Essential Home Décor Items

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Author: Sara Stewart

Decorating your home involves more than just choosing furniture. Carefully selected home décor items warm up a house and express your unique personality. If you truly want a well-furnished home, there are a number of essential home décor items that you should be considering. If you’re in the process of furnishing your first home, here are some of the items you should be looking for in addition to essential furniture.

Window Treatments

Bare windows can make a room appear cold or sterile, so choosing the right window treatments is an important part of the home decorating process. The colors and styles that you choose for your window treatments will play a large part in determining the overall style and mood of the room. For a more formal look, floor length drapes in solid or subtle prints are an excellent choice. Less formal looks for the bedroom include light colored drapes with subtle embroidery at the valance and along the sides.

Kitchen curtains can be more casual, and often include country and traditional style motifs. Kids’ room, family room and bedroom window treatments should reflect the style and personality of the room’s occupant. Choose colors that coordinate with the walls and floor in the room.

Rugs and Floor Coverings

Next to the walls, the floor is the biggest decorating space you have available in any room. Taking advantage of that space is just good decorating sense. Rugs can add a lot of color, texture and character to any room. Oriental designs are among the most popular, but a floral design or a subtle striped 8x10 area rug can create a great background for a furniture grouping or help set off part of the space in a room for a specific purpose.

There are also rugs that are designed for specific purposes. Half-round slice rugs are very popular for kitchen floors where they help protect the floor in front of the sink or the stove, as well as providing a comfortable cushion for your feet. Runners are designed to cover the center of a longer hallway or to be placed over a carpet or floor to designate a pathway through the room.

Lighting and Lamps

Another important design element in your rooms is the lighting. Choosing the right lighting for your rooms can greatly enhance the style and mood of your living room or bedroom and make work more comfortable in the kitchen and family rooms. There are many different styles and types of lighting including table lamps, floor lamps and ceiling lamps.

Ambient lighting, accent lighting or task lighting can be used in various rooms throughout your home to create different moods. Ambient lighting is often provided by dimming ceiling lights that shed soft light over the entire room. A trio of hanging mini-pendant lights is versatile enough to provide task lighting or area lighting over a dining room table. Chandeliers are also often centered over tables, but usually provide less directed ambient light. Table lamps often provide task lighting, as do floor lamps.

Lamps also provide style accents. The lamp body and shade should fit into the overall décor of your room and a bold pop of color, or complement your current color scheme. Tiffany style lamps have a far different design effect than a standing pole floor lamp with a simple drum shade. Be sure to choose lights and lamps that suit your design style and strategically place them to best accent the features of your rooms.

Wall Décor

Nothing looks emptier or starker than an undecorated wall. Walls offer space for shelves, pictures, wall hangings, photos, clocks and mirrors. Finding just the right accent pieces to hang on your walls can be a joy, but it can also present quite a challenge. Traditionally, most homes have a wall clock in each room that fits that room’s décor. The living room nearly always features a painting or a set of paintings above the sofa, and a smaller grouping of wall pieces on the walls that can be seen from the sofa.

Over the years, there have been many fads and trends in wall décor, and you can often find pieces that you’ll love at yard sales or buy wall collections online. Framed prints by artists like Thomas Kinkade are popular for living rooms and family rooms. Unframed, stretched canvases are less formal and are very popular in bedrooms and dens, though they’ve made their way into even the most formal of living rooms. Wall plaques and all art pieces like the very popular Thousand Eyes peacock sculpture also have their place in living room design and décor.

Your furniture and walls are like the skeletons of your home. If you really want to make a style statement, you need flesh out the bones with the right décor pieces.

Sara Stewart is a freelance writer who writes about home decor and shopping, often discussing a specific brand such as Lladro.