Pillow Talk: Interior Design Tips for Styling Your Space with Pillows

Throw pillows can bring together a room’s color palette and design scheme, providing balance, elegance and visual interest to your home decor. Throw pillows can soften the look of a heavy leather sofa or add a punch of color to a wingback chair. Changing or alternating throw pillows can be an inexpensive and simple way to continually update the look and feel of your space. Either purchase new accent pillows or cover existing ones with new covers, and “presto” you have a whole new look! then toss them anywhere, from your sofa to your home office.

I’ve outlined a few of my favorite points on the power of pillows! As you are reading, check out each image and imagine that space without pillows. Proving the point that pillows can really tie a room together!

Bring it all together, with color

Depending on the colors, pillows can tie together multiple elements in a room or simply add some pop to your space. This is one of the easiest and most economical ways to add the perfect punctuation to a room. Plus, if you get tired of them, it’s an inexpensive enough investment to just change them!

Size Appropriately

Size them appropriately…consider the heights of sofa/chair backs and headboards to proportionately complement the furnishings. A great average sofa pillow size is 20×20.

What’s Inside Matters

Choose the fill that’s best for you…indoors, try a feather/down blend for those desiring shapability and an ultimate luxury feel; or a synthetic blend to ward off allergies. For large decorative bedding, a hybrid fiberfill is plush, yet lightweight for constant moving around. Outdoor areas prefer a fiberfill that will drain and dry well and resist any outdoor elements best.

Stack & Style: Start With Your Bedroom

The Minimalist

If you like things sleek and simple, this back-to-basics arrangement will appeal to your streamlined ways. Simply stack up your sleeping pillows, and lean pillows in shams against the stacks. You could also swap out the shams for smaller decorative square or round pillows.

The Traditionalist

Rather than stacking them, this slightly more formal display involves resting your pillows against the headboard (one sleeping pillow in a case in the back, one decorative pillow in a sham in the front), then finishing the look with a prettily patterned boudoir pillow or two. You could also work in a cylindrical bolster pillow if the mood strikes.

The Romantic

In this plush arrangement, we enter the glam world of European squares, a particularly good choice for fancying up beds without headboards. If you have a queen bed, prop a pair against the wall (use three across in a king bed), rest your shams against those slightly offsetting them so the corners of the squares peek through, and then complete the thought with a pair of decorative pillows in the front.

The Maximalist

This, the most major of our pillow formations, is primed for a king bed. Start with three European squares lined up in a row against the back, place your shams in front of those (three across if they’re standard size; two if they’re kings), and then bring in a pop of pattern with your decorative pillows.

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