Beware being taken in by the architecture. One of our neighbors rents her home to photographers who are shooting ads for various products -- because almost anything looks better surrounded by her beautiful floors, walls and windows.

I'm like that, if you substitute "Plant" for "Item" and "Garden" for "Room" :

• Impatience. Failing to wait on the right plant. Buying plants that didn't fit with the inspiration garden.
• Buying a plant and then coming onto Houzz to find a garden to match. Basically starting over every time.
• Failing to realize the gardens I chose no way matched the way I live.

So, I can sympathize!

DH and I liked the "Grand Designs" program, but our most common comment was, Stunning house but we couldn't live there, where would we put our stuff?

I can sympathize with buying not the right plant. The time window for gardening can be so small, I’ve too often chosen what is availabe rather than what is most desired or will work best. Witness the pink and white azaleas next to my red house v. yellow that i truly wanted.

The decorating points listed above should be shared here frequently, especially with regard to patience for finding the right item. I sometimes wince when exterior color schemes demo particular colors on a house with gorgeous architecture and the home in question is very simple. Even if the colors work well, the effect is so much less that it’s akin to false advertising.

Oh perhaps someone recalls the quote from Monteverde about design...it was spot on with your point #3.

I absolutely get what your saying. THIS is MY inspiration photo. Only...there is NO way I'm painting my ceiling beams. I have stonework around my fireplace not sheetrock. I have a wall of windows to the right with a French door....I need space to exit through the door. But....I just like it! I also would rather have a light fixture that doesn't droop that low.

There was also a piece that someone wrote in the Kitchen forum years ago. It started by showing an inspiration photo and then the owner saying something like - I don't want wood cabinets as in the photo I want white ones, I don't want midtone floors as in the photo I want dark ones, I don't want a white counter as in the photo I want blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. And then hating the kitchen when finished. It wasn't a factual story but it showed what can happen when you find an inspiration picture and then make changes and wind up with something that doesn't give you the same feeling as the picture and just isn't cohesive. It's a story that really stuck with me.

Nicole - Your inspiration picture is definitely something that I would have saved. Forget the fact that my house is a simple 2 bedroom, tract home.

Yup- I don't hink I have it exactly but the #3 from Magnaverde was along the lines of

design for the life you live (not what you dream).

Our dining room is still a work in progress and our chairs are out for restoration right now. DH put the kibosh on the chairs in the photo, but we still chose chairs that make a statement.

I feel like we’re pretty close to the essence of the inspiration. It’s been three years of work combining patience and the willingness to spend a little more where we need to - saving up while we’re looking for the right stuff.

Right now it’s a combination of pre-construction, meets stock room, meets mail room, so a file photo will have to do.

inspiration

actual in progress

there aren't any window coverings.

Yes, that's true. My house has 42 windows & 14 have window coverings. I'm in a section with tall pine trees. We're spaced away from our neighbors pretty well.

This reminds me (a little OT) of when I was a hairdresser many years ago. Women would come in with pics - pics of Jennifer Aniston, but they looked like Rosie O'Donnell. Blondes always had pics of brunettes and vise versa. Those with naturally curly hair had pics of straight styles. You get the picture. Same phenomenon. Maybe it's the allure of the unattainable or the desire for something completely different. IDK, but it's not just decor.

I was able to do the opposite. I posted this many years ago, but it's apt here. This was the inspiration for our library...

And here is our library

The one thing I'd still like to get is the brass fender for the fireplace...

I find that it's easiest to use color inspiration from rooms as they are more accessible...certainly more than architectural features.

I have learned over the years that the room will speak to you. It will tell you what it wants, if you listen. It usually doesn't work out well if you force it to be something it isn't.

One thing that strikes me when looking at photos of gorgeous rooms/homes in magazines and on websites (as well as the inspiration photos posted so far in this thread) is that there aren't any window coverings.

I had never noticed this. You are so right about the window coverings. I just went through my ideabooks and 95-98% of them either don't have window coverings at all or they blinds/curtains are up or pulled to the side. This definitely makes a difference.

Here's my desire vs. reality story. Many years ago I was looking for a rocking chair to sit and nurse my baby. I fell in love with a chair that I had seen at a distance, but gave up on that dream when I discovered that it was an antique designed by Peter Cooper. So I settled for a simple rocker made by Smilow Thielle. It was , I recall, 1 or 2 hundred dollars, and was perfect for rocking and nursing. I just found it listed on Chairish for $1,750. I still have the chair.

I just love this thread. JustDoIt, you are on the right track! I like your room a lot! I often think that what good designers do effortlessly (seemingly) is get the scale right for each furniture item. I do not have money to buy new furniture (nor will I ever reach the point where I could do one whole room all at once, due to time/money constraints), but I do strive! I never seem to give up!

I have Charles Faudree decor dreams, on a Craigslist budget :) (and I'm not showing my living room, at least not yet). I will note that I certainly don't have a great rustic ceiling like this one, so I'm with you on challenges to find an inspiration picture that makes sense for YOUR room!

