EP 034: Finding Your Home Style
April 7, 2021 | By Ashley Brown
Turn your inspiration into reality by understanding what style you're drawn to. When you know your home style, shopping and finding items for your home becomes so much easier.
The 6 foundational decorating styles are discussed in this episode as well as how you can incorporate them in your home. Ashley will also be sharing several different resources (many of which are free) that'll help you transform your home from inspiration to reality.
IN THIS EPISODE ASHLEY DISCUSSES:
The different types of decorating styles.
How to identify your decorating style.
Free resources to help you find your decorating style.
Paid resources to help you find your decorating style.
How to blend different decorating styles.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
The course workbook (which has several different worksheets to help you identify your home style).
Ashley’s Facebook group
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I get it some days it feels as if you're riding the "hot mess" express and there's no end in sight. Hello, I'm Ashley Brown, mom of three little kids who used to let life's chaos get the best of me. Then I discovered that you can elevate your life, raise kids and make what matters happen all while adding a little more elegance into your everyday lifestyle.
I'm on a mission to help busy women overcome the hot mess and create an elegant life they love by starting with the essentials. Everyday life doesn't have to be so chaotic. Join me in discussions about ways to help you embrace simplicity with practical solutions and easy to implement ideas. So you can design a home and life you love. This is a source of encouragement. This is the change you've been looking for. This is the always elegant living podcast.
Hello friend, and welcome to the Always Elegant Living podcast. I'm your host, Ashley Brown. And I'm so excited that you are joining me today. My hope is that this episode will really help you find your home style. I know that when we're decorating our homes and designing a home that we love, one of the hardest things that we can do is figure out our home style.
"What style of home really calls to us?"
"What are we pulled to?"
"What is our decorating style?"
Well, these are all questions that I hope to answer for you with this episode on the podcast today.
Turning your inspiration into reality, by understanding what style you're drawn to, can be hard and overwhelming. But when you know your home style, then shopping for your home becomes so much easier. In fact, everything else becomes so much easier to. Of course, it's so much easier to shop when you know what you're shopping for and where you're shopping.
But just shopping for the sake of shopping, sometimes gets really overwhelming and daunting. And you're buying things that maybe aren't necessarily for you and fit your style and how you want to blend everything.
My goal is to really help you know your home style, so that way you'll know where to shop in the future. You'll understand what stores match the style that you're called to. And then you won't be wasting money on pieces that maybe you thought you loved in a store, but then you finally get them home and you realize, it's just not your style, it's not for you. I don't know why I was called to it before, but I felt like maybe I needed to buy it because this Instagrammer had it or whatever the excuse is.
But when you know your home style, you'll know what you love, you'll know where to shop and you'll know how to mix those styles in your home to create a beautiful space you love. Knowing your home style is really important. And this episode is hopefully going to help you find your style.
Before I get into some of the resources of how to actually find your style, I think it'll be really helpful if you first know what the different types of home styles are. In interior designing and decorating, there are six foundational home styles. There's farmhouse, modern, rustic, industrial, traditional, and boho. Although I know there are more home styles than what I'm listing, for the sake of this episode let's just keep it to these six foundational home styles, because these are pretty much the main ones, and then other styles are mixed from this.
If there's a style that I didn't mention, feel free to look it up and figure out if that is the style that calls to you best. Now I'm going to go in a little further to each style and give you a few key descriptive words that match the style, so you can see which style you're more leaning towards.
So for farmhouse, a few key descriptors are nostalgic, casual, distressed, shiplap, wide planked, and think of those big wraparound porches.
For modern, think of mid century, contemporary, very Scandinavian, stark and high contrast.
For rustic, think ranch style, Southwestern, Mediterranean, cabin, raw, rough edges and natural stone.
For industrial, a few key descriptions are loft-style, open concept, exposed metal, gray scale, concrete and utilitarian.
For traditional, think European furniture, classic lines, timeless, historic pieces, old craftsmanship, and antiques.
And for boho, think eclectic, whimsical, colorful, traveled, and woven textiles.
Hopefully these key descriptions will help give you an idea of what style you're pulled towards. But if not, here's a few more ideas of ways that you can really dive in and identify what style you may be. Because when you find your home style, it's going to help you know where to shop and what pieces blend with what you're going for, and it helps you create the overall feel of the space that you're trying to design.
One of the best places to turn to for ideas to figure out your home style is Instagram. Who doesn't love Instagram? I love Instagram so much, it's my favorite social media platform. I just love it. I get so much inspiration from there, and I often try to pin images I love straight from Instagram to Pinterest, so that way I always have them in an easy to access place and consort them.
Instagram is definitely a top resource to turn to when it comes to finding your home style. Find home Instagrammers that you love. There's so many people on there that show their home, and if you just look at their home and you love everything about it, try to identify exactly what it is you love. Is it the farmhouse feel? Is it the openness and the metal or the modern look that you love? Is it all the plants around and that boho vibe that's pulling you in? What is it? Try to dive into it and find words and key descriptions that match to a style.
