Happy Spring!

Happy Spring!

Technically we have one more week of winter, but I can’t bare this cold anymore, so I’ve declared it officially spring. With spring comes cleaning, decorating, planning and overall everything your resident Virgo realtor/designer loves. As you all start to clean out the corners of your homes you’ve stashed clutter in, you may want to spruce up rooms of your home. The extra sunshine seems to always make us want a new accent chair in the living room, or a fresh floral centerpiece on the dining table. Keeping this in mind, I’ve focused the last few weeks of the Instagram “this or that” series on design trends for 2023. You were all voting so well until I slipped a trick question into the bunch and everything went wrong.

This week’s newsletter will be used to help explain why “matchy matchy” furniture is the WORST design mistake you can make.

Let’s start with the basics.

Every furniture store runs a TV commercial, showing you their bedroom and dining room set furniture. It’s perfectly matched. You pay one price for 3-4 items of furniture all together. Boom, done, easy. You get home, everything gets delivered and suddenly you are looking at your new bedroom/dining room/living room and realize it feels boring, cold and nothing like the inviting and visually appealing rooms scattered throughout magazines. Why? Because you got tricked.

Your home is meant to be a compilation of your life and experiences. None of us are one dimensional. We are complex. If you met a person that was one dimensional, you’d likely get an unpleasant feeling and think they were hiding something. Your home is a reflection of you, and should have some complexity too. This makes your home feel inviting, familiar, and most importantly, relatable, both for you and guests. Keeping this in mind will help you buy furniture that grows with you over the years. Your furniture will never go out of style.

Now, let’s address the confusion from Instagram. There is nothing wrong with buying 4 or 6 or 8 matching chairs for you dining table. Everyone has a different level of sensitivity to eclectic design, and there is nothing wrong with that. Having different chairs mismatched can be chaotic and visually stressful, if not done very intentionally. Having all your chairs match, gives a simplistic, clean look. This is a popular and timeless approach to styling a dining table. However, when doing so, it’s best to have the chairs contrast the table. When the chairs and table look too similar, either in color, texture or style, we are getting dangerously close to the TV advertisement, “buy 3 pieces for the 1 low price of…” look. Get too close to this “matchy matchy” style, and a few years after your purchase, you’re going to want something new.

Here are some examples: