Here at the Home Decorating Centre in Kirbymoorside our fabric room is really an Aladdin’s cave just waiting for you to visit and choose one of our gorgeous materials. Fabric is at the core of every decorating scheme but how you put fabric together and select fabrics that work together is vital as all fabrics have their own personality. They can be used to create a focus for the room or you can play with them and subtly enhance your interior using colour pattern and texture. Check out our window display for ideas, come into the shop to chat with Marie, or just use our tips to get a design that works your you and your lifestyle.
1. Change the way you look at fabric – rather than thinking of a velvet, a check, a cotton in blue, green or purple when we’re designing we think of fabrics as a family. So if you love a check pattern, as we do as you can see from our window display, you set a gorgeous check as your base pattern – your parent and think about whether you want that on your sofa or your curtains. Then you start to mix and match textures and colours so you might pick out subtle tones from the check for your cushions and mix up the textures – maybe using velour, tapestry and silk together. Those are your babies. Then you need to think of how your teenagers fit into the picture and that’s where you decide what you are going to use for a throw, a blind or a lamp. It could be a jewel tone that exactly matches one of the colours in the check or it could be a complementary two tone pattern in a different texture. And that’s the great thing about our fabric room in Kirbymoorside, we stock so many fabrics that you can spend hours there playing with fabrics and working out which are your babies and which your young adults – you’ll find if you see fabric as a family you will end up with the most amazing interior scheme for your space.
2. Use texture - if you think of fabric only in terms of colours and patterns you will probably end up with a fairly flat looking scheme where the sofa, the cushions, the lampshades, the throws, the curtains etc are all in exactly the same weight and style of fabric. No matter what you do with colour and pattern it’s going to bear the same relationship to a textured scheme as black and white photographs do to a Disney movie. So it’s clear we need texture, and actually you can go subtle on texture and get a great layered look with only one or two variations in colours if you dial up the textures (and remember all your fabrics are part of a family). The easiest way to get this approach right is to grab as many fabric samples as you can and play around with them until you’ve got the look and feel you are after. And it’s actually great for your creativity to have a lot of samples as the more you play around with colour and texture the easier it will be for you to find the look and feel you are after.
3. Take a starting point – to get the right character in your room you need to run a connection through all your fabric whether you are looking for impact with jewel tones or a subtle tonality. In exactly the same way that a family has a character so does a home and so you need to make sure all your fabrics work with the largest piece of fabric in the room. It’s a bit like picking a name for your baby, you wouldn’t pick a name that sounded odd with your surname, it’s exactly the same idea, if you’ve got a vibrantly patterned wallpaper you need to make sure that any contrasts are carefully planned to work with them. So in a room where you have brilliantly coloured mustard and grey curtains you want to pick a wall colour that fades into the background and monochrome or same pattern cushions for example but in a room with a huge monochrome sofa you can go to town with vibrant colours on your lampshade and in your curtains. That doesn’t mean that it all needs to be one colour (unless that’s your thing of course) but it does mean that any contrasts in texture, pattern or colour connect to your sofa, carpet or curtains.
4. And don’t forget practicality - do you need a black out lining in your curtains, how many rubs has your upholstery fabric got and does your lifestyle mean (possibly if you have toddlers crawling around you space) that you need to think about regular cleaning of one or more of your soft furnishing.
5. The last thing to think about is light, this is all about fabric and we love the way that light filters through the fabric shades on our individually crafted lamps to give the room a gorgeous ambience. So when you have picked out all your fabrics and got a real sense of what the room will look like don’t forget to think about whether you want strong light in the evening, task lighting or whether you just want to feel of a log burner and candles.