Interior Designer Kelly Wearstler’s Tips for Furnishing Any Space

Kelly Wearstler is one of the world’s top interior designers, and her design work has been featured in publications the world over, from Architectural Digest and Elle Decor to Vogue and The New Yorker. Born in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, she moved to Los Angeles in her early twenties and rose to fame redefining the look of West Coast design. She has designed everything from Hollywood homes to boutique hotels (like the Viceroy in Malibu and the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills); has created collections of everything from home accessories to fine china to wall coverings; and also runs her own firm, Kelly Wearstler Interior Design (KWID), and eponymous luxury lifestyle brand.

Whether you’re about to move into your first apartment or ready for a DIY makeover of your current home decor, Kelly has a few styling tips and decorating ideas to help you tackle the project.

1. 1. Play with balance and symmetry. If it’s your first time furnishing a new space or new apartment, a great way to start is by planning out the room’s balance and symmetry—how well the visual weight of the elements of the room is distributed and repeated. For instance, Kelly’s living room is balanced with a symmetrical pair of fourteen-foot couches. “But the balance and symmetry doesn't have to mean that all the pieces have to be the exact same weight,” Kelly explains. She also added asymmetry into the living room to introduce visual interest and tension: for example, one coffee table in the room is square, while the other is rectangular. “They have a different voice,” Kelly explains. “Opposites attract.”
2. 2. Think comfort. When furnishing your own place you can have plenty of pieces of furniture that look cool and sculptural, but you also want to make sure to have things that are comfortable, especially in the seating area. “We want it to be intimate and have a sense of place,” says Kelly—you don’t want your home feeling like a stiff showroom. Kelly explains a furniture-store rule she uses to achieve comfort: “When I go out shopping, I always make sure I sit in a chair.” But uncomfortable pieces can still work. “If there’s a really amazing chair that I want in the room that isn’t the most comfortable, but it does so much to the design, I make sure that the other pieces are really comfortable.”
3. 3. Diversify materials. “Different materials … make the room feel more interesting,” Kelly explains. In Kelly’s living room, she has all kinds of materials in both the upholstery and fabrication, like ebonized timber, bronze, glass, velvet, leather, and lacquered wood. “If you have two rugs in a room, maybe the rugs have different construction pile,” Kelly recommends. “If the walls are high gloss, then your ceiling might be flat [paint].” Bringing contrast in with different materials and textures, from throw pillows to area rugs to drapes, will help make any room feel interesting and designed.
4. 4. Treat your furniture as sculpture. Kelly likes to think of furniture as sculpture. “They’re all these shapes coming together to tell a story and to create movement and magic in the room.” For a beach home design, she wanted all of the furniture to look like she found it at the beach. “I found these insane chaise lounges, and they really reminded me of a shell. … Everything was a little bulbous-y. Things that were rounded. Bull-nosed edges.” Whatever the story of your room is, choose furniture—from end tables to bedframes—that will tell that story through your personal style. “Maybe you’re working in a story that is a little more cubist and angular and sharp, and go with that story. That doesn’t mean that you have to have everything that tells that shape. You can have contradictions. But starting out, it’s great to follow your story.”
5. 5. Experience the room. “When I start a project … I love to go to the site and sit in the space,” Kelly explains. “I look at every elevation, north, south, east, and west, and see: Where’s the sun rising? Where is the sun setting? And I do the same in a room in a home.” Experiencing your space will help you make better choices for functionality. “I recommend getting a chair and sitting at every side,” Kelly says. “Getting a sense of the space. What does it feel? How is the light coming in?”
6. 6. Create mixed-use spaces. “In a lot of our residential projects we have what I call mixed-use rooms,” Kelly explains. For instance, one of Kelly’s clients needed her bedroom to have space for work and guests, but the bedroom was very small—which meant that there wasn’t a lot of space for extra furniture. So Kelly used furniture pieces that could perform double-duty: She included a multipurpose daybed (a long couch that can serve as a bed), which the client could use as a bed, as a couch to work, or as a guest bed. She then included a small side table next to the daybed, which served “as a drink table if the client is sitting there working” or as a bedside table. When designing a smaller space, keep in mind the functionality of each individual item and include as many things as possible that can perform double-duty, like sleeper sofas and tables.
7. 7. Choose the right sofa for you. A sofa is a key piece in a living room, because it often has the most visual weight compared to everything else in the room and serves as the focal point. Kelly’s recommendation is simple: “You want something that’s comfortable, and you want something that is you.” She says, “With technology today, so many fabrics are so durable and they look great.” One consideration, however, is to keep in mind the size of your room—if you have a small room, a sofa with a high back is going to make your room feel even smaller, whereas a low back and low seat will help keep your room feeling open and inviting.
8. 8. Make your small space feel larger. If you’ve just moved into a new apartment, then you might not have the space for fourteen-foot couches or huge pieces of wall art. When working with a small room, there are a few furnishing tricks to help the floor plan feel bigger. “A mirror is the perfect medium to use,” explains Kelly, because they create depth and reflect back light to make a living space feel more open. “You could either go floor to ceiling with mirror, or you could get several mirrors.” Another great way to keep your room feeling open is to choose furniture with legs. In Kelly’s words, “If you have furniture that’s rooted to the ground and you can't see under it, your eye’s not going to travel beyond the lines of the front of the piece of furniture.” Having pieces of furniture that are up on legs—bookcases, beds, nightstands, kitchen tables, dining tables, chairs—will help extend your floor space and create more visual surface area. “You could easily have a marble coffee table that’s on delicate bronze legs,” says Kelly. “That would absolutely do the trick.”

Learn more about how to design for small spaces with Kelly Wearstler’s guide here.

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