How to make and use mood boards

A few weeks ago I shared eight questions to ask yourself before embarking on a decorating project. The idea behind them was to help you cut through the noise and trends, gain the clarity you need to create a space that works for you and your lifestyle, and avoid costly mistakes that would take time and money to put right. But what’s the next step once you’ve worked through them? Well, it’s the part of the process that I enjoy the most: mood-boarding!

You might not feel you need to make a mood board, especially if you already have a scheme in mind, but I always think it’s worth doing. It’s a great way to develop your personal style and fine-tune ideas, and it acts as a handy tool that you can reference to keep your project on track. It’s also a lot of fun.

Here’s my guide to getting started with mood boards and making the most of them as you move forwards…

A two-stage process

I’ve found that mood-boarding is most effective when broken down into two stages. The first is creating a general ‘vision board’ to define the overall look and feel that you want to achieve. Begin by picking one thing that you’re drawn towards and use it as a starting point. It could be anything: a postcard, a wallpaper sample, a photo, even a pebble from the beach. Next, bring in other items and play around with different combinations until you have a group of elements that work well together. At this point, focus purely on colours, textures, patterns and materials, and leave anything more specific until later on. When you’re happy with the selection, lay it out on a piece of card, pin it to a notice board or even stick it on a blank bit of wall, and don’t worry about creating a neat arrangement – the aim is simply to experiment and let ideas come together.

Once you’ve worked out the general mood you want, you can move onto a more specific board that hones in on the detailed aspects of a scheme. This is when you can start introducing exact paint shades, fabrics, flooring, furniture and accessories, and consider how you’re going to translate the various elements of your vision into the space in question.

Doing things in two stages like this will help you stay focused and bring your ideas to life. If you’re decorating more than one area, it will also help you create a coherent scheme and avoid a series of rooms that bear no relation to each other. Just think of the vision board as a guide to your home as a whole, with the more specific boards adapting it as needed to each space. For example, the vision board for my house encompasses soft grey, white, beige and pale oak, along with black, marble and stainless-steel accents, but the proportion of each element varies from room to room. I generally use more white in areas that I want to feel open and airy, and more grey in cosier spaces such as the lounge; I might also introduce one or two new elements to individual spaces to add interest, without veering too far from the overall scheme.

Contrast the vision board for my home as a whole at the top of this post with the above, which I created for my living-room makeover. The former focuses purely on colour, texture, materials and the overall look and feel; the latter drills down into how to apply the general vision to a particular space and incorporates specific paint, furniture, flooring and accessory suggestions.  

Finding inspiration

Inspiration for mood boards can come from anywhere: books and magazines, the natural world, art galleries and museums, hotels and restaurants, other people’s homes… It’s always worth keeping your eyes peeled, as you never know when you might stumble across a colour, shape, pattern or texture that appeals to you. I know one person whose entire scheme was sparked by a tile she spotted in a café toilet, and another who created the vision board for her home around a bit of product packaging she really liked!

I gather together inspiration in three ways. I have a box file for physical bits and bobs – fabric swatches, colour cards, pages torn from magazines – and I use Pinterest to save down anything I come across online; I also snap phone photos of things that catch my eye when I’m out and about. Then, whenever I start a new project, I can browse through all these sources to see what leaps out at me.

As you look back through the things you’ve collected, take time to study each one and work out why you’re drawn to it. If you’ve pulled out a photo of a specific room, for example, think about why it grabbed your attention – was it a certain item of furniture? The way the window is dressed? Or perhaps the overall ambiance of the space? If you’ve saved a painting of the sea, was it because you liked the colours, or was it more the sense of calm that you connected with? Also ask yourself which elements you could realistically incorporate into your own home. If you live in a suburban new-build, you’re probably not going to be able to replicate the rustic beams and exposed-stone walls of a rural cottage; the cottage’s sense of warmth and cosiness, on the other hand, is totally do-able.

This bathroom scheme was inspired by monochrome artwork and the harsh winter landscapes I encountered in Iceland. The salad servers might not seem relevant to the space, but they represent a colour and texture that I wanted to incorporate. I put together this particular vision board as part of a collaboration with Claybrook Tiles, but the next step in a real-life interiors project would have been a more specific board with product suggestions – and the servers would have been translated into matte-black taps, fixtures and fittings. 

Physical versus virtual boards

Pinterest and Photoshop mean it’s incredibly easy to create digital mood boards, but I still like doing things the old-fashioned way – it gives a much clearer idea of colour and texture, and nothing beats the tactile nature of holding materials in your hands. Nowadays I tend to make physical vision boards before moving over to my computer for the more specific boards where I need to include images of actual furniture and accessories, but that’s just personal preference. It’s definitely worth playing around to see what works best for you.

I love making physical layouts for general vision boards. I often incorporate 3D objects, in which case I’ll arrange everything on a piece of card and keep it in a corner for the duration of the project, or take a photo that I can refer back to when needed. The above example was part of a collaboration with Crown Paints, which you can see here. 

Dealing with overwhelm and sticking points

It’s easy to feel like a rabbit in headlights when confronted with hundreds of different colour, material and texture choices. If you have lots of competing ideas bouncing around at the same time, try creating a few different vision boards and mulling them over for a few weeks. Take a while to think about how each one makes you feel, and how your reaction changes with your mood. Over time, you’ll begin to get a sense of which scheme appeals to you on the deepest level and which you’d like to develop further.

If you find yourself stuck when trying to finish an individual board, leave it for a day or two and come back to it with fresh eyes. More often than not, you’ll instantly spot what’s missing, or which element clashes and needs to be removed.

Above is the board I created for my dining room. You can see how it’s evolved from the same overall vision as the living room, but uses the elements in a different way to create a lighter, more airy scheme that responds to the space in question and the way we use it.

Mood boards aren’t just for interiors…

Finally, I’ve written the above with interiors in mind, but mood boards can come in useful for all sorts of things. I almost always create one when styling an event or photoshoot, and Chris and I put one together when planning our wedding. It helped us set the tone for the day, and it took a lot of the stress and indecision out of the process. You can even make vision boards for your life or the year ahead – see this brilliant blog post by Hannah Bullivant for more info.

All photography by Abi Dare; images within mood boards as credited above