Choosing Pretty or Practical Home Decoration

When you are involved in any aspect of home decorating, you may find yourself faced by the old dilemma. Do you make your choices based on what is pretty or what is practical? On the one hand, we all dream of living in a beautiful home that looks like the front page of an interior design magazine, with stylish furniture and amazing decor.

But on the other hand, some of these furnishings and furniture may look great on the day we buy them, but they may be impossible to keep clean and given our lifestyles they may not last too long anyway. Therefore, when buying or designing anything for the home, we need to be practical. Yet the most practical choice may simply not appeal to our aesthetic tastes.

So how do we reconcile the dilemma of pretty or practical?

This particular question often arises when we are trying to choose flooring. We may find the most beautiful wood flooring, for example, but however lovely it looks, if we are trying to find the best flooring materials for a bathroom it would be totally useless. Wood gets warped and damaged when it is exposed to moisture. However, if we are looking for flooring ideas for the living room, wood could be a very good choice.

Indeed, when decorating a room, another practical consideration would be who will be using it. For example, if a member of the family is wheelchair bound, you can’t simply choose what looks pretty. The materials you would use would have to be wheelchair friendly and not cause any obstructions. For example, if you are using area rugs or any other kind of carpet flooring, you would have to make sure that the corners are stuck down properly as any dog-ears could seriously interfere with the progress of the wheelchair. Similarly, all the furniture would have to be placed in the most wheelchair-friendly way.

However, just because you are trying to be practical, this does not mean that you have to be saddled with something you don’t like either. The best way to approach this problem is to first write down all of the practical considerations. Once you have worked these out, it’s time to make a list of all of the options that would fall within these criteria. You will probably find that even though your choices are no longer unlimited, you probably will find enough options that are worth considering.

Of course, the other point to remember is that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” In other words, the way that we look at things is very much influenced by our attitude of mind. If we think of room design from this point of view, we can also become much more positive about the choices we are left with once we have thought about all of the practical factors involved. And it is surely far more appealing to have a home that is easy to clean and suits our needs but is slightly less stylish than a home that is extremely elegant but impossible to look after and totally unsuitable for our needs.

The article and pictures above are submitted by houseofarearugs.com