Design Dilemma: Styling - A Few Take Aways

One of the joys of working on a design project is the big reveal day. It's when all the amazing things you sourced, designed and ordered for your client are finally ready to be perfectly placed. Here's our studio table full of some of the amazing pieces we found, ready to be styled. It may be hard to tell from the photos, but the scale of some of these pieces are very large. The glass vase series in the background are huge and will look so dramatic in my client's dressing room. The stacked Barbara Barry boxes in the foreground are large enough to hold legal size papers and odds & ends; plus fill an entire shelf in the adjacent office bookshelves. Scale, quality and balance are so important when styling. Adding these final details are the personal touches that reveal your personal story, and give the room individuality and character. It's not easy to do and in my opinion, best left to the professionals. But if you're going to give it a go on your own, please keep a few of these tips in mind: 1. Remember scale and balance: I like to use larger scaled pieces to add drama and keep it from looking cluttered. Balance of colour and pattern throughout gives a sense of calm and synergy.

2. Layering different textures in similar tonalities are a stylist's trick to make a space cohesive and sophisticated. It's more complex and risky to mix colours and pattern.

3. Quality: Invest in some special pieces you love. If you add a bunch of cheap items everywhere, it will cheapen the look of the whole room.

4. Edit: Just like an elegant woman, know when to take the one extra piece of jewellery off before leaving the house. Leave the "more is more" styling credo to the experts.