5 Ways to Add a Retro Charm to Your Home
by Northern Life
Designing your ideal home is the work of a lifetime. No matter how long you’ve been in your home, be it your first-ever purchase or your hard-fought forever home, you’ll always have a veritable laundry list of things to do to make it match your tastes and expectations. While no interior design project is ever truly finished, it is still possible to bring your vision to life with some serious, coordinated effort.
Say you’re a retro aficionado, whether a glam yesteryear-influenced fashionista or a cool, record-collecting hepcat. You want your home to reflect your taste and passion but don’t quite know where to start. Let this article serve as your ideal jumping-off point with these five simple ways to bring retro charm into your home.
1. Mid-Century Modern Marvels
Mid-century furnishings are far more than the trappings of a bygone period; they are an intoxicating genre in and of themselves, of sharp designs, warm woods, judicious textiles, and irresistible charm. The moment you put a single piece of 1950s-adjacent furniture in your living room, you’ll be smitten.
There are particularly iconic mid-century designs that you might already be familiar with: the Eames chair and its womb-chair contemporaries stand out as far as seating solutions are concerned. But any clean-lined sideboard or coffee table can do an incredible job of elevating your space, particularly when (mis)matched with other wood furnishings.
2. Colour Me Retro
Arguably the biggest bang-for-buck impact you can have in any home space is through playing with colour—and what better way to access that ineffable feeling of retro nostalgia? Mustards, olives, burnt oranges—all these hues will bring about that ’70s feeling with practically no effort on your part at all. Just be sure to use different textures with your different colours; natural textiles are a great starting point.
3. Pattern Power
Colours aren’t the end of it, either. You can add more interest to your spaces by embracing the patterns of the mid-1900s as much as the colours. A good set of curtains with a wavy 70s pattern can bring some depth and intrigue to your living spaces, while floral designs on things like cushions can help your furniture pop. Don’t forget rugs, either, which can help pull the room together!
4. Iconic Accessories
Basics down, it’s time to accessorise. Vintage finds and retro-inspired pieces are incredibly fun to style with, being an adventure to discover in the first place. Charity shops and vintage emporiums are your friends for odd bits of 20th-century esoterica, especially old-school vinyl records, which themselves will have you picking between turntables and record players for listening to your favourite hits. Less useful set dressings can take the form of vintage telephones and typewriters or even the quintessential lava lamp.
5. Wall Wonders
Speaking of wall candy, how you adorn your walls can be the final piece of the puzzle to achieving your retro-inspired décor dreams. Artwork and prints are the way to go, particularly vintage posters and pop art, but vinyl records can just as easily become part of your gallery wall and create an eclectic feature in the process.
