Interior designer Chris Carroll: The biggest home decorating mistakes

If you have a really big TV and a tiny sofa you are not alone – it’s a common decorating mistake, but there is an easy fix.

Interior designer Chris Carroll on the interior decorating mistakes we need to stop making. Picture: iStock

Think your interior design game is strong? Think again.

Below are 10 of the worst home decorating crimes most Aussies are still making.

And there’s probably a few going down at your place.

Way too much melamine

Flatpack furniture is nice and all, but if every piece in your home is giving off a glossy sheen, you’ve got more issues than Woman’s Day on your hands.

A room filled with all-white melamine furniture can feel cold, clinical and sterile.

You need to mix in timber and other materials to inject some much-needed warmth, pronto.

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Interior designer Chris Carroll on common home design mistakes we are making. Picture: Supplied

Package deal furniture suites

Package deal furniture suites belong in the mid-nineties with Tim Shaw and his Demtel steak knives.

The modern (and correct) approach is to buy furniture for a room from different stores and in different colours and finishes, but blend them together in a space so it feels stylish and cohesive.

Enormous TVs in living rooms

Unless you’ve paid $150 for a small popcorn and have a teenager shining a torch in your eyes periodically throughout a film, I must break the bad news to you that your living room is in fact not a Hoyts cinema.

How big do you really need the television to be? Picture: iStock

As such, stop buying TV screens that dominate the space.

Cheap buys = wrong size

People get lured by budget furniture because it’s so cheap, but most of the time it’s actually way too small for their space.

Tiny bedside tables next to a king bed: fail.

Miniature coffee tables metres away from the sofa: no deal.

Two-seater sofas that won’t fit two butt cheeks, let alone two people: insanity.

Always measure before you buy, because scale is everything.

Everything’s pushed against the wall

Your living room should not resemble a gauntlet on the best TV show of the nineties, Gladiators.

Vulcan is not coming to chase you around the space. Creating a hallway through the middle of the room – with a long sofa on one wall and TV on the opposite wall – is not ideal.

Pull the sofa into the space, ensure there’s a coffee table in front of it, and add in some armchairs.

Conversation pits are key.

You have art-purchase paralysis

News just in: art doesn’t have to mean anything. It doesn’t have to speak to you.

Waiting an eternity for the perfect piece to move you to tears before purchasing is a mistake worse than Holey Moley getting the green light to air on TV.

Art can, like the cast of Love Island, just look nice.

Do not leave your walls undressed for decades.

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Don’t wait to find the perfect piece of art. You can always change it. Picture: iStock

Tiny frames spaced too far apart

You want photos on your wall by all means, but don’t impose social distancing measures between each frame.

A gallery wall of photos can make a room look amazing, but you want about a 10cm gap between the frames, not 1.5 metres.

There are no photos or keepsakes displayed

You should be able to walk into any home in the country and get a sense for who lives there. Your interior isn’t Kelly Osbourne’s new face; it should be recognisable.

This is achieved through keepsakes and mementos being displayed across rooms.

This is a personal statement, so go all out with what you love and pay no attention to how ugly other people think the decor may be.

There are magazines beside the toilet

The most hideous of all-time design crimes is the stack of magazines beside the toilet, covered in more DNA than a CSI crime scene and giving people an excuse to sit among the waft of their own waste way longer than they should be.

If you’re guilty of this you need to book into a reform program ASAP.

‘Live Love Laugh’ quotes … of any kind

If I have to explain this one, you’re beyond help.

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No, no, for the final time no. Picture: iStock

Chris Carroll is the Melbourne-based designer behind TLC Interiors; an interior design studio and home style blog helping everyday Aussies transform their spaces without breaking the bank. www.tlcinteriors.com.au | Instagram