Why Is Interior Styling So Difficult?

I have lost count of how many interior styling and decorating courses I’ve taken across the years and I can tell you that not one of them taught me how to style an interior! I follow so many interior stylists (and adore them of course) but unfortunately, they can’t explain how to style a room in a way a technical minded person or a lay person can understand.

Styling is one of those skills where people often fall into it naturally rather than learn it consciously. Many stylists have incredible instincts. They can walk into a room and immediately start moving things around, layering cushions, tweaking proportions, adjusting height and texture and within minutes it looks finished. Ask them how they did it and the answers tend to be vague. Play with it. Move things until it feels right. Step back and come back to it later. Trust your eye. For a practical person like me – this is not only infuriating, but literally sounds like nonsense!

The thing is that I was someone who learned how to design. I wasn’t a natural designer, so I knew that I too could learn styling – even if I wasn’t a natural. If (like me) you’re not what I call a natural “faffer” and if you don’t enjoy endlessly moving objects around until something clicks, interior stylign can feel very intuitive rather than scientific. If, like me your brain works more structurally, you can watch stylists work, absorb months of Instagram content, even take styling courses and still feel no more confident standing in front of an empty shelf or coffee table than you did at the start.

The problem is not taste or talent. The problem is that no one has translated what stylists do intuitively into something that can be learned (until now!) My problem with styling courses is that instinct-led creatives rarely analyse their own process. They probably couldn’t explain it even if they wanted to because they’ve never had to. Their brain runs on a highly visual, subconscious loop that doesn’t pass through language.

That’s wonderful for practice but terrible for teaching! It means entire groups of designers who are perfectly capable, thoughtful and detail-oriented are left feeling like styling is some mysterious gift they simply weren’t born with. (This is also how many interior designers make new designers feel too – like there is some magic or secret talent that they were born with – but in reality design, like stylign can be learned too!)

I see this constantly with technically trained designers as well as career-changers coming to interiors from architecture, engineering, business or other structured fields. They are brilliant at space planning, documentation, lighting, finishes and procurement yet styling feels like a foggy unknown. Not because they lack creativity, but because every explanation they’ve been given has been too abstract to apply.

There are answers to these questions, but instinct teachers (or faffers) can’t articulate them. So learners are left guessing, copying Pinterest without understanding why something works and feeling like impostors when their own attempts fail… I am the kind of person who is not a natural stylist. Like architecture and interior design, I had to painstakingly learn every single piece of the puzzle, one tiny bit at a time.

I don’t have natural flair for styling, and in all honesty, I always thought that if you had to style something it was a failure on my part as a designer because the room should be a design success even without those finishing touches. But over the years I have learned so much about how important stylign is to interiors, but also to how we live as humans.  We lvoe to have things that mean something around us. It’s important for us to feel good and our things (like photos of loved ones or objects of meaning) impact us in so many positive ways, it’s insane to ignore them in design.

This is why I wrote a course on interior styling. I wanted to get into the nitty gritty of it and to the actual science behind it! I wanted to find a way to teach interior styling in a way that the rest of us could understand and actually make it a successful skill to add to our designers toolbelts – especially as interior styling is actually one of the most important elements of our job as an interior designer! Learning interior stylign helps us understand composition, scale, alignment, repetition, contrast and so, so much more.

It’s actually a 3-dimensional artwork that we experience whilst moving thorugh it, but also can be static (like for photography). This is why it’s so complicated, because we need to understand every single element, the context and the relationship between those pieces (what I call the conversation between each item).

Next time you style a surface, don’t move all the things around randomly. Start by choosing one anchor piece, then build other pieces around or next to it to try and tell a story. Is the story that the items are all different heights and they create a rhythm or is the story that they’re all the same colour but the textures vary from smooth to rough to shiny. Try placing the objects so that their heights step down deliberately from tallest to lowest or push the height up of one object with something underneath it like a stack of books.

Step away and stop. Look at it from a distance (this is what artists do because we have to step back and see the whole artwork!) This is what a natural faffer does, but they can’t explain it, they’re creating a composition from memory, you can do it too, you just have to build your composition memory (and there are templates you can use inside IntoDesign!)

Once you understand that styling follows principles rather than vibes, it stops being something mysterious that only some people possess and becomes a skill you can build just like any other.

This is why I talk so much about practical experience. Education stops at concepts. Instagram stops at aesthetics. What designers actually need is more of a translation. The science behind the artistry. The structure beneath the styling, written in plain English so that anyone can understand it.

Most designers don’t actually want you to understand it and so they keep it a little wishy washy because they’re afraid that you will steal all of their ideas – but the reality is that even if you knew their secrets you would create a different style with your own interpretation and that’s the beauty of design – so there’s nothing to worry about (which is why I always share everything you need and don’t save some of the important key pieces of information so that you never grasp the actual concept!)!

This is also why I created the interior styling course inside IntoDesign. It is an in depth styling course that finally breaks down the missing pieces that no-one explains. I give you the science behind it and break it apart into tiny digestible pieces so that you understand it step by step in a way that no-one has ever explained before! I will finally help you to understand why certain compositions work, how to build visual hierarchy, how scale and proportion really affect a space and how to make styling decisions with confidence rather than instinct.

Styling skills are not something you either can grasp or not. It’s not magic it really is a science and an art that come together – this is why it can feel so difficult. So if you want to be the type of interior designer who can walk into a room and knows exactly why it works and can then recreate that outcome consistently, room after room, you’ll love our styling course (which is also accompanied by our stylign masterclasses!)

If you’ve ever struggled to style a room or shelf (or coffee table!) Give my interior styling course a try… We’ll even give your real feedback on your styling projects on the community feed. You can have access instantly.

Jo Chrobak