Furnishing and decorating your vacation home is far different from your everyday home. When you head to your secondary residence for the summer, you want it to feel a certain way, like vacation, or like a relaxing getaway that makes you forget about the winter. You want to relax, play, and have fun in your summer home, not worry about your summer home.
Naturally, painting and decorating your summer home are different tasks than decorating and painting your regular home. Here are some things to keep in mind when you’re designing your vacation home’s décor:
Allow Yourself Plenty of Space
Visitors are more plentiful and frequent in the summer, and your vacation house is the perfect place to host them. Even if you plan on using your vacation home primarily for yourself and your family, consider setting up a guest room within your space with its own décor in the event of visitors over the summer months. Invest in durable furnishings and beds so that you don’t have to worry about them being used more often by visitors.
Relaxing Colors
For the paint job, consider the bright colors you’ll be seeing your summer home in more often. Since your vacation house will be used more frequently in the summer, consider lighter and brighter colors for your exterior and interior. Consider how your interior rooms will be affected by natural light. Generally, a semi-gloss finish on your trim will keep it resilient to the sun and help your paint job pop.
Keep an Open Concept
Vacation homes are perfect opportunities to experiment with space and how different rooms flow into each other. If you can, consider an open concept between rooms, merging different rooms and purposes together, allowing a relaxed feel ready to accommodate your summer vacation needs, whether it’s the need to read books or to dry off from a day on the lake.
Consider Consistency
Versatility and consistency are used by professional interior designers to create the best inside spaces possible for their clients. Consistency in this case means using the same materials to furnish or decorate and setting fun themes in all or some rooms. If you have wood floors in the entry-way, for example, try to match your kitchen baseboards with it.
Go Room-by-Room
As you would design each room in your regular home, consider each separate room in your vacation home as its own unit. If you have guest rooms, make sure they have quality beds and a loveseat, sofa, or other furniture so they’re just as comfortable as every other room in the house. Be extra thoughtful about your master bedroom. Give yourself space and consider what guests will feel when they come into your vacation home, since you can rent it out when you’re not there.
All of these suggestions are general guidelines to get you thinking about how to decorate your summer home and make it a treat to visit every vacation. Make your vacation home one to dream about every year.