Interior Design: Create a Plan For Your Perfect Room

1. Introduction: Design is one of those things that means something different to everybody, it's so personal. Until you have a home that you really love, you don't realize how much of an impact beautiful design, or design that really makes you feel good, can have on your life, and how much it can improve, just how you feel about living in it every day. I'm Arlyn Hernandez and I'm an interior designer and design writer. I write articles for publications like Apartment Therapy and Style by Emily Henderson to help people decorate their homes. Whether it's tips, tricks, colors, trends, if it makes your home beautiful, I've probably written about it. A lot of questions I get often from people who are decorating their home themselves is, once they collect all that inspiration, all those really beautiful rooms that you envision yourself living in, the next question is, "Wait, how do I actually make this a reality?" Today, we're going to be working to put together the living room that you see behind me, so you can see the full process from start to finish. We're going to find some really beautiful images. We're going to go through those, and distill down how that can turn into a real room, and then we're going to actually mood board the space. We're going to take all the stuff that you were inspired by, the products that you decided, we're going to bring them into Photoshop and we're going to play around with some products and see how they feel together. It's so much easier to feel confident about your purchases, and what you're bringing into your room when you've had a chance to dream a little bit. I want you to leave this class today with a lot of confidence, that you can take all those beautiful photos that inspire you, and turn them into a plan for your home. Thanks so much for taking this class and let's get started. 2. Research and Inspiration: In this lesson, we're going to go through the research and inspiration phase. We're going to find some really beautiful images. We're going to go through those and distill down how that can turn into a real room and really find what truly inspires you. This is the Pinterest board I put together for my living room. I like to bring in everything. I like to save everything into Pinterest. Whether it's something that I grabbed from Instagram, if this image inspired me, I like to save it into Pinterest. I will save specific products but for the most part, this is like my look and feel. This is not the time to be conservative. We can clean all this up later but really it's about finding a room that speaks to you, that excites you, throw it on your Pinterest board. Let's take a look at the Pinterest board I put together for my living room so far. All of these things here are things that for whatever reason, really excited me whether it was the velvet, I clearly really love velvet. I knew going into this that a blue velvet so far was likely going to be something that I implemented in my home so you're going to see a lot of that here. Find your blue velvet sofa, whatever that happens to be and that's a good place to start. If you have a good starting place for a piece whether it's a color that you know you really want, a fabric that you know you really want, or even a specific item that you really want. That's a good place to start but save everything, don't just go on Pinterest, look on websites, look on Instagram. You can clip things out from a magazine and take a photo of it and bring it into your Pinterest board so you want to make sure that your board is varied and you don't pigeonhole yourself into a style that you might not end up really loving. Another tip that I recommend is if you're working on a living room, don't just stick to pinning living rooms. You want to pull an inspiration no matter what room it is, it doesn't even have to be room. It could be a really beautiful photo of Morocco. If its colors that speak to you, pin that. You do not have to just stick to the room in your home that you're decorating. Once you have all of your inspiration, you're going to find that there's a lot here. This is really your time to take a pause and go back and clean out anything that maybe doesn't excite you anymore and that's going to happen. During the process of research, you might have started thinking you want your room to be x and by the time you're at this phase where you're really cleaning up your inspirations you're like, x who? You're onto y now and that's perfectly fine. I recommend going through and really cleaning up your board. For instance, this photo right here maybe that's not really what I'm looking for anymore. It feels a little dark with the brick. It doesn't speak to me so you can go ahead and just delete it, just get rid of it and really start cleaning up your board. If there's something that you're not into anymore, don't let it cloud your design vision, just get it out of your life. This is also a really important part of this phase and taking a glance at everything you've pinned altogether like this and pulling out trends so I'm obviously really drawn to clean white walls, to simple draperies and that's something that surprised even me while I was putting this room together because I really love color and I thought a room like this with this really beautiful slate blue wall would be what I wanted to end up with but sometimes you're going to surprise yourself. Obviously, there's a lot of velvet here that's an underlying theme. I've pinned a lot of warm woods, a lot of blond woods, some Scandinavian tones. There is a casualness to a lot of the rooms that I've pinned and that's what we're going to take out to put