Interior Designing: How To Decorate A Room Corner

We all live with corners in our rooms. Corners, corners and more corners. There's no escape, really. But oddly enough, there seems to be rather little written about how to decorate our many corners. This makes sense if you consider that corners are often the biggest problems when decorating our rooms. But why?

Well, if you stop for a minute to think about it, we just have too many kinds of corners that bring along with them, too many challenges to decorating. Just as we have many room sizes, we have many corner sizes. Add to that the fact that often our corners have closets and doorways butting up near them as well as windows of all sizes. Then we get to add window coverings to those corners that are near windows and well, you get my point. I believe corners present the most daunting interior designing challenges. And that's probably why you won't find much help decorating your own corners.

Having been a student of interior design as well as having worked as an interior designer, I've more or less gotten intimate with many, many corners. So, I decided to tackle this somewhat unruly topic by giving examples of good and not so good interior corner decor. In doing this, I'll be highlighting some basic interior design principles that you might generally apply to your own room corners.

The first thing you should do when considering how to use interior designing for your empty room is whether or not you want to visually make the corners kind of "go away" or draw your attention. Do you really want to emphasize your corner/corners? Do you have the kind of furniture that will make your corner look better if you put it there? Do you have a really, cool corner that's just screaming for attention? While I know that's rare, if you do have a great corner you want to draw attention to, try and figure out if it will work given the other furniture you have to put in the room. You always want to try and visually balance a room's furniture and accessories.

RULE #2 DON'T OVERCROWD YOUR CORNERS in an attempt to make them less noticeable, less of a problem or appear more attractive than they really are. Sometimes corners need to just fade away. Corners are functional and needn't always be decorated.

RULE #3: BALANCE YOUR ROOM FIRST AND THEN BALANCE YOUR CORNERS: Good interior design is often based on creating a balance between all the elements of a room: the paint colors, the wall decor, the rugs and flooring, lighting and most importantly, the furniture. With so many elements to consider, there's no wonder why so many of us have trouble giving ourselves the home interiors we want. But, like so many other things in life, learning and following a few logical steps can really help to master the task.

From my own experience as an interior designer, I've found that most people can rather easily place the furniture in a room to it's best advantage. This is a great asset since most folks know to keep traffic paths clear of furniture and how to place the furniture for best functional use. It's the details that stump most people, like what to do with corners. But again, focusing on just a few simple principles like the ones in this article, are all it takes for greater mastery.

So, to reiterate, if you want to know how to decorate the corners in your room, place and balance your room furniture first. Remember, good interior design is all about balance. Having said that, notice the right corner of the photo below: the furniture is quite away from the corner as it should be and the small painting on that corner wall is very light colored making it recede. Actually, I would have left that painting out completely as the room is balanced but a bit busy already.

In the photo above, you'll see a very nicely balanced corner. Now, most folks would be inclined to stick a picture on the white wall of that corner, not good or necessary. Why? The darkly colored wall to the left has windows, pictures, etc. and there are also curtains, darker, on the other side of the white wall curtain. All that means that this corner is decorated all around itself already and the lamp is all it needs to beautifully balance this room and corner. Sometimes less is more.

You can find more unusual and helpful interior designing and home decorating tips at Studio Van Herik.

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