What are Home Furnishings?

Possibly the most cost-efficient way to refresh your home, home furnishings (or soft furnishings) – for example some cushions, a throw, a rug and some curtains – are the perfect way to complete your design and tie together all of the larger elements of your room, perhaps using some of those accent colours or bolder fabrics to give it some pop.

To put it simply, soft furnishings are any fabric you use to complete the design of your room:

How to use soft furnishings

Combining textures, patterns and colours for the perfect balance.

Use of Textures

People want to touch with their eyes – you can feel textures when you see them and it adds a whole new dimension to our room designs. For each of your elements – for example your sofa, cushion and throw – try choosing a series of different textures to see how they layer together.

Use of Patterns & Colours

Patterns are really exciting; a room that has plenty of colour might still feel very one-dimensional without the use of different patterns throughout its elements. Patterns tend to make the room feel busier, not to mention that using bold patterns on larger furniture might become tiresome on the eye, so we generally recommend subtler tones and patterns on larger pieces, like sofas, so that we can use soft furnishings to show off our favourite patterns.

Try incorporating one or two different patterns throughout the room, maintaining the pattern theme but changing it subtly for each soft furnishing (without going overboard!). Remember, not every soft furnishing must have a pattern – maybe you could pull an accent colour from one of your patterns and support it with other plain elements around the room.

Use of Layers and Creating Balance

If done right, a fantastic mixture of texture, patterns and colours throughout the elements of our room can add character and achieve the emotional response that we are hoping for. Each room of the home has strong and weak areas that we may or may not want to emphasise, and using colours, textures and patterns correctly will help us to show off its defining features.

Different elements of the room should work in harmony – not necessarily all of them together – grouping by area or at different heights will pull the eye to certain points, and our balance of colour and pattern combined with the extra dimension of texture will work together to make our room look effortlessly elegant, aesthetically pleasing and inviting to touch.

Aside from the design benefits of soft furnishings, they may also be used to increase the energy efficiency of a room by warming it up, or even to improve the sound insulation, as soft materials tend to absorb noise far better without reflecting it back into the space.
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