Discover Your Home Décor Theme with Mood Boards

Are You Having a Hard Time Pinning Down Your Ideal Home Décor Theme? Try Building a Mood Board!

Deciding on the perfect home décor theme can feel like an overwhelming process. From wall color and flooring to furniture, lighting and accessories, the list of factors to consider is seemingly endless. It does not have to be though. Take some of the stress out of designing your ideal space by building your very own mood board.

What Is a Mood Board?

Mood boards are organizational tools that provide visual representations of a theme. You can be as creative as you want with your mood board. Add photos of staged homes, color swatches, pieces of furniture you have decided you absolutely cannot live without or anything else that helps you represent the theme you want to build your room design around. Oftentimes, it is hard for people to decide what they do and do not like in a design theme until they see it with their own eyes. This is why visualization tools can be such a big help.

Aside from just representing the visual aspects of a space, mood boards can also help you pin down the more intangible things that make your house a home. A room’s ambiance and mood set the tone for life in that space. Unfortunately, they are often hard to see, or rather feel, until a design has been implemented. Mood boards allow you to take a peek into that finished environment, to step into a room that is not there yet and experience the space.

Creating Your Theme

If you have a solid idea of the look you are going for in your home, great! If not, outside inspiration is a good place to start. This can be anything from visiting a home store, watching design shows or looking at other mood boards online. Even something as simple as taking a walk outside might help you pin down the perfect home décor theme. Inspiration can come from anywhere!

The first step in building your design is identifying your likes and dislikes. This is where mood boards can be incredibly helpful. Not only do they help spark creativity by providing visuals of the elements you are considering, they also help keep your ideas organized. Furthermore, you are less likely to forget something or try to add too many elements resulting in a cluttered or disjointed theme. They can also help keep you from impulse buying pieces that do not quite align with your vision. After all, what good is a solid living room theme in planning your design if you keep changing it up with impulsive furniture buys that are not the right fit?

Making a Mood Board

When building a mood board, it is helpful to pick an anchor piece to start. What is the one element—the one chair or paint color or area rug—you absolutely have to have? That will serve as the starting point of your design. It is much easier to build a cohesive theme off a desired feature than it is to pull ideas from the air and simply hope they go together.

There are a variety of apps available, both free and paid, to help you easily build your mood board. Pinterest can also be a great tool to help you visualize and pin down your ideal theme. Digital mood boards provide a world of inspiration right at your fingertips. Simply searching “bedroom theme ideas” can pull up thousands of photos for inspiration. Then once you have found something you love, one click is all it takes to add it to your board.

While digital mood boards are incredibly helpful in building a theme, some designers say there is nothing quite like a good old-fashioned cork board. Building a physical mood board allows for a more three-dimensional approach to your design. You can feel the texture of a fabric or pin a flower you found outside right to the board for that perfect pop of color you have been missing.

Physical mood boards provide a more immersive experience, though they often require more work and are less portable. Digital boards, on the other hand, are easy to build and can fit right in your pocket, though they give you only a two-dimensional experience. Each method has definite pros and cons, but at the end of the day it is all about what you are more comfortable working with.

It can also be helpful to arrange your mood board to mirror the actual design of the room, as best you can of course. A mostly two-dimensional board will always look different than a three-dimensional room. However, organizing the elements as close as possible to the way they will appear in the design may help you better visualize your theme on a large scale when comparing the board to the room itself.

The only thing better than finding the perfect home décor theme? Having the perfect house to use it in. Get to decorating faster with one of Perry Homes’ move-in ready homes!