How to be a savvy buyer when styling your home

Apart from the barrier to entry (including cold, hard cash or a line of credit) there really is no such thing in decorating as high or low-end, anymore, in the ultimate outcome of a room.

This throws even more weight to my enduring idea that both a saving mindset and splurging urge are required to create magical, engaging rooms.

As a habit of my occupation, I can walk into a room and the small calculator part of my brain can spit out how much the person has sunk into it.

I can do this room by room and leave knowing almost a decorative per-square-metre cost.

I can achieve this even more so now, thanks to online shopping and social media, by doing a quick double-check to be fairly certain on price.

It becomes harder when I’m guessing totals of rooms with elements sourced from auction houses, dealers, and other pieces with meaning, varied providence and sentimentality.

Which is a long way of saying that in my working observation, the more unpredictable the mash of furnishings, the more mysterious the maths – and result – becomes.

We already know that money can’t buy style, but it also really can’t buy pedigree or objects passed through time.

And this is truly what I think makes for wonderful rooms. Rooms that deserve their own Pinterest folder. Rooms you have to make a mental copy of in case a robber comes.

So, to get into the pure maths of it all …

If you were to be given an amount of money – and for the sake of this conversation, let’s call it $1000 (add or minus your own zeros, I’m just minding my own interior business) – the “old you” might go out and spend it in one jolly transaction.

Or maybe you would divvy it up into 10 mini purchases that would provide enough for you to scatter pieces around the room.

What I am suggesting you do is take the said amount and carve it 90/10 or somewhere around there. So, go to your usual place of dreams and spend $900 on something and the last amount on smaller other things, and vice versa gives equally similar results. The point being that dividing the set budget with left-of-field, unexpected elements will ensure a gold star is awarded to an otherwise boringly perfect room.

When like-minded things sit together, the predicable happens. When unexpected elements are united, heads will turn.

It could be colour, such as a spray of orange in an otherwise contemporary room. It might be something of a completely different vintage to the rest of the room.

It could be something obviously low-brow beside distinctively overt high-brow elements. It could be something totally organic amid a sea of artifice.

There are so many ways to save versus splurge and although it presents itself as a budget, it’s really so much more than that.

It’s a rule breaker and room maker, turning the room into a space that imparts a wink.

Megan Morton is a stylist, author and interior instructor.

meganmorton.com