EP 158 // Are You Guilty Of ‘Safe’ Interior Design? 5 Steps To Correct This

Cara Baker (0:00)

Be honest, are you decorating the home you really want, or the one you think you're supposed to have? Fear of getting it wrong, wasting money, or hearing what on earth have you done can quietly push you towards safer choices. In this episode, I'm helping you spot where that's happening and showing you how to start breaking out of it.

Welcome to the Daring Home Decor podcast. Are you tired of playing it safe with your interior design? Are you overwhelmed with choice and just want simple steps to pull off cohesive and unique decor? I'm your host, Cara Baker, virtual interior designer and bold decor coach. I'll help you get brave, find your style, and create a home with pizzazz. So grab your paintbrush, put on those overalls, and let's get decorating.

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode. So great to have you here. And we're going to be talking about safe decorating today. I remember when we first renovated our house, when it came to decorating the bathroom, I think my mind went to what it probably does for a lot of people. This is a room that's going to be expensive. It's got to last a good many years, and it's not something that I can just chop and change on a whim. So we actually plumped for beige in the bathroom at the time, because we felt that this was a safe choice, that we wouldn't need to worry about changing every year. And what actually ended up happening was, we were stuck with this choice, because as I mentioned, it's not that easy to change up your bathroom on a whim.

But it wasn't in a good way, because I ended up hating the beige. It went out of style really quickly, out of fashion. I know I say don't go for trends, but it's like a beige in marble effects, probably back in now we've had it that long. And I think when you are making these kind of decisions, if we'd have gone for a color, for example, I don't think I would have got fed up of the color as quickly as I got fed up of the beige. So being safe doesn't always necessarily mean that you're going to be happy with it for longer.

And maybe I should have thought more along the lines of timeless rather than safe. And if we'd gone for white, that would have given me much more opportunities to change up the color. And white never really goes out, does it? If you've got it as a base. Not that I'm encouraging everybody to have white as a base, but yeah, being safe doesn't always mean that you're going to be happy for a long period of time with the choice that you make. So if that's the reason why you're doing it, make sure that you are doing it intentionally and really thinking about it beforehand. If you're at home now, I want you to walk around your home or at the next opportunity you get, walk around your home and look at the choices that you've made and ask yourself, were these choices made because I genuinely loved them? Or were they made because I thought it was safe? Because I thought it would last longer? Because I thought nobody would raise their eyebrow at it? This is an interesting experiment to have. So I challenge you to do that.

It can be very easy to end up with a home that's nice, tasteful, and completely harmless. But if you're going for something a little bit more adventurous and different, then this isn't what you want to end up with, is it?

Safe decorating often happens gradually through second guessing rather than a conscious decision. So as I just mentioned, make sure that if you're going for the safe option, that you're doing it with intention and not by default. So if you are guilty of safe interior design, I'm going to go over now five steps to correct this. Step one, spot where you've edited yourself. As you look around, were there any choices you made where you went for the quieter version of what you actually wanted? For example, you may have a more subtle pattern wallpaper because you talked yourself out of the more bold one. Maybe there's a paint color that you really loved and you toned it down. You went for a more earthy version of it or a lighter version of it. That can happen very often. Or what about a statement piece that you just decided was too much, even though you really deep down did love it? Step two is to work out what you were actually scared of. Was it getting bored with it? Because let me tell you, you can get bored with whatever decision you make, whether it's the safe one or whether it's the wacky one.