Accessories, Accessories, Accessories!

March 13, 2013

Accessories are the finishing touch in every room. When you adorn your room with beautiful objects, it gives it a feeling of completeness. You can embellish your room with paintings, flowers, throw cushions, sculptures, plants, clocks, pictures and more!

For the most part, accessories don’t fulfill any function in the room other than adding beauty. For example, let’s say you place a throw pillow on a sofa. Someone can lean on that pillow, so you might say that its function is to add comfort.

But is that the reason you placed the pillow on the sofa? Probably not. You most likely placed the throw pillow on the sofa to add beauty to the room – perhaps adding dash of color or design or a touch of softness to break-up the hard lines of the sofa.

A room without accessories means that every piece of furniture in the room is functional. This kind of room will exhibit very little warmth or personal interest because the mood of the room is achieved only through functional elements and its existing color scheme.

When you select accessories, think about the mood that you want it to convey and ask yourself, “Does this accessory fit in with the rest of the room?”

The color and scale of the accessory is important. To ensure that the accessory complements your space, ask yourself, “Does the item fit the color scheme of the room? Does the item harmonize with the scale of the objects around it and the size of the room?”

Extremely large accessories typically don’t fit well into small rooms. And as you think about the scale of your accessory, keep in mind that when you place several smaller objects in a group they will take on a visual weight and appear larger then they are individually.

When you are considering the amount of accessories to place in your room, you’ll find that uneven numbers are more pleasing to look at than even numbers (for example, 3 or 5 books on a table, 3 candlesticks, 3 vases on the mantle).

To begin accessorizing your room, start by imagining your room without any accessories at all. Now, take each major item of furniture – each sofa, each table, each chair – and ask yourself if you should place anything on this item to make it more interesting. Your accessory could add color, a touch of design or maybe a sense of completeness to cover bareness.

Accessorizing your sofa

Accessories can be used to provide a color accent or to soften your sofa. You can counter monotone coloring by adding brightly patterned pillows. Or to soften the starkness of a sofa you could place a throw pillow on each end of the sitting area. To draw out a particular color in the fabric of the sofa, add cushions with complementary colors.

When placing accessories on tables, start by positioning the major or largest objects. Move them around until you achieve an arrangement that is pleasing to the eye. Then stand back and see if there are any empty spots that could be filled with smaller accessories.

Arranging accessories on walls or mantelpieces

Many people wonder how to arrange objects on a wall or mantelpiece. In general, you will want to build up the axis of a room and arrange the objects to achieve proper proportion and scale.

Accessorizing in corners

Corners! Nature abhors a vacuum! Many good designers abhor bare corners. Corners are – by nature – stark and bare. In most rooms, you could soften this sharpness by using accessories to camouflage or hide it. How can you soften a corner? Short of plastering it over into a curved wall, here are some great ideas:

1. Plants are a time-honored method. Consider a tall floor standing potted plant or a small plant atop a table in the corner.
2. Sculptures are another great possibility. A tall statue may stand by itself in a corner or a smaller statue atop a pedestal.
3. Lamps are a easy way to soften corners. Try using a tall floor lamp or a smaller lamp on a table.
4. Large vases also look smashing in corners. Consider a vase three or four feet high in which you place long reeds or other dried stems to provide added height.

For more ideas on accessorizing your space, take some pictures of your room and then visit our showroom to speak with one of our interior designers – they’ll give you some great ideas on embellishing your room.

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