How to Embrace Clutter Without Creating Chaos
Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve begun to look at our homes differently. They’ve become a place to linger for longer, rather than just at the start and end of the day, and we’ve come to see them as a restorative space.
As a result, many of us want to inject more of our personality into our rooms and surround ourselves with objects, paintings, colors and patterns that bring us joy. But how do we display an eclectic collection of treasured furniture and items without making our homes feel messy and stressful?
Read on to find out how designers have created homes that incorporate collections of artwork, textiles, vintage furniture and decorative items while still looking stylish and cohesive.
Shelve It
For a cozy kitchen that nourishes your eyes as well as your stomach, shelving is key. Incorporate as many surfaces as possible to ensure you can display treasured pottery and old recipe books.
In this kitchen designed by Stephen Graver, an eclectic mix of vintage and custom shelving adds personality to the walls and provides storage for the owner’s collection of tableware and reading material.
It’s vital to plan ahead if you want to achieve a seemingly casual look like this. If you’re clear about the objects you’d like to have on display, a professional can help you combine open areas with closed cabinetry to ensure your kitchen looks curated rather than cluttered.
Consider Color and Layout
A home that’s full of keepsakes, artwork and color doesn’t have to feel overly busy. This bedroom designed by Brooke Copp-Barton Interiors shows how interesting objects and textures can actually bring a calm, harmonious feel to a space.
The trick here is the clever use of color that goes beautifully with the artwork. The designer has picked out the blue, green and pink hues in the paintings for the walls and textiles. The interesting palette is both bold and balanced, and the mix of velvet, pattern and wool brings tactile character to the room.
The artwork is also cleverly positioned. It appears to be hung in a slightly haphazard way, but in fact the bottom of the central painting is lined up with the base of the artwork on the left, while the painting on the right is lined up with the bottom of the central frame.
Repeat an Accent
If you get it wrong, a cluttered look can cause the eye to dart from place to place, not knowing where to stop. If you do it right, like the team at Studio Fabbri did here, your eye will glide along the space in a relaxed manner.
The disparate selection of objects has, of course, been arranged in a beautiful composition by the designer, but there’s another trick at play here. Note the numerous objects that are all a particular shade of vibrant salmon pink. The color crops up at intervals around the room — in the mannequin, on the graffiti artwork and on the flamingo, for example.
The repetition of a single shade adds a subtle rhythm to the space that gives it a cohesive feel.
Embrace Symmetry
Want to fill your home with pattern, color, vintage furniture and artwork? It’s perfectly possible to create a room full of mismatched designs without it feeling disjointed. This room, designed by Pineapple Interiors, illustrates how to do it beautifully.
At first glance, nothing seems to match, yet the space feels calm and balanced. The cohesive color palette helps, but equally important is the symmetry in the room. You don’t have to achieve perfect symmetry, just a feeling that each side of the room is balanced in some way by the other side.
The armchairs are placed opposite the sofa and also help to balance out the console on the left. The lamps are also imperfectly balanced, and all of these objects are grounded by a central artwork, coffee table, rug and pendant.
Find a Theme
If you can arrange your objects, finds and furniture around a theme, you can create a collection rather than random clutter.
In this New York apartment, Jessica Shaw of moment design + productions devised ways to display the owner’s collection of interesting objects and artwork so they feel calm and ordered.
Similar objects are arranged on custom storage to form a balanced display. There are a lot of pictures, ceramics and baskets in the mix, but by grouping them together, the designer made them look beautiful rather than untidy.
Measure Up
It’s worth being detail-oriented when it comes to designing display storage for an eclectic mix of objects and books. If you take the time to measure the pieces you’d like to show off, you can create open shelving that puts each piece in its own frame.