Creating A Style Book
A style book is basically a scrapbook where you’ll keep all kinds of tear sheets from magazines of images that appeal to you, aesthetically. Whenever you’re looking through photos of interiors (or even non-interiors…anything that inspires you), you’ll add it to your book. You’ll organize your book into different categories. Which categories you choose are up to you, and you don’t have to start with all of them. To give you a frame of reference, I’ve included the ones I use, below. Eventually, you’ll also use pages in your book as specific mood boards when you’re doing a whole-room makeover. You can also include paint and fabric swatches if you like. If you’ve done the “Bird Board” project (also in Phase 3), you can include those pages in your style book as well.
HOW TO USE THE BOOK
The style book is kind of like a visual diary of your thoughts as you develop your eye for design. Throughout, you should be making notes about what you’re seeing, what specifically you like and why, and most importantly, to pay attention to why a particular room (or vignette) works in terms of how it’s composed.
MAIN & SUB CATEGORIES:
ANNUAL VISION BOARDS
Each year (we’ll start in January, 2022), you’ll devote a few pages to the coming 12 months. We’ll create special vision board pages that are based on your Style Manifesto for that year (again, we’ll delve into this in Janaury).
ROOMS
Living
Dining
Bedrooms
Dens
Kitchens
Bathrooms
Laundry
Mudrooms
Entryways & Stairs
Hallways
Nooks
Exterior
Patios/Porches
DESIGN ELEMENTS
Favorite Things (photos of things I collect or want to collect, along with objects I’m drawn to over and over)
Color & Pattern Palates (photos of colors and/or patterns that are mixed together in a way that I really like)
Holidays (not really a design element… just a place for decorating ideas for different holidays)
Compositions (photos of rooms or vignettes where I’m paying attention to how something is put together in terms of shape, scale, color, pattern, flow, etc)
PLACES
These are particular types of environments that you are drawn to over and over. They may be fairly broadly defined (such as “Scandinavia” or “Cities,” or they may be more specific such as “Maine Coast” or “Santa Fe.” You could also define them by natural environment such as “Mountains” or “French Alps.” The important thing to understand is that you’re noticing the specific elements of a place that you particularly like, rather than getting caught up in a style category. For example, for me, I love the beach cottages I grew up seeing in a small town we summered in on the Maine coast. I associate those cottages with my family’s long history of eating lobster, fishing, canoeing, collecting shells the 4th of July and catching fireflies. So one of my sub-categories is called “Cottage.” But what I don’t want to do is simply cut out pictures of mass-produced pillows emblazoned with starfish or “Gone Fishin’” signs. Instead, I collect photos of elements such as weathered wood, old lobster traps, vintage sea captain salt and pepper shakers… those kinds of things. At the moment, I have 3 sub-categories of places that inspire me on a regular basis: “Cottage,” “Cabin,” which reflects my love of old-time summer camp experiences, and “Adobe,” which is the kind of house I’d like to live in if I ever moved to Santa Fe or the Southwest.