10 Tricks to Make Your Home Magazine Worthy

Do you flip through the pages of Elle Décor or Domino and just sigh, wishing that your foyer, bedroom, or coffee table could look that good?

Here’s the thing…you probably have everything you need to have a beautifully styled bed, an artfully set dinner table, or a fantastic foyer right at your fingertips. Don’t believe me? Read on for easy tips, tricks, and hacks for styling 10 different areas in your home like a pro.

1. Bookshelves

You’ve seen the color-coded bookshelves time and time again, but they just can’t be beat. Arranging books by color calms the eye and organizes the space into blocks of color. To break the trend a bit, try not to fall into the rainbow order of color—group your blues next to pink and your lavenders next to yellow.

Lay books on their sides so that you have some vertical and horizontal lines working for you. This also allows you to give some of your favorite knick-knacks a little stage.

Image via One Good Thing

2. Coffee Table

It’s so easy for your coffee table to get cluttered with ugly stuff—remotes, school books, empty cups—but if you set the stage for a well-styled coffee table, perhaps your family members with take notice and follow your lead.

The best way to start is with a tray—it corrals the stuff and creates a little vignette, as the designers like to call it. Add something with a little verticality (flowers or a tall vase) and something horizontal (books) to add interest. And if the remote has to live there, it can easily hide away in the corner of your stylish vignette.

Image via Handmade Mood

3. Front Door

Maybe the most important location in your house, the front door should feel welcoming, seasonal, and friendly. A fresh coat of paint (love the unexpected color here!) is always a must, and seasonal flowers, plants, or outdoor knick-knacks take your curb appeal up a notch. Placing pots, benches, or baskets on either side of the door will bring symmetry and balance to your home’s entrance.

Image via Little Greene.

4. Art Wall

Salon-style art walls have been the rage for some time, but it can be intimidating to start nailing into that blank, freshly painted wall. Instead of the painstaking measuring and cutting brown paper to the size of your frames (which can take forever!), first map out your wall size with painter’s tape on the floor. Lay your focal-point piece in the center and work outward. Stand up on a chair and take a pic with your phone so you know the arrangement as you start on your wall. This hack will get you the wall you love in half the time! (Also, don’t be afraid to mix 3D pieces like clocks, sculptures, hooks, and small shelves in with your framed pieces.)

Image via The Everygirl.

5. Foyer

After your front door, the next place your guests will see is your foyer or entryway. The upside to thoughtfully styling this area of the home is this: you can do it once and leave it alone. It’s not a place that has to draw everyday use (like a coffee table or kitchen counter for example), so you can be a little more precious here.

I love this 3-step design idea by The Hunted Interior: place a tall lamp with interest to one side of your console, lean a piece of art against the wall, and place a basket below the console that can be your clutter catch-all. Start with those three steps and then fill in with books and knick-knacks.

Image via The Hunted Interior.

6. Night Stand

When you flip through the pages of your favorite home catalog or décor mag, every corner of the bedrooms always looks so clean and uncluttered. Tackling your nightstand and keeping it functional and stylish at the same time is not so hard.

First, get a nightstand with drawers. Open shelving gets messy fast, and drawers let you hide away your bedside unmentionables. Decorative boxes are great for nighstands so you can store jewelry, watches, and phones…the last things you take off and put down at bedtime.

Image via Sis & Taylor.

7. Dinner Table

The pressure to set a lovely and stylish dinner party table is immense, and it sometimes feels like Pinterest is that playground bully saying “I’m better than you are—you’ll never beat me.”

Here’s a quick 2-step hack that will make your table bold and beautiful. First, use a dark tablecloth. Most of us have light-colored dishes so make them pop with a dark gray or blue linen. Second, raid your produce drawer for your centerpiece. Grab a shallow tray or basket and gather your richly colored greens, fruits, and veggies together for a bountiful centerpiece that doesn’t have to go to waste.

Image via The Kitchn.

8. Mud Room

The key to a well-styled mudroom is all about the organization tools you use, namely, your bins and baskets. With all the hats, coats, boots, and backpacks that get thrown, tossed, and dumped at the door, if you have a unifying element like color or material in the bins that you use, you will find that the melted snow puddles might not bother you so much any more.

Image via Simply Seleta.

9. Kitchen Counter

When it comes to kitchens, function has to precede form, but form certainly still has a seat at the counter. There are ways to have what you need when you need them and look great doing it.

Take this kitchen for example. Cutting boards and sugar are at your fingertips, yet it doesn’t feel like someone failed to clean up after themselves. Lean your loveliest cutting boards against the wall, and have a shallow basket to hold herbs, your fave cookbook, and the salt and pepper shakers that are too cute to live in the cabinet. And if you’re the type that likes to have your wooden spoons handy, it’s fine to keep them on the counter…just store them in a ceramic or glass crock that matches your décor

Image via Owens & Davis.

10. Bed

You know when you walk into a fancy hotel room and you wish your bed could look that lovely and fluffed every day? If you follow this linen plan, you’ll feel like you should be paying big bucks to crawl into your own bed every night.

Image via Vanilla Slate Designs.