Modern home décor can look wonderful, but it’s not for everyone. Some people truly dislike it and want to style their home differently – they want to use a retro look that they can enjoy. However, although this might seem like an easy thing to do, there are some difficulties involved.
For example, the last thing you want to do is make your home look like it needs to be updated even though you’ve only just decorated it. In other words, your retro home décor needs to look new at the same time as looking old.
This might seem confusing at first, but there are some great ways to combine a mix of retro and modern in your home décor to ensure your home looks exactly how you want it to without sacrificing on the quality of comfort of the place. With that in mind, read on to find out more about the retro home trends you can try.
Accessories
It might be that you don’t want to change the décor in your home (or perhaps you can’t because you’re renting, for example), but you still want to give it a retro look where you can. A great place to start in that case is your furniture; you can buy retro looking couches, armchairs, coffee tables, and lamps that can all add to the effect even if nothing else in the room changes.
This is the perfect time to add some fun accessories to the room as well. You could have some rap vinyl, for example, with a retro record player so you can enjoy the sounds when you’re relaxing at home or hosting a party. Or why not a cool retro drinks trolley, or perhaps your cushions could have a retro look to them?
These small elements are fun to put in place and are a great way to start your new home décor look.
Retro Wallpaper
We’ve gone through a long period in which painting walls was seen as a better idea than using wallpaper. It’s easier, often cheaper, and if you need to change the style or you want to update your look, it’s a simple thing to do. Most people can paint a wall themselves, although they might need help hanging wallpaper.
Yet, if you want to have a retro look in your home, paint isn’t going to give you the look you want. What you’ll need is some vintage-inspired wallpaper. This will be colorful and highly patterned, and you can choose from designs inspired by those that originally came from the 1950s up to the 1980s, depending on the time period you like most.
In order not to make your home look like a time capsule from the past (unless you want it to, of course), and to inject some modernity into this idea, the best thing to do is to use the wallpaper sparingly.
Don’t hang it on every wall, but instead, use it to make a statement in a room by hanging it on only one wall and painting the rest of the room a more neutral, up-to-date color. In this way, you can easily draw attention to the retro elements without going too far.
Change Your Bathtub
If you’re just testing the waters when it comes to making your home look more retro, the bathroom is a good place to start. This is a private room in the house where only a few guests will ever go, so you can make it a lot more personal than the living room and kitchen, for example – this is all yours.
Something that was very popular in the past was a freestanding bathtub. Due to the design of the tub’s feet, this was known as a clawfoot tub and was popular from the end of the 19th century and into the 1930s and 1940s.
This kind of tub is truly elegant, and it can be a real centerpiece (perhaps literally) within the bathroom. You can search through reclamation yards for an authentic clawfoot tub, but it’s likely that if you do find one, it will need a lot of repairs done to it.
Luckily, there are companies today that specialize in making new versions of this old style, so you can have the look without the decades of dirt and grime to contend with. Make sure the taps are retro as well, otherwise you’ll have a strange mix of modern and classic which, although it can often work well, wouldn’t look so good in this instance.
