A mood board is a visual curation of colour selections, design elements and sample materials assembled on a board. Photos: Canva Pro
We're now officially in the last quarter of 2023! It is often the busiest time for carpenters and renovation contractors because homeowners like you and me love to start the new year with a rejuvenated home.
If you have been too busy to realise that 2024 is around the corner, perhaps this article will inspire you to launch your own DIY home makeover. It’s still not too late!
Professional interior designers often start a mood board at the beginning of every project. So, what is a mood board, you may ask?
A mood board is a visual curation of colour selections, design elements and sample materials assembled on a board. Imagine a collage board of images to put all your ideas together in one place.
It is essential to set the design direction at an early level to avoid purchasing items from the store only to regret their colour or style later.
You may start your own DIY mood board on your tablet using tools like Pinterest, Canva or even Microsoft PowerPoint, but I always recommend the good old-school way of a physical collage on a hardboard.
I get excited whenever I need to create a mood board because it demands creative intuition yet at the same time, a good amount of strategic thinking.
It is essential to set the design direction at an early level to avoid purchasing items from the store only to regret their colour or style later.
Getting started
If this is your first DIY home project, relax and just imagine the mood board as your creative blank canvas. Gather ideas and elements that capture your design vision. Curate diverse aspects of design such as mood, style, textures, fittings and accessories.
Here’s a quick checklist to put you on the right path:
- Overall look-and-feel mood images from other interior spaces
- Furniture items, i.e. designer chairs, desks and sofas
- Pre-existing context of window, ceiling or floor
- Soft furnishings like cushions, blinds, curtains, rugs and decor items
- Flooring tone
- Accessories for accentuations
- Colour swatches for wall paint
So, where do we begin?
Do we create a mood board for the entire house or create a room-by-room mood board? There are several schools of thought on this aspect.
Instead of curating each room in your house with separate mood boards, I always recommend an overall mood board for the entire house first.
As an architect and interior designer, I rarely separate the two disciplines into sequential phases of one after another. It is always concurrent. Whenever I design a building, the interior design is conceptualised at the same time as well. Ideally, your home should sing the same song from the exteriors to the interiors.
Hence, my approach is always a mood board of the entire overall house first, with a subsequent offshoot curation of each room in the house.
Step 1: Determine your ‘look’ by selecting key images that reflect your style and personality.
Your home should always personify you in your absence. So, be honest in your expression of style. If you have a calm demeanour and prefer muted shades in your outfits, why splash your home with dark moody colours? Hence, your home ambience should resonate with your personality.
What if you share the home with your other half? What if you also have three kids living in the same home? It is always possible to create a core colour palette to anchor the overall look and then add variations to match the kids’ respective personalities.
So, set your over-arching style with idea images. You may cut out images from magazines or pin online images from Pinterest on a digital mood board.
Step 2: Curate materials of unifying shades and textures to create the desired mood.
Remember our previous discussion on the seven design elements of line, colour, texture, shape, light, pattern and space? Now is the time to apply those elements in your curation of materials. It’s not mandatory to use all elements, but the idea is to feel your intuition, be honest and select materials for key surfaces to reflect the ambience you desire.
Step 3: Assemble photos of existing elements in the room against shades and textures of your new additions.
A mood board can be either wall-mounted where you pin up images and materials or laid flat on a board. Once you have decided the style and materials, identify the existing elements in the room that you cannot change or make disappear.
It could be the existing windows of the room, or existing floor tiles that are out of your budget to remove. Instead of ignoring them, add images of the existing window shapes, colour swatches of the floor and any existing visual texture on the ceiling or wall. Bring photos of anything else that will not change during your “mini makeover” onto your mood board.
Step 4: Mix and match colour swatches of walls and ceiling against fabric tones for your furniture and curtains.
This final stage is the best part, yet it can be nerve-wracking to come to a final decision. The final stage requires you to assemble the possible combinations of elements and pin them down.
Place pre-existing elements against new colours and textures you have chosen. If you have an existing piano to include in your furniture arrangement, then place photos of the new sofa and coffee table alongside the photo of the piano.
You want to ensure the colours and form work well together! This careful step is crucial to ensure you blend the old seamlessly with the new. Once all your main pieces are on your mood board, bring in the colour fan chart to select the paint colours for the walls and ceiling.
Have fun, dream and be brave to experiment. You can swap in other options to mix and match until your intuition says it is right. This is the most exciting yet crucial stage. I always remind my students that they only show good design when they are feeling happy, inspired and connected to their inner creative intuition.
Hence, my hot tip is avoid this final stage when you are hungry, stressed or tired from house chores and feeling uninspired. Nothing good will emerge. Do this in the morning, have your coffee, play good music in the background, and let the morning sun cast natural light onto the materials you have chosen. The colour swatches you select will be more realistic under natural light.
That’s a wrap for this week! A mood board is not something you can rush into. It can take as quick as an hour to place everything on the board, but it can take days to dream, curate and identify shades that you like. So, enjoy and take it easy in this DIY project.
Tan Bee Eu is a professional architect registered with Lembaga Arkitek Malaysia. She teaches at Universiti Sains Malaysia and has two decades of working experience involving diverse local and international projects in architecture and design. She can be reached at www.betadesignz.com/contact.
