The French are known for a few things: the Eiffel Tower, buttery croissants, and their flawless tastes. In many homes, French style embodies a casual elegance that feels at once carefully and effortlessly curated as well as reserved yet deeply personal.
When it comes to French-style interior decoration, you don’t need to live in an 18th-century farmhouse or a historic apartment to appreciate the simple charms of French design. You need to simply follow our amazing design rules to master the art of French style in your home.
- Design#1: Create a Lived-In Space
One hallmark of French-style interiors is that they never look perfect. This statement means that you don’t need to decorate a specific style too much around. Instead, you can accessorize with only a few items that are special to you such as wall art, books, or family heirlooms that help to create an organic space that you’d love.
- Design#2: Embrace the Beauty of Aging
Beautiful doesn’t mean perfect in French-style interiors. The French people welcome the character of chipped paint, burnished metal, and aged wood. Hence, you can provide a sense of history to your home with decorative items that gracefully show their age such as an antique painted table, a wall art gallery of different sizes, or a mirror that is speckled and scuffed with age spots.
- Design#3: Add a Touch of Glamour
Every French-style room requires an element of glamorous touch. You can instantly elevate a space with humble bones by mounting a glided antique mirror or hanging a delicate crystal chandelier.
Although remember to choose just one or more glitzy accessories to introduce a luxury touch without going all-out glam.
- Design#4: Decorate with Subdued Colors
The French-style interior comes from the simplicity of the color palette. Neutral furnishing and crisp white walls typically dominate with small hits of color mixed to create interest.
You can try some muted colors in gray undertones such as dusty rose, steely blue, or sage green to add depth to a neutral palette while maintaining the effect of the sophisticated subdued. Additionally, try adding small doses of black-through light fixtures or hardware to ground the overall look.
- Design#5: Mix Old & New
French-style interiors are often highly eclectic and distinctive featuring furniture and décor from a wide range of sources, eras, and design styles. You can use European antiques or contemporary pieces with midcentury modern furnishings to keep the look cohesive.
Conclusion
Your home might not have the herringbone floors and intricate ceiling moldings of a penthouse of the Seine, but you can still play up with the French-style architectural details of any room. You can simply draw attention to an elegant fireplace mental with beautiful art or decorative vases, or can even forgue a rug to highlight the richness of your wooden flooring.
However, if your home lacks distinctive architecture, you can simply boost its character by making small upgrades such as adding beach art paintings adding crown molding in the living space, and terra-cotta tiles or herringbone bricks in the kitchen to create a rustic French look.
