How to Style a New Home (Without Paying an Interior Designer)

If you’ve just moved into a new home, you’ll want to know some key tips you can use to make it your own.

There are plenty of relatively easy and affordable ways to use home décor to create unique living and entertaining spaces.

We’ll outline some of these ways below.

Our top home styling tips

Here’s how to style a new home on a budget – which you can execute without paying for an expensive interior designer.

Use structural design to best effect

One of the keys to wonderful interior design is knowing and understanding the space you have to work with.

Use the pre-existing structural design of your home to help you create comfortable and attractive rooms.

This could mean swapping your large sofa out for two smaller ones or filling an empty corner with angled shelving, a coat stand, or a long and colourful print.

Work with your floor plan rather than trying to use fittings and furnishings that simply don’t work.

Change the lights

It might not be something we consciously notice, but how a room is lit can greatly impact your experience of it.

For less than $10, you can completely change your experience of a room. Light bulbs are made with both warm and cool tones, so make sure you pick something that adds to the ambience of the room you will use it in.

Warm lighting helps the kitchen and lounge room to feel cosier, while cooler lighting will make you more productive when working in the home office. Another way to influence the light coming into a room is to use curtains or drapes.

Some materials are thinner than others and can help you take full advantage of the natural light from your windows.

Use textured surfaces

Touch is an incredibly powerful sense – and adding textured details can increase the sensory experience of your new home.

The options for incorporating texture are endless: a shaggy rug by the heater, a velvet cushion on the couch, a woven wall hanging in the lounge or even soft, fluffy new towels on display in the bathroom.

Textured pieces are easy to purchase and transport home, but will instantly improve the comfort level of a room.

Consider how your treasures are displayed

If you’ve arrived at your new home with a lot of ‘stuff’ – take the opportunity to display your collections with care.

Rather than keeping favourite objects locked away, install wall shelving to enable you to show them off and use them for cute room decorations.

Make a special space for your trophies, trinkets and treasures. You might want to claim an interior wall and carefully arrange your favourite prints and photographs.

One quirky but unique (and free!) step you can take that will immediately increase the appeal of your study or workspace is to arrange any books by the colour on the spine.

Use indoor plants

Consider adopting some houseplants to bring some of the natural beauty of the region into your home. The selection of houseplants on the market today is wide, and some can handle conditions such as humidity, low light or constant air-conditioning.

Thriving, happy houseplants will help your home feel natural, organic and connected to the local environment. And don’t stop at just one; plants look most effective when displayed together in groups of two or three.

Need home styling tips in the Hunter Valley?

If you’re purchasing a new home in the Hunter Valley, you’ve chosen a beautiful part of the world to live as it’s got beaches, mountains and lots of green open spaces.

Making your house your home can take a little while. Rather than heading straight into major changes, like a different colour paint on the walls, try out different textures, lighting and accessories. You may find this is all you need for a beautifully styled home.

As you live in your new home, you will get a sense of how each room makes you feel, and this will give you ideas for how you might be able to change or improve it, without spending a fortune.

Our home builders in the Hunter Valley here at Hunter Designer Homes can give you more information about styling tips for your home. Give us a call today and we’ll be more than happy to help!

Still searching for the perfect new home to build? Check out our contemporary range of home designs.