Whenever I have to choose between two evils, I always like to try the one I haven’t tried before.
-Mae West

Just as with life decisions, design decisions should not happen serendipitously. The backdrop of your life should reflect your character and your furnishings should reflect your style. While Mae probably wasn’t talking about the design risk she took when she chose those scarlet velvet drapes with gold bullion fringe, she is talking about learning from your mistakes.

The fear of making a mistake is the biggest reason people live with hand-me-down furnishings and hodge-podge belongings. Many of them get by calling their look “eclectic” but what it may mean is that they can’t make a decision. Don’t let this happen to you! If you have arrived at a fork in your decorating road, take it! In other words, sometimes any decision is better than no decision.

To begin with, be bold in your choices. By bold, I don’t mean paint your family room ‘Brady Bunch’ orange. -- I mean make a choice based on what you like. Don’t live with a wall color that is there because of a previous owner and don‘t choose antique white unless antique white is what you love. If you are in a rental situation and can’t paint, add your character to your space through furniture, art, lighting, whatever. Timidity in selecting your environmental puzzle pieces will result in lackluster and bland surroundings.

Next, exercise your creative power when putting together your space. Don’t like the finish on the table you’ve had for years? Paint it. Shopping for upholstery but don’t see anything you like? Go to one of the many retailers that offer the “pick a frame, pick a fabric” approach. The lead times on these items may be a little longer than having something delivered off of the showroom floor, but 6 to 8 weeks is short in comparison to a lifetime of enjoyment.

Did I say lifetime? Yes. Upholstery is a big “bang for buck” item. Picture your living room. The sofa is the largest single item in there. There is no substitute for a well-made sofa. The buzz words here are 8-way hand-tied, solid hardwood frames and down-wrapped cushions. Choose one with lines that you like and a scale that is appropriate to your room and then relocate, recover and repeat as necessary.

If you take only one thing from this article, I would want it to be this. Love the things that you look at on a daily basis. If you absolutely love a piece of art or a vase or a chair, buy it. Things don’t have to match to go together. Hang contemporary art hung above a traditional table. Top an ancient and weathered coffee table with a sleek glass bowl filled with fruit. This look appears in every magazine as again, an “eclectic” look. You know, opposites attract.

While I can appreciate this disparity, I prefer an approach I call “collectic”. Collect the things you love and make them work. You might be surprised to notice a theme running through the items that you have that you have become attached to over the years. Perhaps they have a thread of red running through them or a harlequin pattern or a touch of wrought iron. The common element that unites them will make them work together when placed deliberately in relation to each other.

Many years ago I wallpapered my kitchen. In the process of getting ready for it, I removed everything from my walls, countertops and shelves and made a pile in my dining room. In doing this, I noticed that I had a lot of heart things -- plates in the shape of hearts, prints with hearts in them, even heart-shaped cookie cutters. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I had been collecting hearts! When the wallpaper was done, I rethought my accessory placement. Instead of putting them back where they had come from -- randomly placed in whatever spot was available when I brought that heart home, I hung them together on the wall, utilizing plate hangers for the plates and ribbons for the cookie cutters. They now formed a pleasingly deliberate collage of my collected hearts.

Did all of the hearts make the cut? No. Sadly, I had to part with some of the items that hadn’t aged well or just didn’t fit the new decorating theme. I had to exercise some self-discipline and edit my collection. This editing process is an important one in making your space deliberately decorated. If your home has become cluttered, overcrowded and chaotic looking, take the Trading Spaces approach and clear the room. Now shop from the accumulation of accessories, books and pictures and add back items one at a time until you are pleased with the look but not overwhelmed with “stuff”. If there are some items that didn’t make this initial cut but you can’t bear to part with them, rotate them. I usually get the itch to move things around after 3 or 4 months and have found that over the years, it has become a pattern of spring cleaning, fall cozying and a post-holiday decoration purging when I have become claustrophobic from the gradual layering of wreaths, trees, garland and other comforting wintertime paraphernalia.

After putting away the holiday hoo-hah, I am glad to see the table tops, mantels and door fronts. Compared to my annually over-decked halls, the spare look that remains allows me to breath, enjoy the gleam of the recently polished wood, and add back a few of the knick-knacks that were replaced by my Santa collection. By springtime, I am dusting behind and under furniture and sometimes it goes back to where it started and sometimes it doesn’t. I add vases of flowers and pots of ivy and am encouraged to add back a few more knick knacks. By fall, dried bouquets are replacing the flowers and I have to throw out the ivy that I have killed. I bring out the chenille throws and some more pillows and begin to layer on comfort and color in my quest to add warmth and coziness to the lengthening days. By Thanksgiving, I am hauling out the boxes of Christmas decorations and heading into the process that will start all over again with a swipe of my lemon-oiled dustcloth.

Your surroundings are an ever-evolving reflection of your life -- a collection of memories and mistakes to learn from and laugh about. Do I still have my collection of hearts hanging on the wall? No -- they went out with stenciled borders in the 90’s -- but I’m sure Mae would agree that sometimes even mistakes are fun while they last.