This is how you decorate with rustic style!

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Rustic furnishing is gaining fans around the world and if you are keen to embrace a natural and quiet feel in your home, it could be the perfect choice for you too.

Textures and shapes play vital roles in rustic furniture and transport us to a comfortable and cosy atmosphere, while the natural elements at play create balanced compositions and tonally blended visuals. It all sounds great, doesn't it? Like you can effectively get back to nature in the comfort of your own home? Well, you can and best of all, it is a style that can easily work in every room of the house.

Bringing harmony and calm, rustic furnishing is the perfect choice for anyone that seeks to bring a little balance into their lives, so let's take a look at some of the ways you can incorporate it into your home.

Take inspiration

The sources of inspiration for rustic furnishing come from everywhere! The countryside is a key locale, with its easy connection to nature, access to lush greenery and harmonious acceptance of wildlife. Because of this, villas and beach houses are often naturally rustic in style, as they are to be found closer to wilder landscapes than many other homes and seek to exploit natural elements such as wood, plants and flowers to bring about a feeling of well being. Colours such as browns, mustards and terracottas all seamlessly blend together to create a palette of warmth and happiness and it is these hues that should inspire your furniture choices!

We love this scene, from Mascarenhas Arquitetos Associados, as it is the perfect example of not only rustic furnishing, but also the effect it can have on your demeanour. Aren't you feeling more relaxed just looking at it?

Identify key style points

Rustic furnishing is marked by its own simplicity and the memory of a traditional life that brings about a warm nostalgia and a comforting vibe. Decorative elements being used, therefore, should reflect their origins and of course, your personality. 

While its great that you love the aesthetics of rustic styling, be sure that you inject a lot of yourself into your scheme, otherwise what you will create will be beautiful, no doubt, but not as personal and pared back as rustic themes should be.

Re-use materials

A wonderful way to give a rustic touch to the decor of your home is to invest in furniture which is preloved. Anything that has a sense of a previous use or life will sit perfectly in a rustic setting and bring with it its own sense of purpose and style. 

While brand new items can feel like a treat, upcycled, recycled or antique items have a personality all of their own and really capture the essence of rustic furnishing, especially if they have a fabulous or intriguing story to tell as well!

Include plenty of wood

Wood is a recurring component in rustic furnishing and with good reason! It is not only pliable and beautiful, it is long-lasting and personal. 

Being carved by somebody who took the time to create something beautiful from a lump of wood, rustic furniture feels inherently more holistic, natural and organic than other pieces and it offers a sweetly tactile vibe too. An easy way to connect to nature and just step back from the modern world a little bit, wooden furniture is the perfect addition to your calm and rustic home.

Use colour

What a fabulous bedroom! While many of the hues and colours used in rustic styling blend together wonderfully, don't be fooled into assuming that they are all muted and boring! Nothing could be further from the truth, in fact.

Taking cues from nature, rustic furnishing will often showcase amazingly vibrant colours, such as the red of a dramatic sunset, the green of healthy plants and the blue of a clear sky. Used together, they create a perfectly harmonious tableau of design and style, because nature designed it that way!

Showcase natural elements

Natural materials are frequently exploited and highly valued in rustic furnishing. Materials that are typically used in great quantities include bamboo, wood, straw, wicker, leather, cotton, stone and, of course, wood, as we just discussed.

Bringing warmth and tactile comfort into any home, rustic furnishing makes great use of complementary natural materials and even en masse, they never seem to overshadow the home as a whole. Just like in nature, they serve a purpose and look wonderful, but don't compete to be the star attraction, making for a wonderfully relaxed and harmonious vibe.

Collect old furniture

We've already talked about installing preloved furniture into your home, but we think you should always be on the lookout for old and shabby looking furniture!

Great locations to find such rustic furnishing pieces include antique shops, house clearances, charity shops and car boot sales and you'll be surprised at what bargains you can find! Keywords to look out for online should be 'retro', 'old fashioned', 'vintage' and 'shabby chic' and before you know it, you will have a garage full of beautiful pieces to choose from or maybe even sell on!

Try your hand at shabby chic painting

furniture, gleam gleam Rustic style dining room Chairs & benches

If you find some old fashioned furniture that has seen better days, but has a wonderfully rustic feel that you think would work well in your home, with a little bit of tweaking, perhaps you could consider mastering the shabby chic painting style!

Rustic furnishing is all about an imperfect, lived-in look and the fabulous chalk paint method is perfect for this. The end result is a wonderfully retro piece of furniture that looks as though it has endured some hard use and kept slithers of 'original' paint at every turn. We love shabby chic furniture for a guest room and think it would be the perfect accompaniment to a wider rustic decor scheme. 

Embrace florals

You might be thinking that rustic furnishing needs to look unfinished or even, dare we say it, tatty, but that would be wrong! Yes, preloved furniture makes for a wonderfully warm and welcoming feel, but it looks incredible as a contrast to pretty and perfectly finished floral elements!

Just look at this stunning floral feature wall! Still giving a tangible connection to nature, it lifts the space as a whole and helps to showcase the beauty of the rustic dressing table that could have been a little lost in a 100% rustic space. Beautiful.

Don't be afraid to contrast with modern styling

Never forget, that even if you are keen to embrace rustic furnishing in your home, if that is not the style choice of everyone, you have to accommodate all tastes and create a space that is a perfect compromise and representation of you all. With this in mind, contrasting rustic styling with modern elements makes for a fantastically eclectic and unique home that really represents you and your family. Don't ever lose yourself to convention or expectation, after all, you're the one that has to live in your home, so make it perfect for you!

If you are taken with the rustic furnishing in this article, take a look at this Ideabook: Fabulous Rustic Bathroom Furniture. We think you'll love what other people have managed to create in their smallest rooms!

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