Decorating interior spaces is not as easy as it seems, at least from a design perspective. It’s easy to get caught up in the latest trends and go all-in on a style that’s popular today, only to find that this is a short lived fad that quickly looks old hat a year or two down the line.
To avoid this, you need to aim for timelessness over trendiness in your decorative decision-making. But how can you do this on a budget?
Could You Become an Interior Decorator?
It’s first worth mentioning that working as a new interior decorator is a bit different to being a full-blown interior designer. You don’t need to concern yourself with aspects like re-jigging the layout of a property, or adding or removing major features. Instead, the decor is your primary focus.
Of course plenty of people take on interior decoration in an amateur capacity, either for their own home projects or for friends and family. Whatever the case, there are cost-effective options for achieving a timeless look.
Work on Spaces Individually
The quickest way to go over the top with your decor budget is to try and do too much in one go. So rather than attempting to revamp an entire house, start with just one room.
This doesn’t even have to be your main living space, but could be a utility room or a spare bedroom.
This is not only an inexpensive starting point, but also a strategy that will let you hone your interior decoration skills in a place that won’t be that visible to visitors, giving you the freedom to experiment and make mistakes.
Opt For Neutral Paint Colors and Add Personality With Furniture
Speaking of mistakes, one of the most common errors that interior decorators make is to tie a room to a specific era with paint or wallpaper that is bold, bright and overly anchored to an up-to-the-minute design movement.
Choosing neutral tones for the walls is more timeless as well as more cost-effective in the long run. It means that you can be more playful with the furniture choices and accessories you add to the space, without having to face up to the prospect of needing to redecorate all over again any time soon.
It’s also a move that will improve the salability of the property, as prospective buyers will be able to see the spaces for what they are, rather than being put off by overly personal color palettes.
Buy Second Hand Units Where Possible
Timelessness is a bit of an illusion, as what most people mean by it is really an old-school charm, or decorations that hark back to an era that is distinct from the here and now.
Because of this, you can make the move to buy second hand items to furnish and accessorize a room, without fear of it feeling dated. In fact, by upcycling old, unwanted pieces from the past, you can be both on-trend right now, and also give yourself the flexibility to turn back the clock and restore the item to its original state when tastes inevitably change.
Reorganize Rather Than Redecorating
The last piece of the puzzle is to realize that timeless decoration doesn’t have to be an additive process; sometimes all you need to do is take certain items out of a space, or reorganize the way that the objects you already own are configured, to get a transformative effect.
Taking stock of what you’ve got to play with, without buying anything new, could open up inventive new avenues that don’t cost the earth.
