Southern Rustic Home Decorating Tips
Southern homes emphasize hospitality, offering a welcoming respite from hot, humid weather. Rustic decor, with its complex textures and casual sincerity, can be easily adapted to Southern interior design. Take your cues from Mediterranean interior decor styles, which often employ rustic elements to create chic rooms that work for warm climates. Remember that rustic doesn't have to mean unsophisticated. You can combine elements from many warm-weather cultures to build a truly personal style.
Cooling Interiors
A color scheme of chocolate and white can create casual elegance.To make rooms feel airy and fresh, keep interiors simple. Paint walls in soft neutrals, like white or sand, or cover them in unpainted plaster. Leave floors uncarpeted and unvarnished, letting the natural beauty of wood or stone breathe. Eschew curtains for unadorned windows that fill rooms with natural light.
Rustic Furniture
Adirondack chairs work well both indoors and out.Fill rooms with rustic furniture in the Mission or Adirondack style. Opt for pieces like bent willow rocking chairs and hickory sideboards. Rustic furniture tends to be unupholstered or partially upholstered, so steer clear of heavily padded pieces. When choosing upholstered furniture, avoid weighty or patterned fabrics, instead using light, natural materials like jute, raw cotton, raw linen, hemp or raw silk. Choose loose weaves to allow air to circulate, as these may also assist you in keeping fabrics from molding. While Mediterranean homes do include plenty of colorful elements, these usually come in shades that can be found in nature. If you want to incorporate color into your Southern rustic decor, choose hues like cinnamon red, pale green, sun yellow, eggplant and azure.
Southern Touches
Hang walls with mounted antlers.Let Southern history and traditions inform your home's furnishings. If your region has a hunting tradition, honor it by using deer horns, fox hunting prints, bear furs or bloodhound motifs in your decor. Light your mantel with bayberry candles, and display local pottery in your parlor. Stack bookshelves with classic works by Southern authors, such as Mark Twain, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Katherine Anne Porter. Fill your garden with native plants, such as dogwood, Virginia creeper, black-eyed Susans, cypress, magnolias, kudzu and indigo.
Rustic Centerpieces
Baskets can also be used to house centerpieces.Use centerpieces to set a rustic Southern tone. Wrap vases in birch bark, and fill them with Southern foliage and flowers like pine branches, wild geranium, myrtle, gardenias, begonias, viburnum, wild cherry, dogwood, clover, violets and mallow. Fill windows with pots of marigolds and zinnias. In winter, improvise centerpieces from dried cattails and peacock feathers, or arrange lengths of dried willow branches in a tall urn for a dramatic impact.
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