When you’re decorating your home, it sometimes seems you search high and low and everything looks the same the whole world over. Almost certainly, if you love a piece of furniture you see online today, just keep looking, and a few days later you’ll have seen enough clones to make the love leave your heart, no regrets.
Your Home Is Part of You
What you need are home decor pieces that are brilliant. Your couch, your rug, your art, your vase should all make your spirit leap, your heart beat faster. Every time you enter the room. Every time you snuggle into that chair, you should feel divine.
Don’t you cherish the way you feel when you’re wearing clothes you love? Happy and covered in beauty? The home decor that surrounds you affects you the same way. Is your home like an ugly set of clothes you trudge through life in? It should immerse you in your own unique style, so you feel at home and beautifully so.
There are some straightforward ways you can bring that genius into your home decor.
Classics of Art
Your taste in art is uniquely you, and incorporating it into your life is uniquely revitalizing. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access program makes available over 406,000 of the works in its collection for unrestricted use. This means you can download high-resolution Rembrandts or Seurats and print them for your walls. Choose from over 4,000 woodcuts alone, ranging from Utamoro II to Paul Gaugin.
Online print-on-demand services can make your digital art files in a huge range of sizes, even as a wall mural, on high-quality archival papers or on canvas, framed. You can even manipulate an image in Photoshop to suit yourself and then print that out.
High-Fashion Decor
High fashion is founded on ideals of quality and unique design, so it’s natural that fashion houses have released decor lines that further those traits.
Dolce & Gabbana is known for opulence, and its decor pieces use luxury fabrics and gifted artisans to recreate the high-fashion experience. The Dolce & Gabbana Casa line of home decor pieces is literally stunning. You may forcibly have it brought home to you that you must have this enchanting couch that looks like Lorenzo de’ Medici could sit down next to you at any moment.
If you’re a Gucci fan, you’ll be interested to see what has been done with its Décor line. You won’t be able to look long without finding something you cannot live without — an armchair covered in winged dragons or exquisite porcelain dishes bringing together the best of past and present.
You can find an entirely different but no less elegant look with Ralph Lauren’s Home line featuring tufted oversize couches and boxy leather chairs. Quality shines through in whatever style.
Le Marché aux Puces
Often a brilliant piece of decor is hiding in the past. It would be easy to spend a lifetime browsing the Paris flea market, Le Marché aux Puces, falling in love again and again.
You’ll find centuries of antique fabrics, art, statues, furniture, and decorative items from beaded curtains to painted screens to candlesticks and chandeliers. Europe is old, and a remarkable number of objects from the 17th and 18th centuries are still about and in good condition.
If you can’t make it to the Paris flea market, look for the nearest thing close to you. Maybe a local neighborhood or town is known for its street of antique shops. It may be best to start the search not with the idea of finding a bargain — but planning to find something you love that seems well-priced.
Loving where you live makes for health and happiness. Instead of taking a scattershot approach to your home decor, focus on what uniquely pleases you — pieces you truly love.
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