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6 Dramatic and Bold Interior Design Ideas for all Budgets

For many homeowners, impressing those that step foot in their home can be just as important as creating a space that they themselves are happy with!

Photos By: Unsplash

While we don’t all have the same taste, homemakers often agonize over the right bold color or distinct design that they feel will excite others as much as it does them. If your own house is in desperate need of that extra aesthetic spark, there’s a wider range of possibilities out there than a trip to the paint shop — and they don’t all have to break the bank either. We’ve narrowed down six elegant and timeless additions to your home that will lend it a huge dose of personality, charm and sophistication — some with the extra benefit of functionality too.

High budget features

Home lifts

Aside from offering enhanced accessibility for those with mobility issues in your home, installing a domestic lift is a fantastic way to future-proof a property, adding convenience, comfort, and class. As Premier Lift Group explain: “People who may not necessarily need a home lift, but want one for their potentially jaw-dropping aesthetic value will treasure it, with bespoke lifts in particular [providing] a striking focal point that gives one luxury home an edge over another.”

Before going ahead with the installation though, you should seek out a consultation with an architect and lift designer in order to keep abreast of the different factors at play. For instance, who will be using the lift the most? How many people will use it in total? Bear in mind that a bespoke lift can be adapted into the structure of your home, but how this is done depends on the scale, frequency of use, and safety regulations.

Oversized chandeliers

Adding an oversized chandelier, either in a modern build or an older property, blends tradition with elegance and creativity. There may, in fact, be no bolder statement for a home that exists today. As Lindye Gallaway points out, it’s a great way to draw attention to something while still making it transitional and beautiful for your aesthetic.

The living room is the most common location for a chandelier, but, if placed in the reception or entry area, it can create a feeling of opulence as soon as you enter the property. If the hallway width is not accommodating enough, or you’d rather put up the chandelier in a more open space, the living room is just the ticket  — just make sure that it doesn’t obstruct the view of any art or prints on the walls, or your TV.

Medium budget features

Large contemporary canvas art

Forget that reproduction of Monet or Picasso — if you have a more mid-range budget, you can’t go wrong with a striking contemporary art canvas to really tie the space together and give your home a modern feel.

Make sure that the surrounding area looks polished and uncluttered though, so you can emphasize its dramatic features without distraction. Having a few smaller artworks instead may be less costly and imposing, but these can look disorganized on an expansive wall space. Save them for other parts of your house instead, and opt for a large canvas.

For framing and mounting, a considered choice can provide some extra panache and presence. For the canvas in particular, many prefer a tray or floater frame. As Soho Frames point out, these can be made from a “variety of solid woods such as oak, walnut, maple, tulip, beech, ash, pine, wenge”. Though these are more expensive than plain wood, they will certainly be more reliable — not to mention sleek and elegant.

Floor to ceiling bookcase

Nothing screams sophistication and culture like an aesthetically pleasing bookshelf. Whether you’ve got an addiction to buying books or a large wall you just don’t know what to do with, floor to ceiling bookshelves are more functional than they might seem. Their classic wood feel highlights both the top and bottom of the space it sits in, but can also be used to display antiques and any other unique items you have.

As The Spruce suggests: “This kind of shelving is also perfect for home offices when you want to have an additional storage area near and or above your desk — and can even work as additional dining room or kitchen storage”.

Low budget features

Bold colors for walls and ceiling

A bright, deep, or intense shade for your walls can instantly transform the look of the entire room. While many opt for more traditional, neutral shades such as beige, grey or cream, if you want to make a statement, go big.

Taking blue as our example, dark or classic hues balance out the more earthy wood tones or house plants you may have. On the more pronounced side, turquoise is underrated due to its highly distinctive tone, but it’s actually more malleable than you might expect — as MyMove maintains, this shade “can be soft and subdued, rich and bold or bright and playful”.

Just remember to paint the ceiling as well — this is a common aspect that people neglect. In fact, you could even use a different color, whether lighter or darker, for heightened contrast.

Dramatic lighting

A striking shade is all very well, but if it’s not accentuated and complemented with thoughtful lighting, you may as well have left it as is. For walls that are dark, lights are instrumental for the room’s total decor. These fixtures will be more pronounced when placed on dark walls, so being a bit picky about the style is essential.

For instance, you could invite a mood from the bygone roaring twenties by installing art deco orbs, which pair well with floor lamps. You want to choose lights with as much personality as possible — to quote My Domaine, “bold or sculptural pendant lighting fixtures often feels more like art than a utilitarian necessity”. It just goes to show how you can start to refine your interior design from the smaller details, giving your home flair for years to come.

