You might have heard "styling" tossed around a lot lately. You might even have an idea what it means, but not how to git 'er done. Or you might just not see the point or why to bother with it.
Believe it or not, the way a surface is styled can make a considerable difference in a room's allover look and feel. Each surface is an opportunity to zhuzh up the place, to impart lacking color and texture and shape and personality. Each tabletop, bookcase, and shelf provides a chance to correct or counter an imbalance in other areas of the space with a vignette (pronounced "veen-yet").
A vignette (for our purposes) is a 'scene' built with decorative elements that creates a balanced, appealing visual composition.
There are two kinds of items we use in styling: items that don't really tell anything about who you are as a person, and items that do.
The impersonal items are plants and containers.
They are things that add dimension, life, color, and organization to the items in a styled surface, but don't really have meaning beyond that... unless a plant was given to you by your Great-Aunt Trudy, who raised it from a sprout; a basket your Uncle Bob wove during his hippie years; or a box your dad made in his garage workshop. For the most part, though, they're more props than things of personal significance.
Plants can't be beat for bringing color, shape, and life to a room. You can use fluffy ones like loropetalum and peperomia, something that trails down like pothos and spider plant, tall upright plants like snake plant and ZZ plant, even little succulents you put in tiny containers that you scatter around to punctuate your vignette.
Containers are a characteristic of a well-styled surface. Boxes of all types, baskets, bowls, dishes, cups, mugs, glasses, snifters, tins, and trays are all decorative in their own right, but can also hold an attractive array of items for a next-level presentation.
Lamps and candles are also good to include, especially if you need tall items to create or balance height. And the light they produce can make lovely shadows in your vignette.
The personal items are books, art, and found objects.
They reveal something about you-- your interests, passions, values, ambitions, and dreams. They are the most important items in a styled surface, because they impart the uniqueness of you to the room.
Books are the main building blocks for a successful styling. It's best if they're actually books you have read, are reading, or plan to read in the future. If you're not a reader, though, you can always hit thrift stores and yard sales to pick up books for cheapy-cheap. And there's nothing that says you can't use book-shaped things you have a lot of for the same purpose. If you have a lot of DVDs and/or game cases, you can use those to much the same effect.
And don't think you have to only stand them upright-- stacking them on their sides is a fantastic way to switch up how they're placed on a surface and to create a little 'stage' for a plant or art to stand upon.
Art is the third main type of item needed for appealing styling. It includes framed or unframed photos and prints, postcards, menus from favorite restaurants; sculptures, figurines, action figures, dolls; and vases, candles and candlesticks.
Found objects are things like rocks, shells, driftwood, fossils; items that intrigued you enough to keep them with you instead of leaving them where you found them.
So now that you know what to use, how do you go about using them?
We could delve deeply into the realm of artistic elements, but we won't. For the sake of styling a surface, think primarily of balancing the three dimensions: height, width, and depth.
Height: Make sure that each vignette (section of surface being styled) has a balanced sense of height on both sides. A stack of shorter things on one side, one tall on on the right.
Width: Try to make the vignette take up most of the surface without crowding anything on it.
Depth: Layering the items from back to front can create a complex vignette that is very beautiful. Put some framed art in the back, a plant or pair of candlesticks to one side in front of it, a small box with a chunk of amethyst or malachite on it on the other side in front of it.
Conclusion
Look at the bookcase, above. Look at how each shelf is layered front to back, and balanced side to side, how items are stacked to create height. Look at how the shelves themselves are balanced with each other-- the left shelves are roughly the same size as their counterparts on the right. Look at the array of items used-- it runs the gamut of everything I've listed above. It's basically a perfect example of how to create not only eight smaller vignettes but also one larger vignette of the entire bookcase.
Thus it's easy to see how, while it can take a little practice, figuring out how and where to place a variety of items ultimately results in an attractive scene, with the results well worth the effort.
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