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Your place or mine? How to make your new home feel like yours.
Design experts offer tips for quick-and-easy transitions.
When does a new home feel like home?
It’s a question interior designers try to answer every day for their clients. The answer is never the same. After a move-in, that’s a moment that can’t come soon enough. Experts say there are early strategies to help a new space feel like home a little sooner.
“We know when we feel it,” said interior designer Abbey Koplovitz of AbbeyK Inc., “and it’s really hard to define.”
For some, “greige” — a paint color that’s an amalgam of gray and beige — is for selling the house, not living in it. For others, it’s a soothing refuge. Either way, paint first to make your mark, designers said.
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“The quickest and easiest and least expensive way to change a home is with paint,” Koplovitz said. “Do the powder room — do it bold and fabulous. Pick a color you love … You could do accent walls in your bedrooms … These are really quick and down-and-dirty things you can do that don’t take that much time.”
“You’d be surprised at how many of my clients live with someone else’s color scheme for way too long,” said Tess Leeds, a home designer.
Set up the kitchen and bathroom first, and buy fresh towels and accent pillows. “The first thing that I always tell people is that you need a place to sit, a place to sleep, and a place to eat,” Koplovitz said.
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Leeds said swapping out dated light fixtures — inside and out — can help personalize the space, and a new stair runner can freshen up a foyer. “It’s the first room you and guests see, so it’s an important one, no matter how small,” she said.
Lisa Davis, a Boston interior designer, said it’s also important to create a cohesive flow between spaces. “The best way to personalize any space is to add some color to set the mood,” she said. And prioritize the rooms you’ll use the most first.
But remember: Moving is expensive, but furnishing can happen on a budget.
“I definitely recommend scouring secondary markets for gently used furnishings,” said Heidi Pribell, an interior designer.
On the other hand, it’s OK not to rush, said Kasia Korpal of Kasia’s Creative Spaces.
“I interact very frequently with new home buyers that desire to have their interiors designed as quickly as possible,” Korpal said. “I always caution these clients to get to know their homes first — understand what functionally works and doesn’t work, gain clarity on likes and dislikes, wants and needs — before embarking on radical transformations.”
But for fast impact, Korpal said, flexibility is key.
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“Know well what styles you tend to gravitate to, and don’t be afraid of incorporating that style into your new home, even if it doesn’t fit that period,” she said. In other words, don’t be afraid to introduce modern and contemporary furnishings into a traditional Victorian home. It can actually accentuate existing architectural details, Korpal said.
Davis said that enlisting the help of a professional can potentially save money and time. Davis is a member of a cohort working with the Boston Design Center, where newcomers to the design world can sign up for a free one-hour consultation with an accredited specialist.
“It’s a great way [to] get your pinky toe into that water,” she said.
Koplovitz said that, for some, everything clicks when their books are all on display, and for others, when everything has an orderly place.
Modern tastes have been homogenized by social media, Koplovitz said, and part of her job is to help clients recover their own tastes among digital influences.
“I never used to have people picking the same things … There’s been a constriction of taste,” she said.
Helping clients recover their own tastes, not what they’ve been fed through Instagram, is fascinating work for Koplovitz. And knowing yourself, it seems, is the way to answer what makes a home.
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“Figuring out who you are in your home — what kind of home you want to have, how you want to feel in your home — can help you determine what you want to do in your house,” she said.
Lindsay Crudele can be reached at [email protected].
Correction: Due to a reporter error, a previous version of this story misspelled Abbey Koplovitz’s name and the name of her business, AbbeyK Inc. The Globe regrets the error.
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