together the mood boards so this is your time to really distill down what is a trend in all these images to figure out what's your style, what colors you might be leaning toward, what your palette might end up being if you haven't decided yet. It's very clear here that for my room, I'm looking for some warm tones. Some cool tones with the blue, some natural textures but a pretty clean design. There aren't a lot of super heavy handed rooms in my inspiration and I think that's really going to inform how I put together my mood board. As you go through this process, I recommend that you take some notes, write down either straight on Pinterest on the pin, on the photo that you saved, in a notebook on your phone, whatever works best for you, I recommend just jot some things down. Whether it's some trends that you've seen, whether its textures, if you like white walls write down white walls. If you see a lot of images with plants that really speak to you, start writing down these things so that when you start pulling the pieces to put the mood board together, you have a really easy reference point. This is the board after I've cleaned up everything that I didn't like anymore. It's pretty cohesive which is a really good sign and not to say that if you have a few oddballs, like maybe this space here, that you're moving in the wrong direction but this is really important to do because it's not overwhelming. If you go into the next phase of the design process with hundreds upon hundreds of photos that maybe aren't necessarily the direction you want to move in anymore, it's going to feel overwhelming. This is my cleaned up version where you see a lot of trends with the blue velvet, with the warm woods, with clean white walls, and it's a good starting point to move on to the next phase. 3. Planning and Visualization: Before we get to mood boarding, there is a step that I highly recommend doing during the design process, and it's what I call the vision board phase. So this is where you pluck out the pieces of inspiration, the color palette, the materials that you originally jotted down in your notes. This is where you put them all together, so you have a reference point. It's not overwhelming. I call this a vision board, because it's more looking feel board. I put one together from my room. The anchor piece is a sofa that I am really drawn to, that I knew I really wanted in my space with the material that I wanted. I brought in a mock of my floors of my living room. I knew I was really drawn to a rust velvet colors, so I brought that in. This is really where your palate is going to start to come together, your color palette. So for me, there's wood tones, there's velvet, there's an ochre-color, some really Nabi textures, a hit of brass. I really like to put not just products and materials on the vision board, but also some rooms that really speak to the feel that you are going for. So it's not just style, but really your vibe. Both of these spaces, for me feel really warm through really clean, feel just collected enough. I thought they were perfect for my vision board. If at any point you get stuck with a vibe or you're putting something together, and it just doesn't feel quite right, this is the place to go first, so you're not super overwhelmed by all the rooms and start potentially going in a bunch of different directions. Reference your vision board because it is what I like to call your one-stop shop for your room, vibe, your room feel, and really just like it sounds the vision for your room. Before I ever mood board anything, I really take a full scan of my space, and I like to identify the areas which I call vignettes, that I'm going to create a mood board for. If I'm looking at my fireplace, that's going to be my fireplace vignette. If I'm looking at my sofa area where I know I'm going to set that up after that's been decided, that's going to be my sofa vignette. I think it's really important before you go into this process, to take stock of what you want to create. What do you want to get a good feel for in your home? Identify what those vignettes are, and really they're more about the function of the space. The sofa area is the seeding function. The fireplace area, for me was just something really beautiful to look at. This is your time to identify in your room that you're working on, what are the functions, and those really turned into the vignette, so you can put together a very cohesive board for those specific areas. When you're going to identify the vignettes that you want to mood board, I like to think of the space by how it functions. Whether it's in your bedroom, you might want to figure out a vignette for where you sleep, and maybe what you look at when you're sleeping. Whether it's the bed view, and the TV view. In the living room, it's going to be the same thing. How you break up that space; identify what those functions are and it's going to help you bring in the right pieces to put together your mood board. This is a really great time before you mood board, to prepare by collecting all of the furniture, the decor, the lighting, paint colors. I like to create a separate Pinterest board for that, so it doesn't get mixed in with all of your inspiration. It's just easier to grab things as you work. But this is really a time to be a little bit realistic. This isn't a time to pick out a $20,000 sofa, but you're going to want to focus on key furniture pieces. So your main seating, if it's a living room, your sofa, your coffee tables, pull options too. I highly recommend that you don't just stick to one thing, but make sure that they're things you really like, they're things that you could see yourself buying budget