Spring Design Tips

Can you believe it? While we are still in the winter cold for a few more weeks, spring with all its renewal of life and its accompanying joy is right around the corner! Besides taking a page from Marie Kondo for spring cleaning as everyone seems to be doing these days (our souvenir collections DO “spark joy” so they’re staying at our house!), here are some design tips for your home furniture and accents to mark the change of season yet again.

Switch to Bright Colors

Obviously as the hours of daylight lengthen, you want to “let the sunshine in” to brighten your home decor. One way to accomplish this inexpensively is with some accent poufs, rugs, and wall art in your choice of brilliant warm colors such as yellows and even fuchsia or statement-making cool colors such as the green you start to see again as nature renews itself. Ditto changing your bedding to something upbeat, from traditionally feminine floral patterns to bold single colors.

Rotate Your Accent Decorations

Another fun thing to do with your home decor to mark the different times of year is to rotate displays. Now that the holidays have come and gone, your snow globe and sprig of holly can come down for the next several months. Try bringing out your cool vacation and beach souvenirs! To make this easy, you can have both more display space and storage with a fine accent cabinet.

Our Yorktown, VA store and other locations are here to help you get into the spring spirit!

Make Your Too-Large Room Livably Smaller

It’s hard to believe there can be too much of a good thing until you’re faced with it. That goes for a room in your home that seems to have more square footage than you know what to do with! Never fear, dear readers. Hampton Roads’ furniture specialists since 1960 are proud to share with you some designer’s tricks to scale down that behemoth into something more human, a space that’s even intimate if you want.

Smart Furniture Tricks for Instant Coziness

A common rookie design mistake is to manufacture smallness by trying to employ small pieces of furniture in a big space. This backfires because the first thing you notice is all the dead space around them. Actually, if you pick furniture that fits the room’s real proportions well, such as long sofas and consoles, it makes the room appear smaller. Placing the furniture along the walls, as though it were part of the wall, works wonders as well.

Doing the Shrinking-Room Shuffle: Arrangement That’s Magic!

An obvious solution to a too spacious room is to break it up into two or more rooms. Don’t want to bring in the contractor to add walls? No worries. An accent folding partition (room divider) can inexpensively do the same thing while giving you flexibility if you change your mind or your needs for the room shift. Another designer’s tip is simply to treat the room as if the dividing walls were there by clustering furniture for different uses in various spots: sofa and loveseat combo gathered around the TV, bistro counter-height table and chairs in another spot, and so on. How about your whole home bar taking up a third of the floor space? Your eyes will focus on only one section at a time and thus you won’t be overwhelmed by the room anymore.

Light and Color Tricks

A standby for interior designers is light creating the illusion of space. So what do you do when your room’s too big, brick up the windows and light the room with candles? While we’d love to sell you accent candle-holder sets, you don’t need to do anything that drastic. Just choose more subdued, less reflective colors for your room’s palette, from the furniture such as a living room sofa to your area rug. Recommended hues to turn your echo-ey airplane hangar of a room into an inviting space for your friends are charcoal gray, burgundy, deep green, and chocolate brown.

Patterns and Textures That Fill Your Space

Big, striking patterns on your furniture and draperies, again agreeing with the room’s proportions rather than trying to fight them, fills the space visually, scaling down your brain’s impression of it. Good old-fashioned wallpaper works for this too. Another design trick: avoid anything with too much shine such as chrome. Stay away from lacquered wood, for example. Try painted or stained finishes instead. Metal should be dull or wrought-iron. Mirrors in these cases are a no-go.

For home furniture suggestions to fill a room affordably, check out Roberts Furniture & Mattress in Hampton, VA or one of our many other locations.

Refresh Your Interior for Spring

Spring is finally upon us, which means it’s time to pull back the curtains, raise the blinds, and crack open your window to let the cool spring breeze into your home, after months of wintry darkness. The change in season brings with it excitement, renewal, and of course, lots and lots of cleaning. After you have finished removing the dust from every surface in your home, and aired out each musty room, one of the best things you can do to refresh your interior for the springtime is to decorate with seasonal home accents. New home décor is ideal for giving your home the cheery makeover it truly deserves.

Bright and Colorful Home Accents

With the springtime comes feelings of newness and vibrancy, so decorate your interior accordingly. One of the simplest decorating tips that the experts swear by is to stock up on fresh throw pillows. These can really bring some much needed pop after the gloom of the colder months. The myriad colors and designs make for easy arranging in pretty much every room. Choose throw pillows in muted pastels and primary colors, like mint green or canary yellow, to bring some of the freshness of the outdoors into your home. Similarly, pick patterns or prints that evoke nature, like organic paisley and flower designs, or even animal prints. 

Another simple design trick that seems obvious when mentioned, but is often overlooked, is to hang mirrors in various sizes throughout your home. With mirrors, you can capture and direct the emerging sunlight to break away the winter shadows. Also, mirrors give your home a sense of depth, and are particularly ideal for smaller spaces. Hang them opposite your windows and in hallways to take advantage of both elements. Choose a frame that is organic or colorful to really usher in the spring season.

You can find colorful home accents like throw pillows, mirrors, and lots more at Robert’s Furniture & Mattress. Visit us in Yorktown, VA, or any of our four other furniture store locations for springtime home decorations at unbeatable prices.