Another resource you can use is bloggers. There's so many bloggers out there and you could just do a quick Google search and find some home bloggers and just look at their style. If it's something that's pulling you in, examine why. What is it? And then look at their verbiage on their website and see how they define their style.
Another way that you can find your home style is by examining what stores you already love to shop at. If you already love shopping at pottery barn, then chances are you really like that modern traditional farmhouse blend of styles.
If you love shopping at Anthropologie, chances are you love that boho vibe and you want to go all in on it. But just identify what stores you love shopping at, and then see what style they naturally go to.
Another resource to find your home style is home design books. That is what they're written for. Home design books are a wonderful way to figure out exactly what style you're pulled to and why. And they teach you step-by-step how to mix it all together. The only thing with home design books is that they are written from one design point of view, which is fine because that's the author's goal. But books typically have a lot of pages to read so there's a lot to flip through and a lot of information to take in.
Another resource that I know I mention all the time is Pinterest. Pinterest is one of the absolute best resources you can turn to, to define your home style. Sometimes some of the pins that you can find are "Take this style quiz and we'll identify what style type you are." But I find that most of those quizzes don't always work out the way that they should, and they're kind of a time suck. So I try to stay away from that. But if you're looking at Pinterest, see what images are calling to you and then pin them into categories. Such as farmhouse, modern, rustic, industrial, traditional, or boho. You can analyze the pins yourself and just really define what category it falls into. This does take work, but it is a way to find your home style.
And then the last thing is good old Google. Just type in farmhouse home style and see what images pop up, see what articles pop up. When you dive in and research these six foundational home styles, you're going to get so much information, but it's really going to help you find your actual home style.
Another thing I really want to mention about all of this is finding your home style is not the end all be all. Just because you've defined that your style is farmhouse, it really doesn't mean anything. What does that even mean? That means that you're pulled to farmhouse decor. Okay, well, you could really intuitively know that yourself just by paying attention when you go shopping. Most likely you already know what you love and what you are pulled to.
When it comes to finding your home style, don't get caught up on the verbiage of the words you use to describe your style. Get caught up in what pulls you in, what do you love? You already know what you love. So just go with your gut instinct and learn how to incorporate the things that you love with the overall style that you're trying to create.
In my new course, Everyday Home Elegance, I've created a complete module with multiple lessons on helping you find and identify your home style. I believe it's so important to not really know what word describes your home style, but really identify how you can blend your home style, and what you're really supposed to be doing with your style to begin with. Because the point of knowing your home style isn't so you can go shop at a certain store just because it's your style. The point is so we you know how to buy pieces and what pieces to buy that match your overall design goal.
In that lesson of my course, I've also included a PDF of each of the home styles and different images throughout a home that represent each of those styles. My goal behind that is to fully help you identify your style as it relates to your home. And one of the most helpful parts about the course, in my opinion, is the workbook that goes along with it. In the workbook, there's a worksheet that walks you through each of the home styles and how you can choose the key words in each style, that'll help you articulate how you're feeling, with your intuition, with what pieces you're pulled to.
I find that it's most helpful to know your style so that way you can know, are you going all in on that farmhouse style? Are you going all in on that boho style? Or are you mixing different styles? Are you pulling different styles together to create a style that's unique to you?
And that's what I do with my personal style. I mix different aspects of several foundational styles to really create a style that's unique to me and my personality and what I love. Because while I do love some farmhouse things, I also surprisingly love some boho things. And because I dove in and did the work that's included in that workbook, I now know exactly what it is I'm called to and why. Whereas as before I had no idea. So this workbook is created to help you know more how to blend the styles, then how to really just go all in on one style.
I hope this episode helps. I hope I've given you some ideas of how you can find your home style. And I hope understanding why finding your home style actually matters when it comes to creating a home you love, but more so, I hope this episode lets you know that just because you know a word that describes your home style, don't get pigeonholed into that. You can blend multiple styles. And honestly, when you blend multiple foundational home styles, you are going to create an elegant home you love. It gives your home more impact and elegance with less stuff.
Until next time I'm always cheering for you.
The episode is over and now it's time for you to take action.
What can you do today that will help you create who you want to be? Little by little progress adds up and in turn makes a big impact.
If you'd like to continue the discussion head on over to facebook.com/groups/alwayselegantliving.
If you loved listening to this episode, as much as I love sharing it, then please leave a review on iTunes. And if you're ready to take action and dive deeper into the topics that I discussed on the podcast, visit the courses.
You have the power to create who you were made to be. You can move past the chaos and start living a life you love with ease. And remember, I'll be there cheering you on.
Until next time. I'm Ashley Brown.
