Home furniture design and fabric selection are very important to a modern homeowner, whether male or female. Nobody wants to choose the wrong furniture or home fabrics, and although the furniture might appear the more important of the two, the wrong fabric selection can completely ruin an otherwise well-designed room.
So what do you do? Leave it to chance and hope that your untrained eye is as good as that of anybody else, or hire a professional to help you? In fact, your own opinion about how to decorate and furnish your home is likely to please you just as much as that of a professional interior designer. Most people who worry about such things are trying to please friends and visitors rather than select what they personally like.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, because most people do not make the best decisions when it comes to home furniture design and fabric selection. While there is no procedure you can follow to come up with what is best for your home, here are some guidelines on how to go about selecting your furniture design and how to make the correct fabric selection to go with it.
Decide on a Theme
You cannot even begin to consider furniture without deciding on a theme for your home – or even for each individual room. Very few people furnish and decorate their entire home on one single theme, but tend to mix them. Thus, many people love to have at least one themed room in their home: an Egyptian room or a room based on Ancient Rome, Classical Greece or an Asian, Wild West or Native American theme.
None of these is suitable for general household furniture, of course, or for the normal fabric selection you will find in your local sores. However, it does show that your whole house doesn’t have to be decorated the same way. So when you decide on a theme, your living room, dining room, kitchen and bedroom can all be based on a certain home accent – even a traditional one.
For example, you can use antique style furniture and fabrics in your lounge or living room, with sofas and perhaps a chaise longue in the classical French style. Your dining room might be either contemporary, with a black glass-topped dining room table or one in beautiful glossy French polished walnut or mahogany with Queen Anne legs. The chairs might be traditionally webbed and sprung, and then upholstered in tapestry or velvet fabric.
What this is inferring is that you should decide on a general them for each room before you decide on appropriate home furniture design, and then choose the furniture and a fabric selection appropriate to that theme.
Home Furniture Design
As stated, the design of your furniture should go with the theme: contemporary, antique, Georgian or art nouveaux for example. Furniture makers such as The Custom Shoppe can help you design your own solid wood furniture, offering a choice of designs and woods appropriate to your general theme.
You may have chosen a Shaker theme with simple solid wood furniture. Shakers used what was available locally, such as pine, birch, cherry and poplar, and some even used maple or beech. You might prefer something more European, with stained dark oak, walnut, or cherry veneer or the exotic cinnamon-colored Asian teak or solid mahogany which has a beautiful deep red shade. Rosewood is another beautiful wood suitable for most forms of home furniture design.
Traditional American furniture, such as that available from American Craftsman, could be fashioned from light oak, apple or cherry, and black American black cherry is very much in vogue. So is Maple, although the wood you choose should be appropriate to the rest of the furniture in your room.
Home Fabric Selection
If you choose light oak for your dresser or armoire, a walnut or mahogany chest of drawers or table would not go well. This is where advice on home furniture design would be worth seeking. The same is even truer when you consider your home fabric selection. This is where genuinely serious mistakes can be made.
It would be far better if you could find somebody well versed in interior design, and while you might think that it doesn’t really matter – it does! If your drapes, rugs and upholstery fabrics all match, and the colors and designs were appropriate to the type of furniture you have chosen, then an OK room could be converted into a fabulous room.
Get It Right – For the Cats, Kids and the Visitors!
Keep in mind that not all fabrics are cat-proof, and many are also not child-proof. What that means in general terms is that you should be practical when choosing fabrics, and understand that what might be perfect for occasional dinner parties might not be so suitable for general use in a household with kids and a colony of cats with blunt claws needing sharpening!
Space planning, home furniture design, fabric selection and all the rest that make a room what it is, should be thought out and complement each other. You will get your reward when that first visitor wal