There are plentiful of beautiful things out there, like every time you flip a magazine or swipe on Pinterest. But if you want to stay under budget AND find something beautiful to accommodate your house, the choices become less bountiful.

So I will give you the ultimate guide to build your taste. It’s what I use to spend the least amount of money and achieve the desired aesthetics at the same time. While it is achievable, it may be better for you not to expect the exact ideal image that you had in mind. That is, because of the budget limitations, you may not be able to buy the dreamy couch that costs $10,000. We will have to make compromises. But that’s what this guideline is for. It’s to help you make the best compromises, where you are happy without having to spend tens of thousands.

Source: Amazon

Source: Amazon

This is a brief review of the guideline I’ll present you below. First, we’ll begin by giving you a checklist to see if you KNOW what you want. If the answer is that you feel uncertain about your taste, we will help you build your taste. It may sound daunting, but I streamlined the process, Then there are traps! You think this beautiful white couch is what you want, but man, sometimes it doesn’t turn out that way.

Shall we begin?

Common Symptoms That Say You Don’t Know What You Want

Wouldn’t it be easier if you bought everything in your cart, and when things arrived, if you didn’t like them, you just throw them away and buy new things? That hasn’t been the case for me, and maybe for you as well. Honestly, I sooooo didn’t want to pay for return fees. Shopping is fun, not returning.

Source: Amazon

So the following are the signs that tell you might NOT be aware of what’s going on in your heart. If you are not aware of it, it often leads to paying returning fees or… donating… ah… too sad to finish the sentence. See if any of the following is applicable to you.

1. You see a bunch of pictures on Pinterest, Amazon, Ikea catalogs–because that’s what bloggers and interior experts tell you to do–but you can’t tell what you are looking at. I mean, you know you are looking at lamps, but you don’t feel engaged. If your spouse asked you “what are you looking at.” it’s likely you’d say “honestly, I am not sure what I’m looking at.”
2. You add this or that to your cart, but somehow can’t click on ‘proceed to check out’ button.
3. You make a purchase, the product arrives, it’s installed, and you are not happy once you see it in your house. It’s just not how you imagined it. The measurements are correct, the color is as shown on the website, but you know it’s not what you pictured in your heart.
4. You did all the purchasing and installing, and you were happy in the beginning. Several weeks(or months) later, you look at it and realize that you are not happy with it(I didn’t say several ‘years,’ because your taste and trends change/develop in a-few-years span. If you feel unhappy with the lamp you bought 10 years ago, that’s not because you were not sure of your taste. It may be just that trends have changed and your taste has evolved.)

So What to do? Below is the exact process to build your taste. Of course it starts with “see a lot of good designs,” but the key is to “analyze” what you see.

The Process of Building Your Taste

Following these steps might take several minutes or several years for some people, so do not feel rushed. To be honest, it took about five months for me to finally buy the lamps I wanted for my kitchen. I enjoyed my five months, though, because it involves a lot of eye-shopping, just with a goal in mind.

Steps:

1. Go to Pinterest, Google Image, magazines, your favorite brands’ catalogs, or any source you like. It’s very important that you see a lot of images before you decide on what you like. You can’t say you like something better than the other when you don’t know what the other is.
2. Save, pin, or make clippings of the things you like. It’s for making database. You will use this to analyze your taste. You ever hear people saying the bigger the pool the more accurate the statistics is going to be? That’s the case here. For easy accessibility to data, I recommend you funnel them into one platform. I use Pinterest. One reason is that I do spend a lot of time browsing through images on Pinterst. It’s easy to save and sort them by categories. Also, every time I find a good image online, I make a pin with its URL. If you find something offline, like when browsing through magazines waiting at your dentist’s, take a photo of it and make a pin on Pinterest, but be careful of copyright issues. I usually keep my account private so I can save images only for myself. I am not sure if this is 100% safe legally, so if you have better ideas, please let me know.
3. Once you have created some database, it’s time to find a common denominator in the pictures you like. I’m sure there are some elements that resonate throughout the pictures you saved. I want to give you examples. These are the pins that I had been saving when I was trying to pick out my kitchen lighting. When you scroll through, focus on the lamps and see if they have anything in common.

Source: © https://rachelinseoul.com

Pictures are kinda small… But, I want you to look at your board and ask yourself what you see. In my board, I noticed that all of them are hanging from the ceiling. Right? Apparently I wanted my kitchen lamps not standing on the floor but coming down from the top. Then I did more sorting. I found a few that I liked better.

Then I was able to conclude that I liked my lamps to

1. hang from the ceiling with a cord, not built inside the ceiling
2. be more than two and hung parallel
3. have black or other dark colors and be made of metal.

