7 Tips for Creating a Cohesive Home Design

You know how when you watch HGTV and they’re doing the ‘after’ tour of a house each room flows and finds that perfect balance where it’s not too matchy but doesn’t look like an amusement park funhouse? Yeah, that wasn’t what our house looked like when we moved in. It was far from a cohesive home.

Our house is very cute. It has hardwood floors, a fireplace, vintage crystal doorknobs, lots of character. But every room was a wildly different color and nothing matched.

Navy living room, brownish purple dining room, teal guest room, blue sunroom, yellow bathroom.

Now that we’ve been here a year and have slowly worked on making this house feel like our home, it looks much more put together. Each room does have its own feel and we’ve made a few bold choices, like our bedroom plank accent wall, but we’ve still been cognizant of making choices that will add to the feel we want in our house.

So, we’ve compiled a few tips for a more cohesive home.

Pick a palette

Not every room needs to be painted the exact same greige color, but it does help to have a general color palette you stick to and mix up. For us, it’s the greyish color of our living/dining/kitchen and guest room, black/blue accents and wood tones.

The living/dining/kitchen are not fully open plan, but much moreso since we did our kitchen renovation. There’s a cased opening between the living room and other two rooms but we felt like if we made all three rooms the one color then it would feel like one big space and give the illusion that it’s more open than it is. That, and choosing a light neutral color helps with the natural light feel in the space.

Use the same elements in each room

Turns out I love building shelves. If you scroll through our Instagram you’ll quickly notice that we have a lot of them.

In our living room, we built big, chunky floating shelves. In our kitchen renovation, we incorporated two thick open shelves. We build a DIY mantel for our fireplace and even in the nursery I cobbled together some little decorative shelves with scrap wood.

The moral of the story is, as you go through each room, there’s that common element of wood shelving and even though the style of the shelves is different in each one, you can tell that it has a similar feel and one room doesn’t just stand out as different from the others.

Use the same wood stain in your projects

To that previous point, we primarily use one of two wood stains for each of these wood elements in our house – Early American or Special Walnut.

That helps keep the same look without being too matchy. Our hardwood floors are also a very orange kind of stain, so we wanted to offset that some with the more brown colored stains.

In our mudroom for example, we used the color Riverway by Sherwin Williams which is like a blue/green, and then in the bathrooms we used Muted Sage by Behr. Both colors don’t fit in with the grey/white/wood tone/black scheme in the rest of the house but it was a chance to do something different without it feeling too out there because the other elements like the hardware and the wood tones still matched the other rooms.

Match hardware and light fixtures throughout the rooms

Each of our two bathrooms, the mudroom and the kitchen all have black hardware. The brackets for our shelves in the nursery, pantry, kitchen and mudroom are all different styles, but still black.

It’s something you might not consciously notice but was intentional so we could: A, save money and buy things like drawer pulls in bulk and B, carry that theme throughout the whole house.

The same goes with light fixtures. We had this huge silver chandelier in the dining room that we replaced with just a cheap farmhouse black light fixture (partly because once we renovated our kitchen I didn’t want a chandelier in the way of my new beautiful view) and we’re in the process of replacing our hallway boob light with a very similar one. The bathrooms each have a black vanity light and I’d love to one day work on switching out the fans to black or more modern ones, too.

Crisp white trim

I know I’m probably just repeating myself being like use the same colors throughout, but this one is important.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in a year of home renovation, it’s that white is not just white. If you buy samples of white paints, they’ll probably end up looking pink, blue or yellow once they’re on your wall. A good white paint is so hard to find and even when you do find it in a swatch at Home Depot, it probably doesn’t look the same when it’s at home and painted on your wall in the afternoon light.

We just bought Behr satin paint in the pure white base color – no tint – for our trim and doors. It was laziness honestly, but also kind of genius because we don’t need to worry about it being mixed slightly different and looking just a litttttlleeeee bit off when we run out and need to get more because it’s just the standard paint.

Anyway, I’ve been on a recent kick of painting all our trim because you don’t notice how yellowing and dull your trim is until you paint just one room and compare it to the rest. Painting all the doors, cased openings, molding, trim, whatever exactly the same white color throughout the house will not only make your paint and accent colors look clutch, it’ll also keep that consistency.

Mix it up with decor

So by this point you’re like wow, okay I clicked on this blog post and this bitch is just telling me to paint everything the same. Kind of, yes, I am. But the decor is where I think you could mix it up. We’ve got different furniture, rugs, etc. in all our rooms that makes it look different. There’s kind of a farmhouse ticking stripe bedding in our guest room, deep green glasses and plates on our open kitchen shelving and a rust colored rug taking up most of our living room.

The thing is, whenever we move someday all that will move with us, and what’s left behind is the paint colors, the hardware and the shelves that we’ve already put all our energy into making look cohesive.

Maybe your goal is to stay in your home forever which is cool, but if you’re ever planning to sell I think it’s a lot easier for a buyer to get a good feel for it if they’re walking through and every room is giving a similar vibe.

Bonus tip: Match your front door

This one is just an extra because I literally did it yesterday and am obsessed, but paint your front door a fun accent color you’ve got happening elsewhere throughout your house to set the tone right from the outset. I just painted ours Van Deusen Blue by Benjamin Moore, which is a sample we already had from when we briefly considered painting our exterior navy. It would be amazing and would totally complete our house, but in all honesty it’s a lot of money and prep work and it’s summer now so we’re not about to spend weeks outside in the Louisiana sun doing it all.

The navy is similar to the accent color in our master bedroom and while it is a little bit different to the black fireplace, for example, it still works with it because it’s a rich, dark accent color in an otherwise light and neutral area.

So there you go, a few tips for a more cohesive home. Sometimes it’s hard when I see a cool new Instagram or Pinterest trend that would totally blow up our house’s vibe, but I think having all our rooms look somewhat similar honestly is very calming and gives a good jumping off point for different decor styles.

We’re getting ready to replace our hallway light fixture this weekend so come back soon for our roundup of boob light replacements!

If you enjoyed these tips for a cohesive home, sign up to our newsletter where we share all of our favorite DIY updates.