wise, style wise, accessibility wise. Don't focus too much on pulling in a smaller to decor, you don't need to worry about chackies or styling. A lot of that really comes together in the install of the room, but make sure you have your lighting, your rugs if you like rugs and textiles, your key furniture pieces, seating, chairs, tables, things like that. Next up, is we're actually going to mood board. We're going to take all of the inspiration, all of the work that we've done collecting products, and really see this thing come to life. 4. Creating a Moodboard: We're actually going to moodboard. This is really where your room comes together with all the pieces that you love and where you get to play around with some things so you could end up with something that you get really excited about. I've been moodboarding for years, so I have a process pretty [inaudible]. If yours ends up looking a little messier, a little bit more like a collage, it's totally fine. It's really about how you can visualize your space. Let's pop into Photoshop and start creating something. When I'm starting my moodboarding, I like to start off of a horizontal canvas. Let's go ahead and open something new. Let's create it. I've already gone ahead and brought in some architectural details for the room that I felt like it could really help me visualize the space little bit better. Some windows, the baseboard, just to delineate the line from the wall to the floor and I've brought in some wood floors that are similar in tone to what I actually have in my home. I think it's important to bring in the closest tone you can find to the wood floors that you may have in your home. If you have tile, try to bring in that color. Whatever your flooring is, your carpeting, try to find something similar because it's really going to help you when you bring in some of those other furniture pieces to be able to check colors. If you have wood floors that are really dark, maybe a dark piece of wood furniture, it's going to blend in with your wood floor is a little bit too much. I like to bring in real tones of walls, of moldings, of flooring, just to be able to check color when you're putting together your moodboard. Let's start bringing in some products. I like to pull all my pieces in a Pinterest board and then I like to pull all those products onto my computer. The easiest place to start is with your key element. If you're in your living room, for me that was my sofa. If you're in your bedroom, it's your bed. Think of the piece that you're going to build your space around. I organize by furniture type on my desktop. Let's go into seating and I have two sofa selections. If I reference my vision board, you remember I had blue velvet and also copper velvet that I really liked. I'm going to start by bringing in this blue sofa and it doesn't have to be to scale. This is really just for you to visualize what you're trying to work on. So don't worry about, is this exactly the right fit? I use something called the Magic Wand tool, which I can do very quickly here. Doesn't have to be perfect. As clean as you can get it. I'm also going to bring in the other color option. All the rooms that I was pinning that really excited me had a blue velvet sofa, but there were a few that had copper. I recommend that in this process, even if you're really sure about something, bring in another option really just to check yourself. You might be surprised that you end up liking the other option more, but for me, let's build this with the blue velvet sofa. Once you've put in your key piece, I think it's best to bring in some textiles to start building out the room. I knew I wanted a rug in my living room. A rug might not be for you, but let's just pretend that it is for the sake of this lesson. We can go into textiles. This is where it's really helpful to organize your products, otherwise, you're going to spend a lot of time scrolling around your Pinterest board, trying to find that one rug that you really liked. But there were a few different directions that I was thinking of going with my rug. If I reference my vision board, I really like these warm tones, but if I take a look at the inspiration photos that I pooled, the rugs in those rooms are a little bit more neutral, so I think we should start there, but we can also play around with some bolder options. Let's do a little clean up. You want to adjust your layers, so there we go. I think that looks really nice. But let's play around a little bit. Let's clean it up. That also doesn't look half fun. Now let's bring it something a little bit bolder. I think it's best to set the room with the pieces that you think you're most drawn to, but keep the options ready for swapping some things around when the room is mostly set. The rug that I found the most enticing was the first one I put down, so let's build the room around this and then we can take a look at some options. Next, let's bring in some tables. Sometimes if the Magic Wand tool fails you, I like to pull out that Polygonal Lasso tool just to get some really clean edges on some pieces. It doesn't have to be perfect. You just want something that's clean enough. I'm going to finish this up here, and that looks good. Let's bring that in. There she is. Now that I have a coffee table on place, I think it's best to bring in some more seating, so we can really shape out this vignette. I knew that I wanted to use these particular chairs, I had been eyeing them for a long time. Let's start with those, but I have a few more options in case I wanted to introduce some more color. When you're moodboarding, I like to make sure that you're putting pieces in the orientation that they might fit in the room. If