You don’t necessarily have to stick with the one pattern or plain color style in a room for the decorating palette to be considered a success. Mixing patterns in a room can be an effective exercise but there are some basic rules that you should follow. Interior decorating can be a fun exercise of trial and error as you work out what looks good and what looks ghastly.

It’s a good idea to stay with only around three different prints in a room. A large piece of furniture such as the sofa could do with large-scale prints while medium-sized pieces such as chairs could take an appropriately medium-sized print and then you could use a small print on the smaller furnishings.

When you mix the different sized prints in a room you would want to join them together in some way and the most obvious way to do this is to use a common linking color. When you go out shopping for furniture these days many of the stores provide you with a mixed color palette so you can easily get a good idea about how the furniture and their different prints are going to look together.

Deciding on the colors is only the first step, the next is to work out how you are going to distribute the prints and colors throughout the room so that there is balance in the design. You don’t want all of the decorative print located in the one corner of the room, or even the one side of the room. A mix of design and texture through all parts will result in a successful design style.