Floral Decor: It’s All in the Mix
Find out how to use color, pattern and scale to make your room design come together
Jess McBride
August 6, 2016
Houzz Contributor. Custom decorating professional and content creator for the home design industry with a lifelong passion for color, pattern, and texture of every "stripe"
Houzz Contributor. Custom decorating professional and content creator for the home... More
Flowers have been inspiring interior design for as long as people have been decorating their homes. Whether you crave floral-themed upholstery, wallpaper, draperies or art, finding the right balance of floral and other patterns in a room is often a question of personal preference. If you’re looking for ways to freshen up a floral element in your decor, consider these seven tips.
1. Use white as a backdrop to make those petals pop. Here, lots of white space, both on the wall and in the ground of the fabrics, allows the more densely packed foreground pillows and art above the bed to provide contrast and variety.
2. Try mixing in stripes. Florals and cabana stripes are darling together and can look as fresh as an April shower, especially when paired with a third textured solid, like the coverlet shown here. While a mixture of floral fabrics can be pretty antithetical to the simple, clean look that many people gravitate toward, mixing a single floral fabric with floral art prints won’t overwhelm a space.
3. Play with scale. Here, the buds on the wallpaper are the smallest floral unit, while the drapery fabric features a medium-size print and the bedspread and pillows are populated with the largest-scale pattern.
Sticklers for design “rules” will tell you that you should reserve your largest-scaled patterns for the largest items in the room, but this example shows that turning that dogma on its head can yield striking results.
Sticklers for design “rules” will tell you that you should reserve your largest-scaled patterns for the largest items in the room, but this example shows that turning that dogma on its head can yield striking results.
4. Limit colors to maximize effect. Finding two color pairings in a single floral motif and mixing them together in a room is a surefire recipe for an eclectic and effortlessly cool space that’s relatively easy to add to and subtract from when the shopping bug bites. Here, hip black and white intermingles with classic pink and green, and the only place where all four colors converge is on the wallpaper, which serves as a foundation for the whole design.
What I love about this room is how it picks up on the boldest color in an already bold fabric (the floral drapery) and whips it around the room so that it splashes a little bit of everything in its path. Bright pink, so common in flowers, complements this Yves Klein-esque electric blue and also shows up in four different florals, one of which is the real deal in a vase on the coffee table. Drenching the walls in color keeps the whole thing from being too contrasting and stark — as it would have been against white.
5. Fabric-free approach. You can mix florals without using a single floral fabric. Here, a gallery wall has the same effect as a room chock-full of floral-upholstered furniture.
6. Pick a few small pieces for a big impact. For a winning formula that won’t feel formulaic, pick two of the smallest pieces of upholstery in the room and cover them with two totally different patterns, leaving the rest of your decor mostly solid and playing with texture instead of pattern.
These stylish drapes are a simple, modern approach to using florals. They also bring in the ombre effect that’s popular today.
7. Don’t hold back. Three paintings, two upholstery fabrics and two rugs: What do these seven disparate elements have in common? Nothing much besides flowers, and that’s the point. You can get away with a look like this when you combine a range of scales. The pattern on the rug, for example, is large and more loosely spaced than those on the upholstery fabrics. Glancing at the densely packed florals on the chairs yields an overall impression of organized complexity, and the dominant wash of color is akin to what you’d find in nature.
Jason Oliver Nixon and John Loecke of Madcap Cottage are masters at mixing patterns to achieve a layered look. Never ones to shy away from a good time, they create rooms that are a party for the eyes, where a green and white botanical print at the foot of the bed might mingle with at least two other florals in the same space. Their trick to making the room feel cohesive and comfy is to find a thread that ties things together, like a color that pops up all over, on wildly different fabrics.
I often liken mixing floral patterns to assembling a container garden. If you’re thrifty, you’ll grab whatever odd planters you have on hand, and if you also have too many favorite plants to count, representing as many as possible may be more important to you than keeping the garden as color-coded and organized as your file cabinet. In the same way your garden may be filled with pots of every shape, material and color, your living room can be a medley of all the floral fabrics you couldn’t choose between. That just means your indoor and outdoor areas will be similarly coordinated in their lack of coordination.
To understand why this floral haven succeeds, let’s notice what you don’t see: You don’t see any traditional, chintzy or muted florals. The element that binds the eight floral patterns together isn’t so much a varied scale or repetition of a single color as it is a “stylized” motif. Each iteration of the theme is an abstracted version of the real thing: The smooth edges, simplified leaf and petal shapes and bold contrasts all run counter to more traditional florals that embrace subtlety of hue and detail.
More
What Goes With Floral Upholstery?
How to Make Beautifully Untamed Floral Arrangements
More
What Goes With Floral Upholstery?
How to Make Beautifully Untamed Floral Arrangements
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Headache inducing. I would love to see a 'subtle use of floral designs' companion post.
Some people are so nervous about mixing bold floral prints in their spaces. The truth is, florals were a massive trend in the past, but like most things, they have come back around and we are seeing them in a big way. Large scale floral prints in a neutral colour can be the solution for someone who is scared of the design. Florals can be an art piece in themselves because they are something naturally found in nature, which is something we derive a-lot of inspiration from.