you think your chairs are going to go to the left of your sofa, let's stack them there, so you can really start visualizing what this room is going look like. If you want multiple seating, you could always just duplicate a layer by copying and pasting that down. It's okay if things stack like this, you just want to get a sense for how that might come together. This is a good place to start to pull some colors. Pink can be a little overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be perfect. This is really to figure out what kind of color you might like, if you want white walls, if you want green walls, if you want to go pastel or really bold. I was really drawn to light colored walls, but I'm throwing in a little bit of a curve ball with a peach because I also really liked that in some of my inspiration. It's really about what excites you and just pull some colors that speak to you. They don't have to be the colors that you end up with. This is how I like to do it. I like to bring in pink color and you can leave it right there, and I like to change the background. The background right now is white. The easiest way to do this is with the Eyedropper tool, and get the color, and we can go ahead and hide that. Let's fill the background with the color we just grabbed. There is the pink color. I'm going to go ahead and bring in another few colors just to have some options and see what they look like. Let's find blue, you're hiding from me and do that same process. We grab the color, you don't want to create another layer, and then let's bring in one more layer. I find it really helpful if you're working in Photoshop, to make sure you are naming your layers. It just helps you stay really organized. I'm going to go ahead and name this white wall. You can name it the exact pink color if you wanted White Dove from Benjamin Moore for instance, but we can stay generic for now. Let's take a look at some of these pink colors. It's pretty fun. You like that too. I think for this, let's stick with white just because I found that was what I was really drawn to on my Pinterest boards. Let's get some curtains into the rooms and textiles. On my inspiration board, I really liked natural textile like linen, cotton, and I was really drawn to simple textiles. So if you find that you're really drawn to rooms that had bold textiles, pull some of those, pull a few neutral ones too, just to test some things out. But let's pull in some white curtains because that was the majority of what I was seeing in the rooms that I pinned. When you're bringing in curtains, I think it's easiest to just bring in one panel at a time so that you can clone as many times as you need to fill your windows. Otherwise, you might end up covering your window and it gets complicated, but let's make these a little bit bigger so they fall to the floor, and then this is where it's easy to just copy and paste that layer. It's very helpful to name your layers. Why I do this is when you bring in multiple options, If I'm bringing in five different curtain options, it's easiest when you name things, you can very quickly find the layer, turn it on and off. It's starting to really look like a room. Don't you think? Let's bring in some art for over the sofa, because that's really going to start bringing in some more patterns, some more color and help you make some decisions when it comes to your paint color, your textiles. If you're not comfortable picking art just yet, that's totally fine too. You can just stick with your key pieces, but I already went ahead and pulled some options, some art that I actually currently own. If there are items that you own, that you already have in your home or you know you want to use, take a photo on your phone and put it on your computer or wherever you're putting your products so that you can bring in these real pieces and it'll help you really craft the room that excites you. So let's just take a look at my vision board again and you can see that some of the art that I have here, they're graphic, they're pretty neutral, but over here which I really like this is boulder landscape, I got an oil painting. I pulled some options that are pretty similar just to see what they look like. Let's start with something abstract. So I have this, this is from Minted. Minted is a great place to find art, even just for the mood boarding phase, just to give you a lot of different options of styles, so you can play around and see what you really like. But we really just need the actual paintings. I'm going to go ahead and cut that out with the marquee tool, and then all you want to do is hit Command V. You just cut that out, drag it into your layer, then you can go ahead and delete the original one. This art piece happens to come in a lot of different sizes. I was looking for something really big and bold, so I can easily scale it up. Isn't absolutely perfect, it doesn't have to be exact. That's an option for art. Let's bring in something a little bit more graphic. Let's look at our options. So we have that one, we have something a little bit more colorful. I really like what we have here with the abstract black and white and the more colorful abstract, but let's bring in something a little bit more personal. I really liked, from my Pinterest board, this collage of Polaroids that I saw somebody do on a design project. I thought that was really fun. So let's go ahead and bring in that just to check out what that could look like. I really like that. Let's stay there and let's finish up this vignette. In my living room, I know I have room for two hardwired sconces over those sofa, so let's bring those in because those are important decisions. Let's test out