“Yes, that's true. My house has 42 windows & 14 have window coverings.”

Our house has 37 windows, and only 7 don’t have a covering of some sort.

My house has over 40 windows too and zero coverings. It's 184 years old with great windows and the walls throughout out are painted white but the woodwork is highlighted in antique colors: four rooms in New England red paint, (windows, doors, chair rails, etc), three are sage green (original to the rooms), one is mustard, and two are Prussian blue. One of those rooms has a painted floor too. Many of the windows have old white painted wooden shutters, others nothing. The bedroom has plain white blinds which are always up to let in the light except at night. My decorating was hodgepodge after going to weekly auctions and shows for over 40 years. But everything bought was of the same genre reflecting a PA German farmhouse of the mid-1800s.

I have 20 windows in my house of which only 2 have no treatments. I like them for many reasons...the sound deadening, the light control, the warmth (emotional) and heat/cold control (physical temperature) and privacy and the look as it adds more texture and color to a room. In many of my rooms, the color inspiration started with the window treatments. In my library, when we first met with our architect, I handed him a fabric swatch that I wanted our study designed around. That fabric is the window treatment in that room.

An oldie but goodie on window treatments: https://cotedetexas.blogspot.com/2009/08/top-ten-design-elements-4.html

Anyone remember the old TV show Sensible Chic? They took a high-end room (tens of thousands of dollars) as inspiration and copied it for a few thousand dollars? It was fun to watch, but a lot of the savings came from things like finding a rug with the same colors to replace the very expensive hand-knotted one kind of thing. Same with replacing the custom art on the wall with a poster. Some of it was done with flea market finds. Still it was fun to see the room pulled together with a very similar vibe.

Part of it is there are looks I like that I'd never want to live in. I can get into some of the stark straight lined modern looks, but they don't ever look like there's a place to relax. I was in a home on a home tour one time that looked like a colonial museum. It was so well done and looked marvelous. But where do you kick off your shoes and lay down to watch tv?? No thank you.

Justdoit, can't wait to see your progress! TBH, I've never actually had an "inspiration room". I look at pictures of rooms and there are parts/items I like and might incorporate in our home, but I've never actually tried to copy a room. As for windows, I like window coverings but I like them open and light coming in. First thing I do in the mornings is open our bedroom window and great room blinds. (These are the only ones ever closed - at night.) I like drapes, I like "fabric" and I do think it can add to a room, all depending on the style of the room. Ours are set back from the window as far as possible, so that when open, little of the window is covered. I like simple drapes (panels) and roman shades. We have roman shades in our sunroom. Some type of covering there is a must. I keep them closed about 1/3 of the way (against the sun) but the windows are tall, so it still feels open and light in the room. I do not like fussy window treatments like valances, swags, layers (sheers + drapes). Just my personal feeling, but to me all the fussy seems old fashioned, out-dated. Our home is pretty private (up hill) but with it being one level, someone could easily walk right up to our br window. Our master is right off the great room, so windows in those rooms are covered at night.

This might be why I don't look at interiors for literal inspiration. Actually when I feel like I am designing something either still in my head or on paper, I almost avoid looking at interior design media. I look at lots of resources to find "parts" but I don't much look at finished rooms.

I did like the show Sensible Chic as a kind of exercise.

I did have a couple clients who would show inspiration pictures and then either slowly pick apart everything they didn't like about them or reject most of the elements out of hand as being too expensive, not really what they wanted etc. One of them was relatively fixated on a particular kitchen cabinet but it turned out she didn't like the Actual stain color at all, she liked the NAME of the stain color. In those cases it was very frustrating to get at what they actually Did like, because it was not the actual picture, very much. One of these clients I ended up not working with because of this, more or less. Actually it was this kind of thing that kept me in my current profession.

Ms. S - Sorry for the confusion but the posted reality picture is not my room. I posted it to show it is closer to my actual room than my inspiration.

For those of us without a sense of style, picking out an inspiration picture is a must. You've got to start somewhere. I actually talked with a designer and knew right off it wouldn't work. I would be one of the clients from hell mentioned above. Nothing would get done.

Well, inspiration photos will help if you take into account what it is specifically that you like about them, what your own taste is really like, what your lifestyle is like, what your circumstances are like, what your room is like. The inspiration can either be fairly loose or literal. But it's not much good to take a photo like your first one and say "I want it to look like this, but I don't like white, I don't like monochromatic, I could never keep a room that spare, I don't like too contemporary...and so forth. Start ruling too much out and it's not that room anymore.

But you could use this room as an inspiration even if you have a regular height ceiling, a TV but no fireplace, no wall of windows etc. If you want a monochromatic and relatively spare this could lead in a number of directions even if it's not literal

But if you wanted to be literal, this room would be relatively easy to recreate as long as you were all right with not doing white-white, as simply as going to IKEA, Pottery Barn, Z Gallerie and other price point places. It might not have the same finesse but you could get the same general idea:

Probably the only thing you would have to spend a lot of money for would be a good lamp that referenced the chandelier. And I threw this together fast, try a little harder and you could do better with the details.