Homes are more than just walls and a ceiling with an assortment of furniture to sit and sleep on and tabletops where you keep your coffee and earphones. Every item in a home is intentional and embellishes the character of the place. As such, all your furnishings and curiosities mean something to you and say something about you. Your home needs functional, appealing, and durable items. Short-lived, low-quality items are disposable and have no sentimental value. Besides, your quest for beautiful home furnishings ends at the right home decor store. And here are some considerations when browsing and contemplating decor pieces.
1 Where Will It Go?
Buying something pretty (and pretty expensive) because of love at first sight only to realise it doesn’t match or fit into your space is disappointing. And if you don’t mind a motley crew of homewares, you could find some negative space on the dining table to display those mouthblown carafes or a lonely corner of the yard to put that rattan chair. Meanwhile, if you can’t do the mathematical acrobatics to estimate the dimensions of the objects in the store against the dimensions of available space in your home, that’s okay. An advantage of shopping at an online home decor store is that you can access the product specifications from your house, the place you intend to furnish. Now, you can accurately visualise where products from your wishlist will go.
2 What Is Affordable?
Suppose you took a fancy to rattan products of late and want to include them in your home decor. You enter a website, filter the rattan homewares, and, in the spirit of the famous Pokémon slogan, you decide that you ‘gotta get ‘em all’: the square placemat, the round tray, the oval underplate — even the ice bucket and the tissue box. Now, hold your horses before you load up your cart. No one is depriving you of your rustic dreams, but moderation is key when shopping at a home decor store. So first, sample an item or two and then decide if rattan is your style. If it is, stack up your cart with more. If it isn’t, you can experiment with other styles like grand millennial, Scandinavian, minimalistic, urban industrial, and others.
3 What Purpose Will It Serve?
Sometimes, your thumb hovers over the ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Purchase’ buttons because you’re thinking, ‘It’s pretty, but is it useful?’ or ‘It’s useful, but is it pretty?’ Not that beauty and utility are mutually exclusive, but every house has different requirements and restrictions. For example, a modern minimalistic householder would refrain from purchasing an antique candleholder chandelier, while someone whose foyer is a tribute to 18th-century period dramas would have it in a snap.
4 Is the Seller Trustworthy?
The hazards temper the convenience of shopping online. You want to ensure your data and money are in the custody of secure and genuine people and channels. So, the first telltale sign of trustworthiness is a glowing website. An online homewares store should be replete with style guides, themed curations, detailed shipping and returns policies, and complete contact information. Professional and original product photography is a must. Also, brownie points to sites that enable account creation and verification and ask you to sign up for newsletters or promotional emails.
When you elevate your space, you elevate your mind. Everything about your home, from the texture of the carpets to the colour of your throw pillows, affects your mood, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes obviously. So, fill your home with objects you can make memories with and attach meaning to.
