The Pocket Guide to Interior Design

Caveat: Like many of the “resources” post, this one is open to suggestions, links, and tips. If you have a better store I need to know about, I want to hear it.

Aside from your clothes, there is perhaps no better outward expression of how you view yourself than the environment in which you live. And if your goal is to be suave enough to hold parties, have friends, meet beautiful women, and the like, you’re going to need a place to host them.

But not just any place. Your place should say the following things about you:

• You live cleanly
• You have taste
• You take pride in where you live (even if it’s a studio apartment)
• You look like you have people over a lot

That’s about it. From there, there’s some wiggle room for you to express a little individuality. But before you think about that, it’s time that you mastered the basics. And that begins with eliminating the most common mistakes men make when they decorate for themselves.

Most Common Interior Decorating Mistakes

• Frat guy style. Unframed posters (especially of bikini-clad babes), bottles as decoration, framed posters of novelty items like “types of beer,” cheesy lighting/”porn room” lighting, mattresses without bed frames, emphasis on toys rather than furnishings, big giant novelty items like restored Coke machines and dart boards - you get the idea.
• Too nerdy. A touch of nerd is just fine, but displaying your full nerd bounty like Steve Carell in “The 40 Year Old Virgin” is a step or two too far. I keep a few items to show off the stuff I’m passionate about, but they’re certainly not the emphasis.
• Too spartan. Simple is great; Spartan will make a woman wonder if you’re some kind of squatter. It only takes a couple of items to fill up a room more than this.
• Nothing resembling a color theme. There are a lot of colors here but they don’t actively clash with each other. Generally, you’ll already have a wall color and a few items of furniture; you’ll want to base the rest of your purchases off of that. Ideally, you have the money to tackle it all, but let’s be realistic: sometimes, you can only work within your current budget.

Steps to Overhauling Your Interior Design

• Step One: Blueprints. There’s an old saying in show business: if it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage. Most guys will haphazardly throw together any old furniture and possessions when they move in without any real thought. You’re not most men. Do a quick sketch of the room and start drawing up blueprints. Where might the couch go? Where do you see some extra space that a nightstand might fill? What could you put up on the walls to fill out the empty space? And look at the room’s color. What matches and complements the walls and carpet? Settle on a basic palette before you even start decorating - for simplicity, stick with three colors. Biege, brown, and gold. White, black, and blue. Hold up a few color palettes to the room itself and try to see which works best.
• Step Two: Furnishing. A room’s furnishing define its roles. Check out this album from /r/malelivingspaces - do you see how the design is mostly about the placement and selection of the couch, carpet, TV stand? See how much this living room works because of the right couch selection? A bright purple suede couch, not so much. No matter what else you put in the room, it won’t work if you don’t have the right furnishings. If you have space to fill, do it with furniture first. Couches, chairs, tables, coffee tables, desks, end tables, etc. Don’t start adding in plants, frames, and the like until you have the furnishings down pat.
• Step Three: Lighting. For this room, most of the lighting is taken care of by natural light. This room doesn’t have quite the same thing, and requires assistance. The most important thing is to make lighting mostly subtle; it should take up a bare minimum of space. In fact, this guy’s night mode includes lighting that you can’t even see - you just see it reflected off the wall. Also, don’t go for novelty lighting. Thin, minimalistic, and tasteful tends to work well with male living spaces.
• Step Four: Ornament. Plants, frames, and objects like globes, clocks, and speakers. Now you’re filling out a well-designed room to make it not only practical, but to make it actually look “lived in.” And you’d be amazed at how one object can go a long way. This looks minimalistic, for example, but consider how bare the bed frame would look without that contrasting lamp. Here, you want to fill in any “negative” space with contrasting objects that brighten a room out. Here is where you can break out of the color palette a little bit and have a little fun - just not Steve Carell in “40 Year Old Virgin” fun.

That sounds all well and good, but you’re a broke 20-something who can’t go out and furnish an apartment, let alone buy a poster frame worth more than $50. Or maybe you do have the money, and you don’t know what to buy. Here are some dependable resources for filling up your place.

Places to Buy Furniture and Furnishings

• IKEA. It’s hard to go wrong with IKEA, but they have a few disadvantages: they can be pricey, and they don’t ship to you (edit: they do offer delivery!), so you have to go to a store. Still, they seem to do everything right with simple tastefulness, from simple TV stands to no-nonsense coffee tables. If you have the good fortune of a nearby IKEA outlet and enough cash, you should be able to find most of what you’re looking for in a trip or two.
• JCPenney. Heck yeah I’m telling you to check out J.C. Penney! Their prices are good, they offer just about everything, and you can shop their clearance rack if you’re on a budget.
• Unison Home. Free shipping for orders over $150, which is easy to do when you’re shopping for furnishings.
• Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Click over to “Home Decor” and you’ll see just about anything you could need, including full bedroom sets if you don’t like making all of those decisions yourself. Bed, Bath, and Beyond is basically a total furnishing store, so always check to see if they have something you like.
• If all else fails: Target, Wal-Mart, Craigslist, and the like. Yes, the stuff is cheapter, but if you’re a shrewd shopper who knows how to pick out a good item that fits your color palette, who’s going to know? This guy at MaleLivingSpace put this together only using Craigslist purchases. If you’re resourceful and put in the effort to research, you can overhaul a place without a huge budget.

Favorite Accents and Resources

• Zoom Interiors - Haven’t used them, but they have an interesting concept: you take a survey, do a video chat/phone conference with them, and they recommend an affordable redesign of your place. Like having an online interior designer.

Sheets and Linens

• Area Linen Shop is baller, but pricey.
• JCPenney is a nice, affordable alternative.

Plants

• Urban Garden.
• WindowFarms. I like not having to do a lot of work to buy plants myself, so this is an easy solution.

Lighting

Most of the furnishing stores you find will also offering lighting, but here are some special resources to spruce up the place:

• Phillips Hue lets you do just about anything with regular lightbulbs, from setting lightbulb alarms to normal lighting to sexy party lighting.
• Lightpack.
• LED strips. LED strips with a basic remote control put behind a TV can be great for night lighting, under a bar, etc. Just don’t overdo it, and certainly don’t make the LED strips visible.

Wall stuff

• Society6 clocks. It’s going to be tough to find one that doesn’t fit, and doesn’t make your interior design pop. Some are obnoxious, yes, but some of them can be really cool in the right setting.
• Alarm clocks - I like basic ones like this.
• I like to buy cheap matching travel posters and have them custom-framed at a local frame / arts store. It sounds like a hassle, but when you’re working with $4 posters, the cost is entirely justified…and ends up being less expensive than what you find online. Plus, with the frame, the purchase looks more expensive than it actually was. And yes, I have yet to see a wall that was well-decorated with posters or similar items that were unframed.

Further Resources

• /r/malelivingspace
• Apartment Therapy
• IKEA Hackers