Beautiful Clutter? These 13 Rooms Say Go for It
No need to haul cartons to Goodwill for a picture-perfect room. You can have a well-decorated home and all your stuff too
I absolutely loved Laura Gaskill's Clutter vs. Keepers ideabook on how to decide whether to treasure or toss items. And I found myself especially attracted to the more ornate, lavish and bountiful designs — what many people consider clutter.
I like open and light and white and Scandinavian and spare as much as the next modernist, but I also have a real passion for color, texture and, most of all, personality. I love a room that says something about the person who lives in it beyond, "This person hired a decorator." I love a room that could never, ever be mistaken for one in a hotel.
But there are tricks to doing "cluttered" well. Your stacks of old mail and piles of mess don't count. "Busy" done right is intentional and playful with an overarching sense of design and order. It may not be symmetrical or streamlined, but there is method in the madness.
A few keys to creating beautiful clutter:
1. Have an organizing principle. Maybe it's color, maybe it's theme, maybe it's just a feeling you are going for. But figure out what your stuff has in common and bring that out.
2. Everything must be there for a reason. The reason can be simply that you love it. But don't accumulate stuff just for the sake of accumulation.
3. Keep it neat. There is no room for ugly clutter (papers, shoes, dirty dishes) in a beautifully cluttered room. Anything extra just looks like mess.
I like open and light and white and Scandinavian and spare as much as the next modernist, but I also have a real passion for color, texture and, most of all, personality. I love a room that says something about the person who lives in it beyond, "This person hired a decorator." I love a room that could never, ever be mistaken for one in a hotel.
But there are tricks to doing "cluttered" well. Your stacks of old mail and piles of mess don't count. "Busy" done right is intentional and playful with an overarching sense of design and order. It may not be symmetrical or streamlined, but there is method in the madness.
A few keys to creating beautiful clutter:
1. Have an organizing principle. Maybe it's color, maybe it's theme, maybe it's just a feeling you are going for. But figure out what your stuff has in common and bring that out.
2. Everything must be there for a reason. The reason can be simply that you love it. But don't accumulate stuff just for the sake of accumulation.
3. Keep it neat. There is no room for ugly clutter (papers, shoes, dirty dishes) in a beautifully cluttered room. Anything extra just looks like mess.
Books are almost never clutter in my worldview; they are essentials of life. In Kristin and Mark Nicholas' Massachusetts house, a wall of books is combined with rich colors, ornate patterns and a full use of space. The key to this organized clutter is layers of pattern — the more the better — in a palette of vivid but earthy reds, oranges and greens.
Open shelving in the kitchen is almost an invitation to clutter. You can resist it by using single-color dishes and matching everything in neutral tones.
Or you can embrace clutter and make it part of your design by proudly displaying things like spices and mismatched dishes. It helps here that everything else is bright white.
Or you can embrace clutter and make it part of your design by proudly displaying things like spices and mismatched dishes. It helps here that everything else is bright white.
This object-heavy space is organized by both color (white and red) and theme (midcentury country). Isn't it cute?
Have a lot of collections? Group like objects together, and what could be a jumble of junk becomes a curio cabinet of interesting, unique items. Well-curated junk can look like treasure.
This multiuse room is unified by those touches of light blue. As long as there is some repeated color for the eye to land on, even chaos like this has a sense of organization and design.
You can highlight your beautiful clutter by making the rest of the room spare and coordinated and saving one place — in this case, it's the bookcase —for a riot of color and texture. Against an empty background, a cluttered area looks intentional and artistic.
You can have lots of stuff and still create a feeling of calm and space. Wrap it all in white and go for symmetry.
This busy, cluttered bedroom is unified by rich textures and colors, and a sense of personal nostalgia.
An eclectic tabletop gets its organized feeling from repeated color and a few symmetrical stacks of books.
The stuff in this Americana living room shares a theme and a scale (big). There are a lot of things in here, but every one of them was put there intentionally.
Crisp white is always a good background for beautiful clutter. It adds some breathing room and a resting place for the eye.
More: Clutter vs. Keepers: A Guide to New Year's Purging
More: Clutter vs. Keepers: A Guide to New Year's Purging