A Guide to Making Your Home More Luxurious
It is a common question for those who find themselves on a tight budget: how can they make their home feel more luxurious without breaking the bank? The good news is that regardless of your personal taste, design preferences, and dislikes, clever tips and tricks are always available to make your home feel the most luxurious it can feel for the least amount of money.
Whether you want to incorporate black leather dining chairs or chic linen bedding into your home, following some money-saving tricks will make you the envy of all your friends.
Try a Trim
If you are sewing your own curtains or cushion covers or looking to reupholster couches, chairs, or headboards, consider incorporating a trim to add a level of luxury to all the pieces. Buying inexpensive fabric like linen or cotton but donning it with a border of something beautiful is a regularly employed designer hack.
Like with most things in life, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. So think carefully about which pieces you want to use to make a statement, and highlight these with your trim. Including too much in one room will take away the desired effect you are after.
Temporary Wallpaper
Adhesive wallpaper is quickly becoming a leading trend as more people look for fast, inexpensive, and temporary ways of glamorizing their spaces. It is an incredibly easy way of instantly refreshing a room with an entirely new look.
It is the ideal way to explore new colors and patterns in your home that you might need clarification on. A good rule to follow, however, is lighter colors and subtle patterns for working spaces or rooms on the smaller side. Dark, harsh colors and busy patterns can become too distracting and will make a smaller room feel even smaller.
Focus on Touch
When speaking to the experts about the best places to save and splurge, a standard tip given is to splurge on the everyday things you touch regularly. For example, the taps and handles in the bathroom and kitchens or the door handles around your home. You might be unable to redo all the kitchen cabinets and cupboards around your living space, but adding this small yet luxurious detail will instantly elevate the room’s finishes.
In the living room and bedroom, you can change up the fabrics of items you use daily. Cushion covers, throw blankets, bedding, and carpets are all excellent items with which to experiment.
Explore Organic Materials
There is a common perception that the air of luxury revolves around fabrics like silk, velvet, soft linen, and Egyptian cotton. But the reality is that textiles don’t have to break the bank to feel good. For example, buying pure cotton and regular linen for bedding is cheaper in price yet equally as wonderful.
Spend a little extra time looking at the labels of products and checking the composition of the materials used. This will allow you to start seeing patterns in what items cost and what fabrics they include. Focus on bedding, towels, and blankets first, expanding to other things as your budget allows.
Invest in a Dining Table
A bit of formality can go a long way if you want to uphold a sense of luxury in your home. While there is undoubtedly a time and place where sitting on the couch, in front of the tv, eating dinner is perfectly acceptable, including time spent around a beautifully adorned dining table will have you feeling elegant and chic.
The key here is to set your table in a sophisticated and put-together way. Placemats, fabric napkins, a tablecloth, illuminating candlesticks, a beautiful vase of flowers, and your best dinner set will make you feel like you are dining in a 5-star restaurant.
Incorporate Beautiful Scents
You will be amazed how much of a difference can be made through the power of beautifully scented products. From candles, hand soaps, and room sprays to bath oils and essential oil diffusers, walking into a home where you are met with an intoxicating and comforting smell will be the first thing you notice.
Don’t allow yourself to fall into the mistake of mixing too many different scents. Instead, you should decide on one scent group and alternate between two or three different smells that fall under this umbrella. Too many contrasting smells will leave you feeling overpowered and unwell.
Create Tableaus
A small but very effective design change you can make is creating small ‘scenes’ around your home. For example, a side table or accent chair are both wonderful candidates to facilitate a small but chic collection of lovely items.
For an eye-catching corner piece, combine a vase of flowers, a match striker, your favorite candle, and a coaster. In the bathroom, you can use a rustic stool adorned with a basket for a face cloth, bath salts, body cream, and decorative soap.
For the ultimate scene, fill a drinks tray with a collection of glamorous glassware, two or three of your favorite spirits, and a neutral ice bucket, perfect for displaying on top of a chest of drawers, a dining table, or a mantlepiece.
Carol
Information sourced by the author for luxuryactivist.com. All content is copyrighted with no reproduction rights available. Images are for illustration purposes only.