How often have you spotted a beautiful antique piece of furniture or home accessory, but walked away because it wouldn’t fit with your modern decor? Mixing and matching different styles can have a stunning effect, but it’s not always easy to get right. It is possible to use antique items in a contemporary home. However, you need to think carefully about how to blend everything together. You don’t want your antique doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. It can serve as a prominent focal point, but there’s a fine line between that and it being out of place. Here are some top tips on how to use antiques effectively in your modern home.
Play with Contrasts
To give a room an eclectic feel, use lots of different contrasts. Some people think that for a space to come together, everything should match. But if you want to mix old and new, it’s better if you don’t try to have all your furniture matching. If everything else matches, your antiques will only stand out more. So use the rest of the room to create lots of contrasts between soft and hard, straight and curved, and light and dark.
Use Vintage-inspired Contemporary Decor
Lots of the contemporary furniture and interior ideas in glossy magazines take inspiration from older styles. Just like clothing, fashionable styles for interior design make comebacks with more modern tweaks. If you look at what’s popular right now, you could see elements from anywhere from the 1600s to the 1960s. Help your antiques to feel more at home by mixing them with new items inspired by the same or different periods in interior design history.
Use Different Styles
As well as creating lots of contrasts, you can mix up your design by using several different styles in one room. If you wanted to stick with one style, you would have to plan your entire decor around the antiques you wanted to use. By mixing up different styles, your antique pieces will be just another one of the trends that you’ve used, instead of clashing with everything else.
Let the Antique Speak for Itself
Instead of trying to get your antiques to become coherent and blend in with everything else, let it stick out. When you have a piece that doesn’t match the rest of the room, it can create a bold effect. But you need to be careful that it makes itself known in the right way, as a focal point in the room. You don’t want it to look like you just put it in the room because you didn’t know what else to do with it. It can be a rather hit and miss thing to do, and you may just have to experiment to see if you can get it right.
Learning how to blend antique items with contemporary decor takes some time and skill. But if you try a few different ideas, you can find something that works. If you’re decorating a new room, try using mood boards to find a design you like.
Image Credits: Photo by Marilyn Acosta.