How to create a cohesive home

Happy New Year! I hope you’ve had a good start to 2021 so far, despite the strange circumstances?

With restrictions ramping up here in the UK and elsewhere, it looks like we’re going to be spending even more time at home over the coming months, and I know many of you have decorating projects planned as a result. So, I thought I’d kick off my posts for the year with some advice on a topic which I often get asked about: how to create a cohesive look and feel throughout your home.

In Sweden there’s a lovely concept known as the ‘red thread’, which refers to the essence at the heart of a piece of work – the staple ingredient that anchors everything else around it. It can apply to anything creative, from literature to art, and it’s also a big part of interior design. Taking a holistic approach that considers a home as a whole entity, rather than a series of separate rooms that happen to sit within the same building, is often the key to forming an inviting space, and the most beautiful and timeless interiors tend to have some kind of connection that ties the various areas together. But just how do you go about achieving it?

One particularly impactful approach is to use the same palette of colours and materials throughout. It’s what I’ve done in my own home (above and below), where grey, beige, soft white, pale oak and black metal feature in every room. It’s a mix that suits my style and the relaxed, calming atmosphere that I want to create, but to prevent things from looking boring I’ve varied the proportions according to individual spaces, their uses and the kind of light they get. For example, the living room has grey walls to make a cosy cocoon, whereas other areas are much airier, with white walls and just a few hints of grey. In the soon-to-be-completed main bedroom, meanwhile, I’m upping the amount of beige so that it feels a little warmer than other areas of the house without looking out of place.

Copenhagen-based Norm Architects used the same principle when they remodelled the Danish villa below, and it’s a project that I often show to clients as an example of a beautifully considered, co-ordinated home. Almost every room mixes crisp white with a contrasting swathe of black-brown, whether that be in the form of the smoked-oak cabinets in the kitchen or the feature wall in the living room. The bedroom is lighter and brighter, but there are still darker elements thanks to a charcoal-grey bedspread and upholstered headboard. Warm brown tones also feature frequently, with amber glass vases and pendant lights, walnut furniture and leather upholstery dotted here and there.

Photography via Norm Architects – see more of this home here

If you like the idea of using similar colours and materials throughout your home, then mood-boarding is a useful process. I tend to break it down into two stages, creating an overarching ‘vision board’ for the scheme as a whole, before putting together more specific boards that tailor the wider concept to individual rooms. You can read more about that here.

If, however, you find the idea of sticking to one overall palette a bit restrictive, then don’t worry: there are plenty of other ways to create a cohesive, flowing interior. The most obvious is to use a recurring accent colour across different rooms – something that can work brilliantly, although I’d suggest proceeding with caution as it can quickly look contrived. I cringe when I think back to my first home, which for some reason I filled with purple. I had purple everything – cushions, vases, artwork, tableware – and it looked ridiculous: forced, twee, and more like a show home than my home. I don’t even particularly like purple, so goodness knows where I got the idea! The key to doing an accent colour well is to limit it to one or two elements in each area and vary whether it features on larger items of furniture or smaller accessories. Take the below apartment: the mustard-yellow sofa and mid-brown cushion in the living room are cleverly echoed by the throw and curtains in the bedroom, creating a clear visual thread from just a few well-chosen pieces.

Photography by Jonas Berg for Stadshem

Of course threads needn’t take the form of a colour, and you could focus on a particular material, pattern or shape instead. If you love marble, you could have marble worktops in your kitchen and marble tiles in your bathroom, and integrate subtle touches of marble (perhaps a side table or plant pot) in other areas. Or, if you’re drawn to circles, you could do what the designer of this Melbourne house has done and create bespoke cabinetry featuring circular handles in brass and oak.

Photography by Ben Hosking for CJH Studio and Est Living – take a full tour of this home here

Another alternative is to use a variety of colours and materials, but curate them so that there’s some kind of continuity in their tones and properties. A great example is the Swedish home below, which features pale oak, plywood and leather alongside linen in various shades of beige and brown. They all showcase natural textures and share the same gentle earthiness, creating a harmonious effect without everything looking matchy-matchy.

Photography by Petra Bindel for Elle Decoration – view more of this home here

Whatever approach you take, having a good sense of your own style will give you an excellent foundation for creating a cohesive home, so it’s worth taking some time to nail this down. If you’re unsure where to start, try saving images of spaces that catch your eye (use Pinterest or just rip things out of magazines), then look through them to see if you can pick out any common themes. Chances are there will be a few specific things that have appealed to you, even if only on a subconscious level – perhaps certain colours and materials, or a particular style of furniture. You can then start thinking about how to integrate these into your own home in a way that suits the type of property you have, your budget and the way you live.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this subject, so please do leave a comment below. Are there any common threads in your home? Or have you used a similar palette across different rooms? And remember, if you’re struggling with a decorating dilemma then my design service could help – find out more here.

First four images by Abi Dare; all other photography as credited above