Using Interior Furnishings to Create Powerful Personality in the Home

Creating a living space that really reflects your personality and interests is not always easy, particularly for men. Most style magazines concentrate on demonstrating chic and sophisticated surroundings suitable for the luxury lifestyles of the rich and famous. While these have their place, they are hardly comfortable masculine environments where you’d be happy to have a few friends over to kick back and relax.

A tried and tested option has been to create rich, dark Victorian feeling spaces, full of books and leather seating. But there are alternatives. It is possible to brighten a room with College cushions for example – the kind that introduce color and celebrate the owner’s college affiliation. Not necessarily the whole look but a bold statement that sets a tone to work with.

What makes a Masculine Interior?
Home offices are often quite overtly masculine but that can be a reflection of their utilitarian function rather than deliberate style choices. It is much more difficult to define what makes a main living space masculine. Conventionally we think of heavy pieces of furniture and dark color schemes often returning to the Edwardian or Victorian archetype of the sort seen Sherlock Holmes melodramas. Traditional Vs. Modern Living


This style is not particularly suited to modern living, few of us want to sit bolt upright all the time and attempts at making televisions and sound systems compatible with it have seldom been successful. In addition to that, we want nowadays to enjoy more open and light-filled spaces than in the past.

So where do we go from here? It is probably fair to say that simple engineered shapes will appear more masculine than softly draped ones and that stronger color ways will be less likely than pale or delicate ones to be interpreted as feminine.

Create a Strong Central Theme
It is also often the case that when designing a masculine interior a strong central theme can help. For example, as soon as you decide that you want a fisherman theme it becomes apparent what will work and what won’t in the scheme of things. That in its turn makes it easier to place and arrange items in the space and too decide what items are still required to add the finishing touches. Key decorative items, let’s say a pair of oars, will also start to suggest color schemes that can be refined and used to tie the overall effect together.

Putting It All Together
The interdependent factors of function, theme and color palette will effectively lay down the ground rules and make every decision, about the contents of the room after that, one of personal choice and taste. Exactly the same factors also place restrictions on what will work within the space and anything that doesn't tie in with them will stick out like a sore thumb.

For example, a large pink painting of kittens is going to look so out of place above the fireplace in a blue and white, fisherman themed, living room that it will destroy the theme completely.

This article was written by Amanda Walters, an experienced freelance writer and regular contributor to Huffington Post. Follow her here: @Amanda_W84