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De-stress Your Home - Bring The Outside In

Everybody needs their own special place to relax. For many, they choose a place that is outdoors. Where do we go when we want to relax inside of our home?

Consider decorating one aspect of your home, meant only to encourage and promote relaxation. One of the best ways to do this is to bring the outdoors in. What better way than to bring in natural, raw elements, inspired by nature?

Design a Relaxing Room

Design one room in your home that complements the outside of your house. The design will flow more gracefully along with the outside and the overall appearance of your home will be far more harmonious and appealing.

Homes that are enjoyed, primarily, in the summer months, often feature "solariums." These are truly beautiful rooms, filled with plants and flowers, and natural wood furniture that look light and airy. Wicker furniture has been enjoyed for centuries and is still very popular, today, along with cushion fabrics that have wide, bold displays of floral patterns.

To earmark this one room as your relaxation room, think about using all of the natural colors and hues from the great outdoors.

Begin in the Garden

Start by deciding on a garden color to be dominant in your room design. A good suggestion would be to start with the natural hues of pink, salmon and similar pale colors. You can also swing for the deeper and bolder colors of bright yellows, reds and oranges.

For best effect, add tones of green. This will be a major part of your interior palette; you just need to decide where and how much of the green will be used.

Your walls and floors will be used as the background for everything else you will design in your relaxation room. As you decide on the feeling or mood of the room, think about these two large areas to begin with. Your objective is to bring indoors the feeling of an outdoor garden, so think about materials to be found in nature.

Wood should immediately come to mind and, if you already have hardwood floors under your carpeting, let that be part of the design of your room. The money you might spend on wall-to-wall carpeting can be best used in another area of your home.

Next take a look at the walls. Natural green will be the background color for your indoor “garden,” so follow this same design and use a soft pale green as your wall color. Choose a neutral color of green and this way, a tone of almost every other color will work with it nicely. Keep your ceiling a soft white or ivory and then add white crown molding and baseboard molding to frame your walls.

You will now have a soft glow from your beautifully finished wood floor and the neutral, soft green walls. You are now ready to choose your furniture and fabrics. This is the fun part!

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