With the help of an attentive designer, your home will reflect everything you cherish.

Creating a personal style—a style that truly says “this is me”— should be easy. It’s all about you, isn’t it?

Then again, deciding on just how to incorporate all your various likes and loves in your home’s decor can be daunting. But don’t worry—anyone can create personal style. It takes introspection, some creativity and, most important, a partnership with a designer you trust.

Personal style starts with confidence. It’s really about being comfortable with who you are—that irresistible package of passions, activities and character traits—and not worrying about what you should have in your home or what style is the latest great thing.

“In design, self-confidence comes over time,” says designer Andrew Flesher, partner in the Minneapolis and New York firm of GunkelmanFlesher. “Most of us don’t know exactly who we are and what we want until we experiment for a while and learn what pleases us.”

A good designer can help you pinpoint your personal style
preferences with the right questions.

“My first questions are ‘what do you love?’ and ‘what do you hate?’” says designer Sharon McCormick, principal of Durham, Connecticut-based Sharon McCormick Design, LLC. “I’ve

had answers from ‘I love to read in the bathroom’ to ‘I hate diamonds, they seem messy.’ Because the questions are open-ended, my clients get to the point where they tell me anything that’s on their minds.”

PLAY WITH PRINT AND COLOR It’s hard to create a personal style when you succumb to what McCormick calls “white wall syndrome.” “Many of my new clients have never lived with color in their homes,” she says. “That’s fine if white is your favorite color, but I’ve interviewed hundreds of people, and not one person has ever said it was.” Rather, clients usually feel overwhelmed and worried about color choices, particularly what they put on the walls. But when you have a designer helping you create your personal style, she’ll be able to get a feel for what you like, help you sort through your possessions and then be able to lead you toward color choices. These will be choices that will both appeal to you personally and coordinate with the room you’re pulling together.

Even when a client is unsure about colors that really appeal to them, McCormick says a good designer will take cues from personal items. “I ask directly, of course, but then I look for little signs, like the new lavender candle, the head covers on their golf clubs or the color of their iPod,” McCormick says. “We are going to take that and run with it in some way, shape or form.”

HIGLIGHT YOUR PASSION Collections reveal a person’s interests, and they are an important consideration in personal home decor for the client and the designer. “Often people collect things, but then scatter the items around the house so the collection isn’t easily discernible,” says McCormick. “If there’s a dalmatian statue in one room, that’s one thing. If there are three or more throughout the house, we have a collector!” McCormick says collections aren’t just about the objects themselves. “Take a dalmatian collector,” she says. “I want to know what appeals to them—is it the type of dog, the spots or the black-and-white color scheme? I follow this thread to the end, and we incorporate this into the home’s decor.”

KEEP WHAT YOU LOVE Because furniture is a big investment, McCormick says people are often reluctant to get rid of what they’ve accumulated, even if it isn’t right for them anymore. “Many times, people live with pieces they don’t even like because it was their mother’s, or they overspent on it, or because it was ‘a great deal,’” she says. “But life is too short to live with things you don’t love.” Her solution for getting to the bottom of the furniture mystery? When she begins working with a new client, she photographs the furniture. Then they go through the photos and talk about the pieces, why they’re in the house now and whether they should be incorporated into the new design. And for furniture that presents an emotional connection where an aesthetic one is lacking, McCormick finds solutions. “Mom’s highboy can be put into storage or passed down to a child who’s always loved it.” Don’t dismiss furniture you love just because it doesn’t seem to work in current styles. “People change over their lives, and their ‘personal style’ changes with them,” says McCormick. “The result can be a wonderful, eclectic mix of furniture. A room with half one era furniture and half another has an identity crisis, but a room with one star antique among contemporary pieces looks witty.”

DISPLAY YOUR ART Think you’re not an art collector? Think again. “I count art as anything that can be displayed on the walls or easels,” says McCormick. “Designers will help a client see art among their possessions. A football jersey, a treasured christening dress, an inherited wedding ring—all can be framed to create a very intimate art collection that speaks volumes about its owner.” And if you do have collections of paintings, photos, drawings and other beautiful items you’ve collected over the years, a designer can help you find the right way to display everything to convey your personal style. McCormick recently took a boxful of one client’s inherited photos for framing. To get the personal look they were going for, she and the client considered the era each photo was from, then chose frames that echoed that period’s style. “The collection included some black and- white, some colored and some sepia-tone photos,” she says. “Each lent itself to a different finish of frame, but we hung them in a spectacular collage that itself looks like an heirloom.”