Learn how creating a whole-home design can help you create a peaceful, intentional, and stunning space, see my whole-home design, and learn to create your own for free!
What is a whole-home design?
Have you ever been to a home or Airbnb that felt curated from front door to back closet? They’re the ones that feel like you stepped into the reveal portion of an episode of an HGTV home design show. The mood and character of the place is obvious, consistent, tasteful, and layered. Everything seems to fit *exactly* where it is placed. Everything feels purposeful and thoughtful.
Perhaps you’ve been in homes that were designed by professional interior designers, but if you’re like me, the only professionally designed interiors you have experienced are restaurants, hotels or resorts, or large institutions like fine arts centers or museums. These spaces, usually a joint effort of architects and interior designers, often have the same traits. They are planned to be functional and artful. Form must serve the purposes of the space, but it must also elicit a certain desired emotion or psychology.
When we DIY our home design, we often omit the intentionality and cohesiveness that the pros are trained to design with. (Unless you know to do something, how can you do it, right?) We choose what we like and we try to blend it all together, perhaps mimicking the photos we see on Pinterest, home furnishings retailer sites, social media, or even HGTV.
Yet, we often end up with a hodge podge of quality pieces and interesting individual rooms. (Notice any difference between the widespread “modern farmhouse” style vs. Joanna Gaines’s designs?) Which is certainly acceptable, especially if you love it. HOWEVER, if you want to elevate your design to bring peaceful cohesiveness, artful function, and intentionality, you need a whole-home design.
Why Creating a Whole-Home Design Matters
Creating a whole-home design is a fun and easy process that really packs a punch when it comes to the results of your DIY.
- Cohesive Design— When your design flows from room to room, it makes your home feel more peaceful and your design more elevated. Coordinating color palettes, foundational textures, and consistent themes make our brains happy.
- Plan for entire home— When you make a plan for your entire home, you have to consider all your needs for space. Stepping back to look at the big picture can help you thoughtfully decide how you want each activity, item, and square foot of your home to function.
- Set intentions— While you are making functional and aesthetic decisions, you have the opportunity to set intentions. When you are using each function of a space, what do you want the experience to be like? What feelings do you want each space to inspire or engender in your family and guests?
- Decision-tool— As you are executing your designs, you’ll face many decisions. You’ll likely have multiple opportunities to change your mind, to buy or accept items earlier than planned (especially freebies or huge discounts!), or to increase or decrease your budget. Having a whole-home design on-hand can help you curb impulse buying and take changes in stride while still working towards your design goals.
How to Create a Whole-Home Design Using Free Tools
Ready to get started? Following the steps below, you can create your own whole-home design using screenshots from the web and the free version of Canva. (Check out Canva Free to create your free account.)
- Step 1–Make a list of the rooms in your home and the primary functions each needs to accommodate. Add any functional considerations: storage, open space, furniture needs, safety, etc.
- Step 2– Reflect on the feeling you want your home and each room in it to inspire in those who use it. Brainstorming, jot down all your ideas for each, setting a timer and word-vomiting if you need to. Then, read back through them and circle or highlight your most important ideas.
- Step 3– Note colors, themes, or motifs that engender the feelings from Step 2 for you and those using the space. This is a great time to do some quick web research on color psychology and basic interior design themes. For example, did you know red generally causes feelings of hunger, anger, and passion?
- Step 4– Gather inspiration pics!! Pinterest is an obvious help here, but regular screenshots or web tabs work too. Do some window-shopping on Wayfair, Pottery Barn, Pinterest, design blogs–whatever styles you’re drawn to. What do you love? Are there any patterns? Look at colors, textures, furniture, patterns, and decor.
It can be helpful to review some common design styles, noting what you do and do not like. Traditional vs. modern, industrial vs. rustic, etc. Knowing the words used to describe these styles can help you find pieces and inspiration for the look you want. - Step 5– Organize your favorite colors, elements, and styles so you can identify an over-arching theme. If you need to, you can keep a wider variety of favorites to play with in the next steps, and you can eliminate them as you see how they work in your space. Sometimes the design grows during the process, and you don’t really get a clear view of what your over-arching theme is until you’ve considered multiple options.
- Step 6– Working one room at a time—identify anchor points and limiting factors. Choose those elements first, and build your room designs around them. Ex: Dining table and how much space is needed/available or beds in a bedroom and the size/number of occupants.
- Step 7– Upload your screenshots into a Canva document and use the Canva tools to create mood boards for each room. I like to use one or more pages for each room. You can crop your images and drag-and-drop them into place, arranging them so you can see how pieces work with each other or so you can preview how they would look in different room configurations.
I even like to take photos of the rooms I’m designing so I can use the real walls and floors as a background for my designs. With a little fenagling, you can combine several photos of a room to maintain nearly-true proportions, so that you are looking at a photo that resembles what your real-life view of the room would be from a given angle. - Step 8– Repeat for all rooms, creating as many variations as you want. Then review the designs considering other rooms. Which designs look best together? Which do you like best? Refine your design for each room to choose 1 design plan. If you want to save all your ideas for future reference, make a copy of your document and then delete the pages that aren’t your final selections.
- Step 9-Start DIYing! Use your design plan as guide. Does that piece that’s marked down 70% actually fit in your design? What items do you need to be on the lookout for?
Design can change during process too—THAT’S okay! Between the time you create your whole-home design and the time you finish bringing it to life, your style and preferences will probably evolve. No sweat! With your whole home design, it’s easy to see how a change will fit or not into your intentions for your home! And with Canva, it’s easy to drop new ideas into your plan.
Examples from My Home Design
Here are some example layouts from my whole-home design. As you can see, you can really work in Canva to visualize your design multiple different ways. It’s SUPER helpful, extremely easy, and lots of fun!
Photo credits for all of these photos do not belong to me.
Conclusion
A whole-home design is an excellent tool for creating a cohesive, peaceful, functional, intentional home that simultaneously expresses your unique style and meets your needs. It’s fun and easy to create one using home web screenshots and the free version of Canva.
I hope this post has inspired you or helped you start your own DIY home design! Come back next week for the start of the deep-dive story of my DIY journey, starting with the kitchen!
Have you created a whole-home design? I want to hear about it! Share your design ideas here!