Questions to Ask an Interior Designer Before Decorating Your Home

The overall goal of any home design should be to mix the old and the new and keep it interesting. So what do you need to know before you get started? This video by Better Homes and Gardens presents the top three questions you should ask an interior designer before decorating your home:

1. Where do you start? When starting with a brand new home, your interior designer should begin with the floor plans, looking at each individual room as its own space, deciding where to position the sofa, chairs, rug and lighting, and developing the color and “vibe” palette simultaneously. Once the palette is developed, you can go shopping and fill in the floor plan and make it real.

2. How do you come up with a color palette for an entire house? A good place to start is by looking at what’s right outside the door. For the home featured in this video, green fields flecked with yellow and blue skies inspired a palette of greens, golds and blues. The palette was made cohesive throughout the house by having a little bit of blue in almost every space – the kitchen island, living room sofa, dining room curtains and master suite accessories. Greens and golds were added as accent colors in different proportions in different spaces.

3. What’s a great tip for someone beginning a project? It’s important to figure out what your style is and what the style of the home is. It’s helpful to literally write down what you like on a sheet of paper. You’ll come up with a list of 5-15 different things and then narrow it down. Another way to help you identify your style is to create a “mood board” online and pin pictures and print them out, or you can tear out pictures from magazines. Once you see all of your pictures and images togethers, you’ll discover elements that appear in each and every one, and this will help you identify patterns that you like.