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3 Design Trends to Modernize Your House

Make your house look trendy this season with some of our favorite interior design trends!

Photo By: Pexels

Upgrading your home to meet the latest trends can be equated to going shopping for clothing to keep up with the ever-changing fashion trends of the season. Luckily, interior décor trends do not change as often as fashion does, and neither do structural ones, else it would be too costly to keep up. As technology advances, upgrading your home to the current standards of modernization is a welcome idea.

That said, I’m sure you’d like to achieve this with minimal physical damage to the existing structure and without having to rob a bank. Here are our top 3 design trends from which you can borrow inspiration.

1. Let the Light In

Modernize your home by bringing in additional light and giving your space a new lease of life. You’d be surprised how much airy your house will feel with more illumination. Poorly lit spaces tend to feel cramped up and can negatively affect your emotional state. On the contrary, well-lit areas are inviting and keep your creative juices flowing. With more opportunities to work remotely, you want to recreate your home to enhance your productivity and not drain the energy out of you.

There are several ways you can brighten up your home, depending on your budget and how extra you want to get. For starters, you can recreate a wall on one side of the house that would offer a lovely view and interchange brick with glass. The effect of the ceiling to floor windows is not only contemporary, but it brings life into your space without an additional monthly utility bill. Check out some modern house plans to get inspired.

Another alternative is to add lighting or upgrade your entire lighting system. This could be anything from hanging downlighters to strategically placed lamps, either table or floor, to replacing the traditional, outdated ceiling lights with contemporary masterpieces.

2. Landscape Your Lawn

Landscaping your lawn may not give you an instant wholesome result, especially when it comes to planting trees, flowers, and other beneficial shrubs as they take time to grow. However, it will greatly enhance your curb appeal. Often, we do not pay too much attention to the yard until you drive past a beautifully manicured, well-thought-out landscaped yard in the neighborhood and realize what a significant difference it makes.

There are many benefits to landscaping, more so if you carry out most of the work yourself since you’ll be building your hand strength, reducing stress, and exercising your entire body, thus, improving your overall health. Additionally, with an aesthetically appealing outdoor area, your quality of life will improve. Plants are beneficial to the water and air around and provide a cooler environment while preventing soil erosion. These are just some of the benefits.

You can engage a variety of landscaping techniques like layering the heights of trees and plants, blending in flowers that complement each other, and using cobblestones, gravel or bricks to demarcate the driveway. Visit a garden center near you, and they will advise which plants go well together.

3. Create an Alfresco Area

There’s nothing as beautifully relaxing in the presence of nature with a chilled glass of your favorite beverage on a warm, lazy Sunday afternoon with a couple of friends. It’ll be beneficial to have a space created that brings you peace and calm, a great hideaway when you want time away from the kids or your home office or when you want to read a book and relax.

You can create an outdoor room that’s either permanent or temporary, depending on how much you are willing to spend and what resources you have readily available. If there aren’t any financial limitations, you can install a pergola and furnish it tastefully.

Final Thoughts

Modernizing your home is not as complicated and financially engaging as you may imagine. Once you embark on the finer details, decide what changes you would like to make, and get the necessary quotations, you’ll probably wonder why you had to wait so long. People are spending more time at home, and keeping your sanity is critical. Having a home you are comfortable with and look at with pride will put you in the right mind space to achieve all.

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7 Budget-Friendly Ideas to Refresh Your Home

While the idea of a renovation always sounds good in theory, when you begin thinking of the price tag, it can quickly become discouraging. Here are some budget friendly ways to make it happen!

Photos By: Architectural Digest

If you feel that your home is not nearly as comfortable as it used to be, you may want to consider trying out several less expensive and less permanent options to liven things up before jumping to the idea of completely renovating a room or even your entire house. Doing this has the potential to save you a fair amount of money and time, especially if you end up finding a change that breathes some fresh life into your home without the need for a complete overhaul.

Change the Lighting up

Rather than contacting builders, plumbers, electricians, and architects, you might want to consider getting in touch with just the electricians to help you out with the lighting. Changing out the lighting in your home can do a lot to make the place feel brand new again. From replacing the bulbs in your light fixtures to purchasing different fixtures for your home, you will have a lot of options to choose from and only one professional to rely on rather than five. This will not only be a lot easier to handle at once, but it will also be much more budget-friendly.