just two options. It is good to check dimensions to make sure that, for instance, this scans 20 inches tall when the art that I have next to it might be 30 inches tall, but you don't have to be super precious about it. Just make sure you are in the general zone of the size of the piece. Really like that. Again, let's go ahead and bring in one more option. Something a little bit more modern, just to check. Let's take a look. Those aren't bad, but let's compare them to the other layer. I really like those a little bit more and you're going to see, it's really helpful again to bring in those options so you can compare things right then and there. You might think you want really modern lighting, you bring it into your home and you realize it might not fit just right with your architectural details, or could be a very cool curveball for your design. Play around, dream, that's the beauty of the mood boarding phase. Now let's finish up with a few textiles. Let's bring in some of that rust that I really loved. So I pulled a pillow and the rust tone. A lot of these elements come together at the end, but I like to bring in certain textiles to really emphasize the color palette, any trends in patterns that you like as you bring in those final elements when you go to install your room. This is in good shape. I think before we decide that this is where we want to be, let's just see a few of those options that we brought in. I like this table here. The sofa really is the star with the blue velvet, but I think every room can use a little bit of black. So let's see what that looks like. I had brought in another table that had some black marble, so let's just see what that looks like. I want see it a little bit bigger. You can do this with different shapes, if you want to see what a rectangle table looks like, a square table, nesting tables, brass, silver, marble, different wood tones, just pull them into Photoshop, play around and see how you start feeling. But I brought this one in and I think it's not quite the look I'm looking for, it's a little glam. So for me, I think I should stick with the table that I originally thought I liked. It's really good to get that gut check, it gives you a little bit of confidence in the pieces that you've already pulled to make you really think, that is the one that I like. So I feel like this is looking really good. If you wanted to bring in other elements that were important to you, it's good to reference back your vision board and see, is there anything I'm missing from this vignette? I think it's in good shape. With your mood board, you really only have to get about 75% of the way. Don't worry about getting it to a 100. That's not really what this is for. You will never get to a 100 until you really install your room. But what you want to do is establish your key pieces, your main furniture pieces, your color palette, your textiles and really just the look and the feel to give you a really good jumping off point from when you actually go to purchase. I went ahead and did my fireplace view, which is on the opposite side of my sofa. As you can see, I brought in all of the elements that were in the original board, so I have my chairs, I have the rug, I have a sliver of a sofa, and I have the coffee table. I brought in a few little decor pieces just for fun. You don't have to do that. I went ahead and set up the vignette for the fireplace so that I know both sides of my room. What I recommend doing is taking a look at all the vignettes that you put together side-by-side, really compare them and see, do these feel like they belong in the same room? You're going to want them to feel cohesive, the color palette is spread evenly throughout the room, you have all the elements that you really want to bring in, in all of your vignettes. We're done with mood boarding. At the end of the mood boarding phase, what I really hope you have is a room that you're super excited about. 5. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you're done. By now you should hopefully have a mood board that you're really excited about and go ahead and please share your final mood boards, or even your work-in-progress mood boards into the project gallery. I want to see them. I'm sure other students are going to want to see them. Let's talk about them. If you have a question, please go ahead and ask. I'm happy to answer. I'm sure other people will as well. I'm really excited to see what you come up with. Thank you so much for taking this class and I can't wait to see you again next time. 6. Q&A with Emily Henderson: Thank you guys so much for taking Arlyn's class. Arlyn worked for me for two years. I love her very much. I'm just glad that she's out there and teaching because she's awesome. I can't wait to check out your mood boards and don't forget to go over and take the other two designers classes. We have Mikel Welch and Albie Buabeng. All the links to those classes are in the description below. Bye guys. Hi Arlyn. Hi Emily. In case the whole world doesn't know, Arlyn totally transformed our editorial blog. You talk about like what's seasonal. What people are going to start thinking about. It's the end of year, should we talk about what trends we're going to see next year? You got to change things that people get so bored so fast, and something that works yesterday probably hasn't worked yesterday plus one hour. You got to stay nimble. It's what we do. I feel like I used to get extremely overwhelmed at the beginning of the process, the whole mood boarding and finding inspiration. Obviously through experience, you gain some skills and you start realizing like how quickly you can hone in on things because there are way too