Seven Common Interior Design Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
The mistakes that quietly age a room aren’t about taste. they’re about sequence and scale. A practical checklist before you renovate.
After enough projects you start to see the same seven mistakes repeated — not in bad homes, but in careful, well-meaning ones. None of them are about taste. They are about sequence, scale, and where attention goes.
1. Planning the decor before the layout
Choosing a sofa before deciding how the room flows is like buying clothes before deciding where you’re going. Start with how the space is used and how people move through it; the pieces come after.
2. Buying everything from one showroom
A matching suite is comfortable and forgettable. Rooms with personality come from pieces with different histories — a vintage chair beside a contemporary sofa, a handmade table under a mass-market lamp. If it all matches, none of it matters.
3. Hanging art too high
The centre of a picture should sit at eye level when you are standing — roughly 145–150cm from the floor. Above sofas, the bottom edge should clear the back of the sofa by about 15–20cm. Art floats when it hangs like a museum plaque.
4. Fighting the light instead of using it
Choosing dark, moody walls for a north-facing room, or a single overhead light with no dimmer, are both ways of losing a battle with the room’s natural condition. Design with the light you have before you add more of it.
5. Sizing everything down
Furniture that is too small makes a room feel smaller and emptier. Buy at the right scale for the space and let one piece be generous.
6. Decorating the plan, not the room
Plans lie. A room’s true character comes from how it feels in three dimensions — the depth of a corridor, the height of a ceiling, the path of sunlight across the floor. Spend as much time imagining yourself in the room as you do arranging it on paper.
7. Adding before editing
When a room doesn’t feel right, the instinct is to add another object. It is usually the wrong instinct. Remove first — a layer of objects, a busy rug, a duplicated lamp, and see what the room was trying to be. Most rooms improve more from subtraction than from addition.
The fastest way to make a room look better is to take something out of it.