Add an Outdoor Room

It won’t be the same as renovating the whole house, but getting a team of house builders to build an outdoor room can bring about the same energy of having something brand new added to the home. Outdoor rooms are wonderful if you have the space for them, as they can allow you to take in the fresh air outside while still retaining the same homely feeling of being at your own house. But, best of all, all the builders will need to do is install a simple pergola to keep the rain out and then it will all be done. From there, you can spend time picking out furniture, décor, rugs, lighting, and anything else you want in your new room to make it feel perfect for your home. It may not be a full renovation, but it can feel like one.

Consider Painting the Walls (or Installing Wallpaper)

This is a task that you won’t need any help from home builders for. A fresh coat of paint or some new wallpaper can easily make the rooms of your home feel new again, especially if you choose a vastly different colour than the previous one. Additionally, these tasks can become fun family projects to be completed over a slow weekend. Combined with changing up the lighting of your home, you can make your home feel as if it is a completely different building without blowing thousands of dollars on renovations.

Add New Door Handles

This minor detail might not seem like much at first, but in a room full of door handles, drawer pulls, and cabinet knobs, changing all of these can be just enough to create that excitement of having a big change in your home. More often than not, the best room to do this to is going to be your kitchen. This job is quick, inexpensive, and easy to complete. Pairing it up with a lighting change and a paint change can also help to create a bigger impact without spending money on a full renovation of your home.

Rearrange Furniture

While this tip takes much longer to complete than others, the results will be well worth it in the end. When you take the time to rearrange all of the furniture in your home, creating places with a lot of open space in the centre, then you can feel as if you are entering a room that is completely brand new. After all, you will be getting used to a layout that wasn’t there before. This can also be a great way to get some mild exercise in for the day as well, making it a beneficial project to take on over a weekend.

Work on the Windows

Windows are a big part of a house’s appearance. Because of this, it can be a noticeably large change to make some changes to your windows. Whether you choose to update the window treatments themselves or you want to add a new set of blinds and curtains, or you want to do a bit of both, you can rest assured that creating a new look for a room you are regularly in can give you a similar rush as renovating the house does for a complete fraction of the price.

Thoroughly Clean the House

Last, but not least, you can consider giving the house a thorough cleaning. This can be combined with rearranging furniture for a much better effect. Cleaning out the house, moving things around, and so on can create the sense that changes are being made to the home. Not only will your home look cleaner in the end, but you might even find things that you had thought had been lost.

There are plenty of different ways that you can breathe fresh life into your home without dropping thousands of dollars and weeks of your time on a massive home renovation. Instead, you can live comfortably in your home without putting your budget in pain using these budget-friendly suggestions.

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Minimalist Décor: How to Simplify Your Home

Are you a fan of crisp, clean, and stylish home decorating? You’l love minimalist decor, here are some tips on how to simplify your home!


Photo: Storme Conradie

You don’t have to be a hoarder to collect a lot of things you don’t actually need over time. People usually feel bad for even thinking of throwing away some sentimental item, so it all stays where it is collecting dust and creating clutter. But organizing your home is not that hard if you adopt a minimalist way of thinking and try to uphold its principles. “Less is more” is something you will often read in articles about minimalism, especially when it comes to design.

Most likely, you will be amazed how someone can live with almost nothing in their home, but that’s where you’d be wrong. Minimalist décor is less about the furniture and more about the understanding and treatment of your space, something you’ll get the feel from these several ideas to simplify your home.


Photo: Via Instagram

Organize your drawers

Drawers are first to become cluttered and the last to even be considered for organizing. All the things you don’t need but have a problem to throw away, ends up in a drawer. The best way to put it in order is to empty their contents on a pile and start examining item by item. Surely there are things in there you don’t need and even didn’t know you kept until you looked at the drawer. Then use bins and organizers to keep the drawers neat and tidy. Also, use drawer dividers to compartmentalize the drawers.

Choose the base

When it comes to color, it’s more than just using one shade for everything. What you need is to decide what will be your base color. The best choice would be some neutral color like beige or light grey. You can easily add darker or lighter undertones to these colors and even try one more vivid shade to highlight certain points in your home, especially when it comes to small apartments. Natural light is important since it will bring out the freshness and warm up space regardless of the simple design and color combination.


Photo: Decoist

Downsize on the furniture

The hardest part will be to downsize your furniture since everything will seem important and needed at the moment of minimizing your space. When you start following the minimalist principles of décorating your home that doesn’t mean that you should lose most of your furniture and feel uncomfortable. The point is to declutter so that you have enough room to move without hitting anything, to create harmony among the pieces in your home and to be in control of your space. You can still have cozy and comfortable furniture, but only more organized and arranged. You could try the rule “one in, one out” meaning that if you buy something new, you have to get rid of something old, which can be quite useful when it comes to furniture.

