How to Curate Your Style
Curating your style leads to a unique and beautiful home. You don’t need to travel extensively to have a curated home. You just need to follow a few tried and true design tricks. Here are the best and easiest tips for creating your own one-of-a-kind curated style.
Do you have a curated home? This is a home prized for its uniqueness and its collected look! And this quality is one we all should strive to create. Let’s talk about how to curate your style to curate your home and decode the secrets of a one-of-a-kind look.
When I think of a curated home I think of a home that radiates the owner’s own unique style. It shows off collected home furnishings and accents that are carefully chosen and edited to create great beauty!
The word I think of when I think of a curated home is “well-traveled”. You know those people who have the most interesting home because they have the most interesting thing in their homes from places they have traveled.
My new friend, Delores, has a home like that. Draped over the back of her sofa was a wildly colorful throw that was just so unique I had to comment on it. It was a scarf she found in India. She loved the colors so much that she draped it over the back of her sofa to enjoy every day. This little story epitomized the curated home.
However, you don’t need to travel to India to find something to add to your home. We can find wonderful and interesting things everywhere!
You probably have the “ingredients” for a curated home just by shopping your house. So let’s chat about how to create a home that has one of a kind style!
WHAT IS A CURATED STYLE
To curate a home is to handpick or carefully choose each item in your home. This home shows off things you have purposefully collected over the years to show your individual style and your decorating chops. Many items can have a fun or interesting story.
A curated home is all about things we love displayed in the most disciplined way.
I think it is stuffy and unreasonable to say that a curated home only chooses THE best furnishings and THE best finishes and THE best of everything for a home. I take a much more realistic and gentle approach to curating a more workable home for the home decorator.
So a good working definition of a curated home is…
A curated home is intentionally decorated. It incorporates collected items that are carefully chosen and work together to create a home that looks personal, interesting and cohesive. These items often have a story to tell.
Yvonne @ StoneGable
The buzzwords of a curated home are…
- intentional
- collected
- carefully chosen
- work together
- personal
- cohesive
- story
Keep these words in mind when you are creating your own curated look for your home.
You are mindfully creating spaces with just the right amount of things in them that are special to you!
WHAT IS NOT CURATED STYLE
Curating a home is not adding lots of stuff to your home. It also does not mean making over a whole room.
A curated home is not busy or cluttered or filled with all sorts of collections and nick-nacks or chotchkies.
That, my friend, is clutter. And a curated home is the opposite of a cluttered home.
MIX OLD AND NEW
If you love vintage or antiques or collections you already have the “stuff” for a curated look. Yay! Because you already have things you have collected. And how you mix old and new together in pleasing and interesting ways is what a curated look is all about!
A curated look thrives on the contrast of old and new.
But vintage lovers and collectors beware! A curated home is not just filled with old things you collect. It is the heavily edited use of vintage things and collections to enhance the beauty of a home. Collected and/or older things are highlighted in a home making sure they work with all the other decor.
What if you love a unique, collected look and don’t cherish time-worn things? Can you also create a curated look?
Absolutely!
Because a curated home is a custom look, it is really about the attention you spend choosing things to go into your home. Curating your style is a process. So don’t hurry. Collect and add things to your home over time. Let everything you choose for a room be beautiful and make you happy! No matter how long it takes!
You might want to read THE IMPORTANT BEAUTY CONTRAST PLAYS IN DECORATING. This will give you are working knowledge of what contrast is and how to use it to create a beautiful home.
MIX STYLES FOR A CURATED LOOK
Our homes are almost never one style. The beauty and distinctness of combining two, three, or even four styles is what creates a lovely home.
When collecting furnishings and accent accessories for your home keep the styles that make up your home in mind.
It might be quirky and fun to hang cowboy hats you have collected on a wall in your home. However, it just might look odd if the main style in your home is Scandinavian. But that wall of hats might look so fabulous and exciting on a wall in a farmhouse style or transitional house.
And that one-of-a-kind vase you want to add to a room will probably look great with any style.
Here’s a rule of thumb…
The larger the item adding a big dose of personality to your home, the more it should work with the style of your home. The smaller the item that adds personality to your home the less it has to work with the style of your home.
If you need help discovering your decorating style you might like to read HOW TO KNOW YOUR DECORATING STYLE.
BE MINDFUL OF NEGATIVE SPACE
Negative space is actually an area in a room that has nothing in it. It is empty.
