How to Balance A Room

What does it mean to balance a room? How do you do it? Is it expensive? I definitely understand that these questions can be daunting - especially when you're not an interior designer. Whether you're about to move and need to stage your home, or you just feel like redecorating, here are some tips to help you balance your spaces.



1. Define a balanced room.
In order to know where to start, you should know what the end goal will look like. A balanced room is a room that has equal amounts of furniture accent pieces, and decorations on either side of the room. This also means that if you have a tall plant on one side of the room, you should have something tall on the other side of the space to balance it. Here are two pictures - the first is of a balanced room, the other is unbalanced.

Balanced Room
 See how the sofa is balanced by the two chairs, the built-in bookshelves are on both sides of the fireplace, and there are two of everything.

Unbalanced Room
Notice how the room is unbalanced? You could draw a line from the top left corner to the bottom right corner of the picture and see how the entertainment stand (with the sculptures) is taller than the mantel (with the accent pieces) is as tall as the plant. There is also an end table on the left side of the room, and nothing but a gate on the right side of the room.



2. Rearrange furniture
Just because your room isn't balanced, doesn't mean that you need to spend a lot of money trying to balance everything. Sometimes, just moving furniture is all you need. Don't be afraid to take furniture from one room and move it into another.
 

 Notice that the room had nothing tall enough to balance the swordfish before? By adding the art around the room this person was able to achieve balance through height. And switching out bulky furniture for the more modern furniture makes the room look larger while maintaining balance.

3. Don't overwhelm the room with colors.

Don't be afraid to use color in your room, but it's easy to get carried away. A good rule of thumb is to pick one color for the room, and using the color wheel, pick an accent color for the smaller decorative pieces. 

If you're unsure as to how to use a color wheel, the colors exactly opposite of each other are complementary colors. These colors always look great together. If you don't want to go with two different colors, go with either color to the left or right of the desired color choice. 

For example, if you choose Yellow as your primary color for the room, the complementary color for Yellow is Violet. If you don't want to have Violet in your room, go with Yellow-Orange, or Yellow-Green for your accent pieces.  If you notice that Black & White are not on the color wheel, that is because they are the absence of color and can be used with any of the colors on the color wheel.

Good luck with balancing your rooms!

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