How to Successfully Mix Modern and Traditional Interior Design

Can’t decide which era to decorate your interiors? The good news is that you don’t have to choose. You can seamlessly blend both modern and traditional interior design styles throughout your home and still create a harmonious room.

Whether you’re moving from a period property to a new build and want to keep some of the furniture, or whether you just love a myriad of styles, you can easily combine styles with the below tips.

Decide the dominating style

If you’re concerned that mixing modern and traditional interior design styles will look confused, you can pick one style to dominate. So, you could have a traditionally decorated room with modern accents, or vice versa. This will help to blend the pieces better.

Think about the room you’re decorating and what sort of style it might already lean to. If it has period features, it might work best to choose traditional styling to dominate. If the room has clean lines and feels more contemporary, you can allow the modern interior design aspects to lead and add thoughtful, traditional pieces to contrast.

Choose a theme, mood, or colour palette

Whatever spread of modern and interior styling that you choose, you’ll want the room to look coherent. You can do this by first deciding on a mood, theme, or colour palette that will bring everything together. Once you’ve decided on this, you can look for both modern and traditional furniture, art, and lighting that fits the theme.

When you’re thinking of your colour palette for your modern and traditionally styled room, it can work best to keep to a limited palette. You will already have the visual interest of different types of styles in the room, so adding too many colours could make the room feel overwhelming and cluttered. You’ll want each piece to stand out on its own, so picking just a few colours for the palette will be ideal.

Think about sizes

Another way to bring a room together with both modern and traditional styles is to consider the scale. If you have a dainty antique side table next to a bulky, modern sofa, it could look out of place. Instead, match the sizes of each piece so there is a balance. If you have a large, traditional dining table, you could look for contemporary dining chairs that have a similar scale and won’t be dominated by the larger piece.

You should also think about the scale of the room. If you have a big antique piece in a small room, it will make the room look cramped. However, in a larger space it may help to fill out the room and will look better placed.

Choose each piece carefully

When you’re decorating your room, you should consider carefully what you want to put in. Look at the details of each piece and think about why you like it and why you want it in your room. This can help you to know what to look for in the next item you choose.

You should consider every attribute of the room to keep it looking consistent. Think about the type of lighting you want, the furniture, your art and decorative ornaments, and your internal doors. By carefully thinking about every item, you’ll create a room that fits the mood that you want with both modern and traditional styling.

Distribute the styles evenly

When you have all your pieces and you’re setting out the room, take care to distribute the styles evenly. What you want to avoid is having sections – so one half of the room has all the modern items and the other side has all the traditional. You want to aim to blend the styles for a seamless look.

If you’ve picked your items correctly, the styles will meld perfectly. You could place a piece of modern art above an antique side table, or a contemporary industrial style lamp next to a vintage armchair. Your own tastes will help to bring everything together to create commonality.

JB Kind has a huge variety of doors for your interior design project, from traditional oak doors to modern industrial style doors. Take a look at our range today.