Styling The Finishing Touches
Why do we stop decorating too soon?
We get the big pieces, sofas, rugs and coffee table but sometimes forget the finishing touches that actually bring the room to life. The most memorable interiors aren't defined by their largest furniture pieces, but by the carefully considered details that bring warmth, personality, and balance to every room.
Tips For Styling Surfaces
Forget functional and practical and turn mantles, tables, and consoles into vignettes that tell a story about you with flowers, plants, books, candles, objects, extremely personalised stuff that you’ve picked up on travels, bought because you’ve fallen immediately in love or had handed down from family.
Avoid Unnecessary Gaps - Layering and intersection makes for a visually well put together display. Select accessories of different heights and shapes. The lower and smaller items go to the front and the taller go to the back.
Composition - Balance the colours and the materials. Incorporate a mixture of textures, books, art, sculptures, and flowers as much as you can.
Narrative - The personal details like mementoes from your travels, family trinkets, the pieces that help to tell your personal story and bring joy.
Bringing Your Home To Life With Flowers
Styling flowers throughout your home uplifts any room, adds a sense of movement and a joyful nod to nature.
Choosing Your Flowers - Take inspiration from nature's palette and the colours you love. Reflecting the season and echoing the natural landscape is a great way to make your home feel harmonious and connected.
Types Of Arrangements - A generous bundle of a single type stem gives a chic but naturally curated vibe and a good way to echo or contrast the colours of your existing decor. A small selection of flowers and foliage in a bud vase is a great way of styling your dining table. Put several on repeat throughout your space to create cohesion. A wild and loose mixed bouquet can provide a stylish welcome on a hallway console, kitchen island or coffee table, reflecting the season and adding a chic accent to the everyday.
Choosing A Vase - Here at AA we prefer a more rustic, artisanal vibe for our vases so they tend to be full of texture in muted tones. The subtle hues ensure that the flowers do the talking. If you prefer a patterned vase or a colourful vase, a nice touch is to use complementary colours that are featured in your flower arrangement to make a more cohesive floral display.
Styling The Soft Furnishings
Scent Your Space
Probably one of the most forgotten finishing touches. Scent can transform the feeling of your space and change the mood and vibe as well as having quite a dynamic effect on our emotional state. Use scent to differentiate and zone areas of your home to either stimulate and inspire or rest and relax. This is particularly helpful if you're working from home and you want to switch your space to make it feel more stimulating and productive.
Change it up with the seasons by using woody and smoky scents in the cooler months to create a heady ambience that transports you to a cosy cabin, and floral, fresh and grassy scents in the warmer climes to impart a warm garden glow indoors.
Make It Personal
The biggest biggest tip of all when it comes to styling your space and the finishing touches is to make it personal. Fill your home with stuff you love, ditch trends or what's in or what's out and follow you heart. Do that and you get to create a totally unique, bespoke house that conveys your personality and oozes with style.
Shop Abi's Favourite Finishing Touches
Discover the furniture, lighting and decorative pieces that inspire Abigail’s signature style.