And negative space plays a very big role in the beauty of a room.
Negative space gives our eyes a break and a place to rest from all the stimuli we see in a room. These negative spaces also help give us a little visual downtime to make sense of everything we have already seen. And that is very, very important.
A curated room chooses and edits items for that room with great care. Making sure there is breathing room or space in a room.
It is so important that a room is not cluttered and there is a balance of decor and negative space.
You might like to post below. They will help you understand and use negative space to create a beautiful home.
A CURATED HOME IS ALWAYS EVOLVING
We change and just like us our homes should be changing to reflect who we are, what we love, and our current lifestyle.
As the things we love and collect change, we should evaluate and edit our homes if we wish to incorporate new things.
The key is to keep items we cherish that work with our style. Remember to brutely edit things so they all work together and don’t look like clutter.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION
No matter what kind of home you have, your home should always be comfortable and function well.
No matter how one-of-a-kind, unique, impressively individual, or curated you want your home to be function always comes first! Always!
When we are comfortable in our home the things around us give us pleasure. A curated style thinks about function first and then form.
Now that you know what curated style is start following these easy steps to create a beautifully curated look in your home.
CLICK BELOW FOR MORE TIPS
Yvonne, you’ve really taught me how to love my home, how to live with what I can’t or won’t change, how to appreciate the little things! Thank you!
Those little letter orbs! When I first saw them, I had to have them! I searched high and low and finally found them at Hobby Lobby, then had to wait until they went on sale. I immediately came home and filled a cylinder vase with them. I’m going to have to look through my decorative bowls now!
Oh, I’m so thrilled you found them at Hobby Lobby! I’ll see if I can find them and put a link in my post.
I love the letter orbs too! Could you please say what department in the store you found them? I mean were they displayed in the middle or in a certain section?
Thank you for one of the best blogs. I enjoy it so much.
I found them at Pottery Barn. But I don’t see them online anymore. Sorry!
I’m sorry. I got so excited about the orbs I missed in the previous posts they came from Pottery Barn. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find them somewhere. Thanks.
I found them at Hobby Lobby in the middle, dead center section where all the little decor items are. There’s an entire shelf with bins of orbs. It’s one of my favorite little sections of HL! I check it out regularly! They are across from all the vase fillers.
What do you look up at Hobby Lobby in order to find the letter orbs? Love them but can’t find on the website.
Hi Tori, I did not get them at Hobby Lobby. I found them at the Pottery Barn several years ago.
Hi Yvonne,
I enjoy and am so inspired by your posts! Did you make the beige “dotted” pillow above?
No I found it at HomeGoods.
I love your blog and really look forward to reading it everyday – but I have a request, I find it harder and harder to read the font you use, and when you write something on a gray background I really struggle. If this is something I could correct on my end I would, but I haven’t found that to be the case. Is darkening your font something you would be able to do on your end? Thank you
Thank you for you input Eileen. At the beginning of August, I am publishing a new blog design with darker lettering.
Yvonne,
I love your curtains which have thin, horizontal stripes on a white or light background. May I ask where you bought them?
Thank you,
Cookie
Your posts are very, very helpful to me! I am working on keeping just my very favorite things, and I grab a box and donate the things not absolute favorites. I feel happier in the house the more edited direction I go! Thank you!!!!!
I am thrilled to hear this Tracie! You are on the right track!
Yvonne,
I have followed your blog for a few years now. I always find wonderful ideas!!
I thought you’d like to know that I occasionally read your “reduce the clutter” design concepts to my husband of 36 years. I just read aloud many of the sections of this post including “negative space.”
He loves those ones and is thankful for a somewhat to mostly uncluttered house (depending on the day and my cleaning energy lol)!
Thanks for you help,
Blessings from your neighboring state of Michigan
Wow! I hope your husband does not hold it against me. LOL!
Oh he LOVES any of your helpful ideas that include decluttering. He is definitely a minimalist and loves totally empty walls. He’s thankful I don’t follow the busy, cluttered decorators. lol
I have received compliments on our decorating and peaceful home … so there you go … thanks to your teachings, it’s a pleasant place to be.
How sweet of you to say so! You make my day, Leah!
Love all your posts. They are very helpful with decorating and decluttering. I have been waiting patiently to see your painted stairs, have you posted them yet and I may have missed it?
No, you haven’t. I’m waiting for my kids to send images of our grandchildren I’m putting in frames on the landing. When they do that I’m ready to post.