Your home’s entryway is your only chance to make a wonderful first impression on guests. The space should be welcoming to you and visitors, while expressing your personality, tastes and personal values. It should also establish the overall tone of your home. Smart lighting and chic, sensible decor can help you achieve this goal.
1. Let There Be Light
Shadows and entryways simply don’t agree. You want to walk into light, not darkness. Light equals security, which reassures arriving guests. Consider wall sconces, table lamps and lanterns to create a bright, positive introduction to your home.
2. Keep The Flavor Close to Home
Incorporate local motifs, colors and symbols into decor. Remind yourself, and inform visitors, that your house’s spirit harmonizes with its environs, such as desert-chic pieces in a Southwestern house’s entryway.
3. Make A Leisurely Segue
Go from outdoor to indoor style by filling the entryway with an elegant mixture of stone, wood, outdoor furniture and plants. This suggests an intersection that exists happily between two even happier locations.
4. Enjoy Smooth Landings
Small dressers, console tables with drawers and chests provide spaces and storage for keys, mail, gloves and sundry items.
5. Enhance Visual Texture
Great wallpaper injects pattern into a sedate monochromatic palette or anchors a fairly vibrant, busy entryway. Use wallpaper to either advantage. The ideal candidate should be something that excites you, a product that resonates with your personal style and conveys whatever you want to get across.
6. Keep It Basic and Brilliant
Bold primary colors are foolproof tools for creating an exciting, joyous entryway that bespeaks life. Repeat your chosen colors throughout the entryway to drive home the design scheme. Work in some props that reflect your personal likes, whether hunting or fine art. In fact, entryway walls and corners all but cry out for framed art, a mirror, a pedestal and a decorative urn or bust, or a basket full of items that refer to something you love, like oars for boating.
7. Cushion Your Footsteps
A handsome rug is just the warm tonic for cold stone, tile or wood entryway floors. Finding the right size is tricky, but luckily rugs engineered specifically for entryways exist in various sizes, palettes and patterns. Opt for a non-skid rug with a lush pile that is durable enough to withstand high traffic.
8. Create a Preview of Coming Attractions
If you’re unsure about how to orchestrate your entryway layout, take existing cues from your home. Revisit iron, wood or other textures you use in other rooms, and preview them in the entryway. Keep your references handsome, brief, to the point and true to your experience. Imagine precisely the type of entryway you want to come home to.
9. Size Matters
Too much furniture or very large pieces quickly overwhelm a small to medium sized entryway. On the other hand, grand entryways require multiple pieces with healthy dimensions to appropriately fill out and manage the flow of the space. For a small to medium entryway, a few cleverly timed pieces of appropriate size are all you require to establish and maintain welcoming ambiance.
10. Perfect Your Short Story
Use your entryway decor to tell a short story about your tastes, lifestyle and the tenor of your home. Consult magazines and design websites for inspiration, curate a small collection of ideas, and then narrow it down by the statement you want to make. Go from there.