Get rid of the clutter

Over time, you collected figurines, vases, pictures and all sorts of small things you use as ornaments and décorations for your home. And soon enough they swallowed your home and turned it into a museum. Just like with the drawer, have a good look at the shelves, cabinets, coffee table and walls, then decide which things you will donate, sell or throw away. Today, storage solutions intended just for these purposes are more and more available in Sydney, Melbourne, Geelong, Brisbane and other Australian cities. That way, you won’t be saying goodbye to your belongings for good, but you would be storing them away to re-evaluate later.

Apply texture

The texture is the key ingredient to transform your home from frigid to welcoming, and yet let you have a minimalist décor. This is done by introducing knitted materials like covers and throws, plush carpets and velvet fabrics. But playing with texture can be a bit risky since if you’re new to minimalist décor, you will try to warm it up too much. Namely, if you mix textures, shapes and materials of different colors you will create chaos and disorder, something you not only try to avoid but also escape from. Designers advise using the colors and shapes that blend well in nature since this is the safest way to avoid mistakes.

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Remember These 6 Things While Decorating Your Home

Many of us dream of redecorating the house every now and then. Well, it all depends on your budget and abilities of course of how often you require decoration and renovation. Interior decoration plans can be well accomplished if you remember the following things.


Photo: Carriage Lane Design-Build Inc.

Don’t Find Cheap Things

Photo: Carriage Lane Design-Build Inc.

Certainly you can find cheap things to be added to the home. But none of them is of any use. It is better to invest in high quality decoration items which can either be purchased from a flea market or an online store. Don’t feel that decoration of kitchen and bathrooms is not as important as your rooms and living area. In fact, these parts of the house receive most of your visits daily. Come with the ideas which are outside the box. Use traditional materials like granite and combine them with concrete, wood, and precious types of tiles for flooring purposes.

The best part of decorating a bathroom? You have a tiny amount of square feet so something that’s expensive really won’t be that pricey on a small space. A small block of marble for your sink countertop looks luxurious and is a lot more affordable than outfitting a whole kitchen in marble. Those beautiful blinds you wanted to place in your ktichen? You can afford them for your bathroom since you have a small measurement.

Set Your Budget

Without setting the budget, you cannot design the house properly. For one part of the house which is often not visited by any of you like the backyard or storeroom, you can bring somewhat low quality products. But design of the other parts of the house has to be high quality, for which you certainly have to invest a lot of money.

Quality of Lights


Photo: Carriage Lane Design-Build Inc.

Not only you should have high quality lights hanged in every room but also allow natural light to come in through the windows and glass doors. For this, don’t put heavy curtains which prevent light to enter the rooms. In case you have such curtains, keep them aside early in the morning so that fresh air and sunlight peeps through the windows, making the rooms look bright and gorgeous. It is true that the artificial lights can never be an alternate of natural light. Depending on your room, you should purchase different types of lighting. For example, in the kitchen you should have bright lighting which will allow you to cook and have everything clearly visible, while in the bedroom you could opt for more dimmer, romantic lighting.

Beautiful Fireplaces

For those who live in cold areas, a fireplace has to be present in every room. If you are considering to redecorate the fireplace, the best thing is to bring home the fireplace which has color and style as per your room’s overall look. Not all the fireplaces should look similar. Variety has to be created.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”#ffa600″ class=”” size=””]If you are stuck on how you should decorate your fireplace, interior designers have a fool-proof formula that makes every fireplace look glamorous. Hang a mirror right above the fireplace and a large chandelier in your living room that reflects into the mirror. Then, install two sconce lights on each side and place two vases on either side of the fireplace. There you have it – instant glam with little to no effort![/perfectpullquote]

Keep Things that Change Mood


Photo: Janis Nicolay

It is good to keep things that change mood. You need not to bulk your rooms with so many odd and useless items. Everything has to be properly arranged and organized. Here one thing to remember is that sometimes the poorly organized items can create an impression of being useless. This is why, you need to pay attention to each and everything—separate the useful items from the useless products.

Living Area Furniture

Living room or living area is where you sit with your family members and enjoy television or do other things that give you relaxation. It is good to place seating facing toward the television but this idea doesn’t work for the big families. You can keep a music station and other entertaining items in the living room so that every person has something to enjoy with. For children, place some video games or toys.

ANOTHER INGENIOUS DECORATING TIP: Come up with a color scheme for the whole house and then take those colors from room to room. Not only with your home look bigger than it actually is, but each space will seamlessly blend into the next. Plus, it’s super easy since you don’t have to create a new color scheme for each room. It’s a win-win situation!