Once I had my preferences clear, I was able to tell why. I have two kitchen islands that are connected in a row, which meant that two or three lights hung parallel will both fit the purpose(let there be light!) and look coordinated. Also, I have some appliances that are black, so I’d be able to achieve overall color harmony with black or dark colors. I have a lot of furniture that are made of wood, and I wanted to add some other textures, hence metal. I wanted to do something in between the ceiling-to-island space. Lamps that hang from a ceiling with a cord would definitely fill that space. Having done this, shopping became so much easier. I didn’t have to rely on fancy magazine items that are super expensive. I could look at several websites, like Amazon, Ikea and Aliexpress, and pick out lamps that are suited to my criteria.

What this process does is that it helps you discover what’s in your subconscious mind. Often we do want something, but cannot explicitly point it out. Sometimes we don’t have vocabulary for it, or we just haven’t invested quality time digging into our mind to see what’s there. The problem with not knowing what you want results in waste of time and money. If you hire somebody, it can cause problems with communication and eventually relationships(“That’s not what I meant!” “Then you shouldn’t have said it!”)

So, we’re pretty much ready to start shopping EXCEPT FOR one thing: the pitfalls.

Pitfalls are like this: you think you like a certain image but in reality you are tricked into liking it for the factors that you cannot attain in reality. This happens because we are looking at pictures. So many filters can mimic beautiful sunlight in Italy, and it is often used by product photographers to stage one inexpensive product with seven or ten expensive beautiful things to give it a pricey look. I’ve made a list of common pitfalls you have to be careful about.

Pitfalls

1. Other (expensive) Items

Like I mentioned, it is a very common technique to showcase a not-so-pricy item to look good. Take a look at the photo of this beautiful living room. I looked at it, and I thought “oh I love that vase.” But when I isolate the vase and imagine it being in my living room, I realize that it won’t look as good as in the picture, because I do not have that sturdy coffee table nor the huge glass doors leading to a terrace.

I instantaneously loved this image because it reminded me of the scene I saw when I traveled in Spain. A beautiful villa, with a small swimming pool, the sun setting down and people laughing… Amazing, right? Maybe I can afford that cute floatie… But then, if the pool floor didn’t have the same orange-white color, the floatie wouldn’t look so special. It is the pool–which is quite expensive to buy–that makes this one floatie look more awesome. This pitfall actually gives us a lesson. The overall harmony is very important.

2. Photo Filters.
Filters can do so much. If Instagram didn’t have good photo filters in the beginning, I doubt it would have become this popular. Filters give a mood. A plain picture of a sandwich can evolve to remind you of calm Sunday afternoon vibe once it goes through a good filter. A picture of your children running in the park can feel nostalgic once you give some contrast and vignette. Thus, it’s very likely a filtered photo can make you want something that doesn’t exist in reality.

In order to keep yourself falling into a filter trap, I highly recommend you use some filters yourself. There are so many photo filter apps these days. Once you get the hang of it, you will soon learn that not only how filters can mischievously alter the mood of an image but also you tend to like one or two specific filters. Then come back to your database, and see if there are any images that you chose because of the filters you like. You have to be extra careful when you look at them, because of the possibility that you like the general mood that a filter gave, not the actual arrangement, items, or colors.

3. The Size of the Room in the Picture
It’s a bit of sad truth for me, because so far the apartments I could afford were smaller than those showcased in the internet. Even the ‘tiny apartment’ series have bigger space than mine, hah.

The size pitfall leads to mistakes like buying something huge that won’t go with the room but announces itself like “I am a huge piece of furniture and I don’t fit in here.” The opposite also goes true. If you have a big living room and buy tiny decor items, they won’t help build the ambience that you desire. It’s especially risky in terms of money management, because small items are cheaper and feel more accessible, so it’s likely that you invest more money than you should on small items that would are invisible, and left with no budget for actual statement items that your room needs.

Source: Amazon

4. Non-visual Factors
In digital marketing, a good picture is very important and the reasoning goes like this: “once a user finds a picture he likes, then he shall read the caption below.” I say this because of the possibility that you liked something in the caption you read, and that caption gave you an unnecessary fantasy. An item will look better with a caption like “Beyonce bought this sofa” than no caption.

That’s it! How do you feel? I hope you don’t rush. It always takes time. I mean, building a taste cannot happen overnight. Some people may have accumulated data without knowing(that refers to those of you who already have so many pins saved in your pinterest boards!) and can be a step ahead. Do not feel competitive–decorating your home is your own private matter. I really hope you have fun!:)

Want to learn more about choosing color palette? Check out this post on using a color picker tool to set up a color palette.