many options out there for everything. If you're someone like me, I love the good parts of every single style. So at least now I really try and give the home a specific look and feel. Yeah, I know something that I get asked a lot is what's my style? It's so hard to come up with an answer to that because I love so many styles like you, Emily. I think being somebody who has been a design writer for so long, you get so used to looking at such beautiful things that you fall in love with every styles. So I'm not sure that's going to be a pin point for everybody but I think just with like Instagram and Pinterest, there's so many beautiful rooms to see now where before you had to crack open a magazine and that's all you had and now we have so much inspiration throughout being thrown at our eyeballs like all day everyday so I think that's definitely the hardest thing. Are you still working on your bedroom? I got paint samples in yesterday. I'm getting some more in today. I paused it for a while, but I think I'm ready to start it again because I spend a lot of time in there now and I want it to look way better than it does. It's so funny and most people might not know this, but it's not like you can get every single room done at the exact same time, especially for us, we reveal room by room. So you obviously focus on the ones that are you're going to reveal first. So her living room and dining has been so beautifully done for probably like two years. You like turn the corner into the hallway and it's like, "Oh, okay, I see what's going on." I just feels like two different houses. It's like a garage because everything that didn't work in those two rooms made its way further down into the apartment and I haven't quite dealt with it yet, but I will. Do you think you're taking the same approach to the bedroom as you did in the living and dining? A little less. I think when I did the living room and dining room, it was the first time any of my work was going to be seen by anybody. So I definitely over thought a lot of things. I went into it with a mentality like we've already talked about of, "How do I make this a little different," which isn't bad. But I think for my bedroom, I went into it with a very clear intention of what I wanted it to feel like, so I started with a feeling as opposed to a style or even like a color. I wanted it to feel really warm, and glowy. It feels less stressful that way I think because I'm trying to do something that feels good and that's going to be my intention. Whether it's cool, whether it's trendy, whether it's different, I just want to feel comfortable. But I think that that is different. I think that even just saying that you're choosing these materials and colors and pieces that feel warm and glowy, that's different. Also, I do think that warm and glowy might be your style because it's very you. You're very warm and glowy. I think maybe that's you having your bedroom be more of a representation of your inner soul. I feel like your style has like an undertone of an Emily Henderson room like you can look at it and know that was designed by Emily Henderson. Why? You've definitely paired back a lot. Yeah. I think you're probably getting to a point in your life and you're like, "I want things to feel simple. I want things to have intention," and I feel like that's where your where your style is going, to more intentional design. Yeah, I know. You're very correct and I am a little worried about people that don't really want me to shift in that way. They like the ecliptic stuff. Which I do in a certain way, but I've realized that I'm actually just more mentally healthy person living with less stuff and just more intention like, "This is the chair that I'm going to sit in for the next 15 years," rather than being like, "This is cool" and then nobody wants to sit in it. So it's simple but special. You've heard me say that one million times. Warm and glowy. Simple and special. Yeah. I think that there is a very big misconception about the amount of time it actually takes to create a beautiful room. In certain television shows, maybe on a certain networks it's so fast, that people really believe, "Why would you take more than 10 hours to design a room?" When we had client work, it was it was really hard to convince people that just the beginning part, the creative process, the hours of research, and finding inspiration, and all of that takes hours and hours. If you're not taking hours to do that, you're going to get something generic. Yeah. I know. I agree. Even just like my bedroom, I've been thinking about it since I finished my living room, which was two years ago, I hadn't been in an active mind of thinking, but I knew back then, "Okay, I got to do my bedroom" and since then I've been trying to figure out what do I want it to feel like. Like you said, it has taken a lot of time. I have been sitting on it for a little bit. So I would say like, I thought about it, like good and hard for about a year, which is longer than most people because I didn't really have a deadline. I think that's really the key to know even when you design a room like it's going to evolve over time and that like patina of the soul of design is really going to start layering in and that's fine if it's not perfect when you first do it. Arlyn, it's been so nice to see you. I can't touch you yet, but someday we're going to embrace again. One day, soon. I hope. We'll see Yes. I'm excited about your class and thank you for doing it. Thank you. I learned so much from working with you and seeing what you did. Now, I get to spread some more Emily Henderson cheer. That's awesome. I miss you. I love you. I'll talk to you later. Love you too.