We always like to look at photos of French interiors: chic, stylish, modern, and airy. Check out these decorating techniques and find the perfect balance between Parisian chic and the comfort of your own home.
1. Mix vintage and modern home furnishings
French chic in a modern setting is formed when you manage to combine something old with everything new. The secret is in the right combination: select vintage restored items and pair them with modern ones that look the best new. For example, you can buy a modern table and mix it with old refurbished chairs.
2. Transform everyday things into a chic
The dining table may look light and minimal during the day, but when guests arrive, it can be transformed into a piece of chic interior thanks to textiles, candles and candelabra, vases, and porcelain tableware. Remember more often about a simple base that you can transform with elements of chic.
3. Play with details
Two different interior styles that seem to have nothing in common can look amazing in the same room if combined with taste. It’s all about the harmony of color, lines, and proportions. Combine velvet curtains with a mosaic floor, Scandinavian furniture with vintage items, and classics with Provence elements.
4. Between the restoration of the old and the purchase of a new one, choose the first
If you manage to find antique furniture that can potentially be restored, use this opportunity, even if the restoration will cost the same amount as buying a new item. Upholstery with interesting expensive fabric and wood polishing work wonders and an old chair in its new life can become the central object of your new French interior.
5. Feel free to mix styles
Parisian apartments look extraordinary due to the fact that furnishings are not tied to a single style and coexist harmoniously together. Think about what style of interior is closest to you, and what you like no less. Scandinavian style and boho, classic interior with modern elements, minimalism with country touches – the secret of the French in combination and the right proportions.
Place a bright armchair in a white Scandinavian interior, hang expressionist reproductions, and stack old books on a cabinet made of raw wood. Do you feel how stylish and extraordinary your interior has become?
6. Choose the centerpiece of the room
And build a composition around it. Study interior magazines and settle on one thing that you like so much that you can’t get it out of your head. Make this find the centerpiece of your composition (you don’t have to literally put it in the center!). Pick up objects according to your taste, based on the compositional rule given by the central object. And you won’t go wrong!
7. Don’t neglect worn furniture
In the apartments of Parisians, a relaxed atmosphere reigns, unlike what we usually see in interior magazines. The difference is that the French do not neglect the scuffs and flaws of wooden furniture. Imperfections are unique, they have something very personal and valuable.
The scuffs on the grandmother’s sideboard have remained since pre-revolutionary times, and the chip on the wooden table makes it clear that some kind of story is connected with it: you didn’t buy a new one, but left this one, so the room becomes warmer with it. So instead of throwing away your grandfather’s rocking chair, consider how you could transform it.
8. Don’t limit yourself to one color
A monochrome interior, made in the same style, is not in the nature of the French. Add a bright detail, play on the contrasts of textures, color accents, and prints – and Paris will settle in your home.
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