock. The vintage tennis posters I found combines the vintage tennis look and the reds really pop up from the light blue walls. You can find vintage tennis posters online – or you can frame your own tennis pictures to bring your personal touch.

Another theme for my B&W living room! Modern Paris Chic with hot pink.

I am hosting an e.l.f. Cosmetics Makeup At Home party on Tuesday and wanted to get some pink going on to our living room for the party. I thought Paris Chic theme would go well, and I’m of course making pink cupcakes to tie it all together. In fact, I will probably get a glass container full of pink candy for a center piece. Candy and flowers make great and easy ways to bring more color to your room!

We still don’t have all of the elements for our living room that I need, but I promise, I will be posting photos how far I have really come, and how I added pink accents to get the Paris Chic party look for my makeup party for my friends.

Products in the design board:
Pink lampshade ($14.99) – with this low price, you can use it only for a while, and then maybe embellish it with something to get a new look?

Save money and skip the real chandelier, get a wall sticker instead. The pictured is from Wall Tat and comes in several colors and sizes. Another way to bring the chic chandelier in your living room: the chandelier pillow ($14.99) in hot pink brings color and style!

What’s a Paris Chic room without an Eiffel Tower (or two)? Wire Eiffel Tower brings Paris in just for $19.99. The wall clock ($29.99) gives nice vintage feel to otherwise so modern room and makes it warmer and more welcoming.

I love simple black photo frames. My favorite things to frame are black and white photographs, but the simple frames make it easy to swap the photos to something else to reflect my decorating mood. For the Paris Chic theme I framed Fabulous Friends Boxed Cards from Cambria Cove ($30 for 20 cards, 4 different styles) and I cut out vintage map pictures from Cavallini wall calendar ($12.99).

I also added a Mama Mio’s hot pink Gravida Candle ($26) to get my family’s living room to smell ah, so Paris Chic!

I’m really looking forward decorating our new home. It is a rental apartment, so I can not go too wild, it is limited what I can do. Our budget to decorate is minimal, so it won’t be by any means perfect, but I’m excited nevertheless.

So here is my initial design board for our black and white apartment living room. I’ve liked the IKEA Stockholm rug since it came out last year, and now I finally bought it, and a lot of the other stuff… from IKEA too. It fits our budget, and I like the look. We already have two pieces of white furniture from Pottery Barn and from Martha Stewart’s line for Bernhardt, and they are quite not the modern style I’m going for, but I am going to make it work.

BLACK & WHITE SIMPLICITY
Go careful with black furniture if your space is small, then it might draw too much attention. Our two story high living room with vaulted ceiling is pained in tinted white – I am hoping the black bookshelf and the black leather couch will balance the empty whiteness we have right now.

ACCESSORIZE WITH COLOR
One of the benefits of having a black and white room is that it’s easy to bring in other color.
When you have black and white “bones” in your room, bring in the “meat” with color! It’s easy to be trendy with this room design, just change the decorative pillows, maybe the add a new picture on the wall, and change the decorative pieces on the fireplace mantel or the bookshelf. All you really need is one item that really pops in the color and bonus is if you can think of something that you can paint or upholster, so you can easily to change the look, and you are not stuff with it when you want some change.

PS. I showed this post to my husband and said I was going to do this to our living room. He asked.. “you?” Because he has been amazing this move and putting everything together and moving furniture and so on. I answered “well, I’m just going to manage it”. I guess this is a good point to note, that home decorating does take some muscle and it is nice to have a helping hand when you are doing it!

SHOPPING GUIDE FOR THE PRODUCTS:
Bedford Secretary hutch ($499) from Pottery Barn, together with Bedford Lateral File Cabinet ($499)
Kramfors Couch in black leather ($899) from IKEA, the Stockholm rug ($299) is also from IKEA.
Marimekko Hetkiä fabric ($135) from Always Mod.
Jonathan Adler Meurice Polished Nickel Floor Lamp ($415) is available with matching table lamp at Euro Style Lighting.
Lucia Candle Holders by Asplund ($185) are from Scandinavian Grace.
Blanco Coffee table ($499) from Crate and Barrel.
The chair is Alvar Aalto’s pension chair.

BLUE ACCENTS:
notNeutral Triton pillow ($72) from Clever Tomato.
Aalto vase (from $48, depending on the size) from Aalto.com.
Aqua Stripe Opaque Giclee Shade ($59) from Lamps Plus.
Glass bird ($10) Pier 1.
Turquoise small ottoman ($99) from Rooms to Go Kids.