PS: I’m a 52-year-old wife and mom with some remodeling experience -21,000 square feet of historic renovation in Charleston, SC- and burnt out with the whole thing, and now contemplating doing a smaller, more personal addition to a straight-forward brick colonial.

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INTRODUCTION        

In working with home interior design four decades and more, I’ve found that some design mistakes occur over and over.  Mistakes in home interior design involve furniture, fixtures, arrangement, and decoration.  If you’re living with them and you're ok with it, pay no mind.  If not, maybe you can fix it.  If you’re selling with these home interior design mistakes, then, in my opinion, you diminish your sales opportunities.  Buyers tend to get hung up on what they don’t expect, and it distracts from their ability to see what’s important and that can discount value.  

Of particular interest to me is that wealth is no indicator of interior design quality.  Page through realtor websites featuring interiors of homes for sale and you’ll see that, even at the high end, money doesn’t necessarily buy good home interior design sense.  Often I see palatial exteriors, the interiors of which scream "we bought over our heads."

Interior design skills present patterns.  Strong skills present strong patterns.  Strong patterns satisfy expectation, let you get vicarious and comfortable, resonate your self.  Weak skills present weak patterns.  Weak patterns confuse, conflict, put you off.  With strong patterns, you remember the space.  With weak patterns, you remember the stuff in the space.  To my mind, weak patterns of home interior design insult and reject you.  

Here are several moments when what you’re looking for in home interior design is not what you’re getting.
 

 HOME INTERIOR DESIGN MISTAKES  

1. The style of the home doesn’t match the interior design or décor.  The most frequent offense: Traditional house style and Modern outfitting.  In most cases, buyers are looking for Traditional furniture and fabrics. For example, oriental decor became popular long ago in America, and has been used regularly in many decorative applications in homes.  It adds color, art, and finesse to any room.  In my opinion, it’s much easier to include Traditional style in a Modern structure than the other way around.  The former – Traditional in Modern – can work consistently throughout a residence, the latter – Modern in Traditional – only selectively and with careful consideration.
    
2. Poor interior décor selection.  Cheap looking.  Sparse – too little furniture, no carpets or, worse, carpet remnants in the living room; no carpet under the dining table or in other gathering, community spaces seems to be the trend.  A carpet anchors tables, chairs, sofas etc.  Bare walls and in-your-face wallpaper also detract from making a room feel finished and welcoming and warmer and quieter.  Chandeliers made of antlers, animal hides and heads are okay for lodges and castles.  You’re looking for a symphony of home interior décor to inspire you.  This is 2009 and decorating with ‘50’s furniture or furniture that leaves the style of the home at the front door detracts from the feel of the tradition of the style.  It’s fine to present the unusual if that’s what you like to live with, but it doesn’t help in selling a home when buyers don’t have the same taste.
    
3. Paint colors that don’t add to the interior; they detract from it.  You’re looking for rooms with a move-in feeling and not 'this is going to cost me plenty to repaint.' Bright green coffers, shiny black trim, purples and browns etc. are personal colors, not selling colors.
    
4. Darkly stained wood beams, coffers, casings can be overpowering.  Dark makes a space appear smaller and masculine, so keep stains for the library, game room or bar, unless it is being used sparingly elsewhere.  In other rooms, dark can unintentionally betray the openness of larger spaces making them feel smaller and confining.  Further, too many stains together in the same room, can look thoughtlessly cobbled and inelegant unless artfully presented.  You’re looking for wood grain and depth and solidity; you’re getting heavy, dark, and mismatched.
    

5. Drapes that cover up windows even when the drapes are open.  So dowager empress.  You’re looking for daylight, bright and cheery and you’re getting old Europe.
    
6. Fireplaces that just aren’t right.  Stone for a fireplace that looks like it came from a kit.  Or too many textures.  Fireplaces are one of the central gathering points of a home.  If there’s stone on the exterior, then interior stone on the fireplace, should match in looks.  The same goes for firebrick full-faced forward rather than on-end. Full-faced looks to me like an industrial furnace; on-end presents the firebox, surround, and hearth.  Finally about a fireplace: if it’s not centered on its wall, then its off-centeredness needs an obvious, visual explanation.  Largely beyond remediation, these are choices you’ll make and live with – not likely fix.
    
7. Media rooms arranged so that not all the seating faces the screen.  You’re looking for a private theatre and there’s a couch on a sidewall.  Dark staining in this space is ok.  So is other than a matte finish for wall and ceiling coatings. 
    
8. One size décor to fit all spaces.  Proportions of furniture, fixtures, and decoration are key ingredients in home interior design.  Big almost always trumps small.  Almost always.  A little picture hanging alone on a big wall?  A 2-cushion sofa, chair, and 18” round coffee table as the only furniture in an 18’x22’ space?  You’re looking for conversation and task groupings that welcome and you’re seeing desperate and over-their-heads or out-of-their-minds.
    
9. When big is too big.  You can see it most often in dining spaces.  It’s not entirely on owners that the dining furniture’s shoehorned in there; home designers seem all but programmed to draw up dining spaces of all sorts – formal, informal, bar stool, banquette, porch picnic – too small.  In goes the 36” wide table, 6 chairs, and a serving buffet or the like.  Sit down for dinner with a foot behind each diner.  Or sit on the bar stool and block the hallway.  You’re looking for relaxed and comfortable and you’re getting cramped and claustrophobic.

10.  Chaotic coffers.  There are, to my sense of it, two home interior design choices for coffers, not three.  One is lightly, or thinly, stripped and built-up as paneling, if not, in fact, paneling, built down to about three inches or so and laid out symmetrically.  Two is deep profile, systematically sized, boxed channels laid out as though covering real beaming, in order to convey apparent structure.  Wonderful.  Three – the not a choice – is same-size, checkerboard, boxed, deep profile channels symmetrically spread on a ceiling like a quilt.  This mention of coffers is for your discernment. 

11. Kitchens from hell.  Don’t let them tell you that the kitchen triangle is a thing of the past.  Kitchens outside the triangle are designed by men who don’t cook and for house staff or “the little woman” who’ll struggle through meal preparation, serving, retrieval, and clean up.  Not for you.  Not for me.  You can workflow inside a triangle – thoughtfully done all the time.  Another big pet peeve of mine is when a wall oven or any other kitchen appliance, including the kitchen sink, is set in a pathway.  This setup is a safety hazard plain and simple.  I’ve seen this kitchen-hallway home interior design failure more often in higher-end kitchen’s where the obligatory island confounds proper arrangement of appliances. 

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