Your home accessories bring character, personality, and vibrancy to your interiors. A room without smaller pieces like lamps, art, cushions or throw rugs will feel empty and wanting for warmth. Home decor is intended to come alongside furniture like lounges, beds, and dining suites to not only complement their look but enhance their functionality. Like a lamp next to the living room sofa, or a mirror above your hall table. But it’s easy to be heavy-handed with accessories, which can overwhelm your space, making it look and feel cluttered or disorderly. This buying guide is packed with our top tips for choosing home decor pieces that improve your interior design aesthetic.
How to choose the right lamp for your space
Table lamps and floor lamps bring so much more to your room than just light. The colour, style, materials, and shape of your lamp come together to form a look. And that look needs to complement your aesthetic. Picture an ultra-modern metallic lamp in a coastal home. Or a Moroccan lamp near a French Provincial chandelier. While the lamp might be lovely, it doesn’t suit its surroundings.
Always keep your interior style front of mind when looking for lamps. Here at Amart, we have many materials and styles in our range of lamps, including:
- Ceramic table lamps
- Glass table lamps
- Votive-style table lamps
- Rattan table lamps
- Metal table lamps in gold, chrome, or brushed finishes.
Other considerations when buying a lamp include ambience and task lighting. Keep lightbulb wattage in mind and go for softness if you’re setting a calm mood. Or, if you’re wanting a lamp for reading, go for a bright wattage and ensure your light is at an ergonomic height.
Know your size limits
Nailing your scale and proportion is crucial to a balanced look. Just as you wouldn’t choose to overfill a small room with too many pieces of furniture, you shouldn’t try to squeeze too many decorative accessories onto your surfaces. Look for home accessories that work with the proportions of your room as well as the furniture pieces with which they are paired so that it feels balanced and comfortable.
Here are some well-known rules of thumb for how to apply scale principles for balance throughout your home:
- Oversized artwork is perfect for a large wall but will overwhelm a small room.
- Small artwork gets lost on a large wall.
- When it comes to bedside table lamps, you don't want a tiny lamp on a big table or a small table with an enormous lamp.
- To keep a room’s design from looking too busy, leave certain areas blank.
- Fill 60 per cent of your floor space with furniture and leave 40 per cent open. This will make the room feel resolved but not overcrowded.
- A living room rug should be large enough to sit under the front feet of your lounge and other furniture such as your entertainment unit.
Maximising your space
Home accessories can assist with altering the perception of a space. For example, an oversized, light-coloured floor rug can make a room seem bigger. And long, flowing curtains can provide the illusion of height. Accessories can even distract your eye from less desirable aspects of your room. For instance, a mirror hung above a hall table with a lamp on top will bring light and interest to a dark hallway.
Placing objects at head height such as a floor lamp or large artwork encourages the eye to travel around a room before gazing down to take in pieces smaller decorative pieces at a lower level. If you’re working with small spaces, it’s best to hold back on over-accessorising, instead choosing a careful selection of your favourite pieces and allowing them to shine.
Choose home accessories that enhance your interior
Accessorising is like adding sprinkles to your cupcake. They’re a finishing touch that enhances the experience. So, you don’t want to dump a pile of sprinkles on your cupcake. Instead, you want just enough to get the balance right.
Try this interior design hack for DIY placement of home accessories. Start with a blank slate by removing all the accessories from your room like lamps, wall art, cushions, candles, plants and statues. Then visualise where you would put each piece if you’re starting from scratch. Before you add a piece back into your space, think about whether it enhances the room and supports the style. Keep adding pieces one by one until you’ve achieved the right balance. This technique can be applied to any room including your bedroom, workspaces like your home office, dining room, kitchen, or even your outdoor living area.
Avoid going overboard when shopping for home decor
A few high-quality decorative accessories mixed with meaningful pieces that you’ve collected along the way create a nice collection that is special to you and puts your stamp on the space. Less is more.
Here are a few ideas for adding home decor without going over the top:
- Hang wall art as a focal point above a fireplace with a lamp on one side of the mantlepiece and a cluster of candles on the other side.
- Group items of different shapes and sizes into an asymmetrical arrangement, such as a tall vase with several smaller ones.
- Pop a decorative tray on top of your coffee table to hold a candle holder, a book, a coaster stack, and a small vase.
- Go for an odd number of cushions on your sofa. And keep in mind that the sofa is for sitting on. So don’t overstuff it with too many cushions.
Things to think about before accessorising
Enjoy the things you love in your home. It’s your house, so choose accessories you’ll enjoy looking at every day rather than items that simply have compatibility with your space. Of course, it’s a bonus for you if the items you love also have a practical application like a throw rug to keep you warm, a beautiful floor rug to protect your floors from the wheels of your office chair, or a photo frame that holds precious memories of a moment captured. And remember, there’s nothing wrong with buying something that serves no purpose if you love it. Because that’s what home decorating is all about - creating a stylish pace that’s meaningful for you.
How to choose accessories that complement your furniture
When it comes to choosing accessories, take a look at the room you’re decorating and think about what it needs. Notice the colours and textures and ask yourself whether anything is missing or if you can enhance what you’ve got with a new item. Decorative accessories can add contrast to rooms by bringing pops of colour and interest to neutral walls, floors, and furnishings in several ways, such as:
- Cushions in varying shapes and sizes, paired with a throw rug create layers.
- A shaggy or chunky loop pile rug to break up hard textures.
- A cluster of bright homewares in unified colours on a decorative tray.
- Balancing a tall or large object with several smaller ones.
- Nestling items together increases an arrangement's visual weight.
You can shop all of Amart’s home accessories online and filter down to the styles and colours you like. Or you can head to one of our retailers for inspiration and advice on accessories and furniture and grab anything else you might need from gift cards to outdoor furniture.