I love it when interior designers play around with moodboards - it all looks so arty and imaginative and creative. But do they actually serve a useful purpose? Yes, says interiors stylist Jeska Hearne, who showed me that moodboards can be as useful as they are aesthetic. After all, lots of designers use moodboarding in some form or other to keep an archive of their favourite pieces and to create a certain style.
Hearne has a stock of scrapbooks that she has made into "moodbooks", collecting images, colour swabs, and fabric samples of ribbons and lace. These help her focus and come up with good ideas when she's feeling in need of inspiration.
"If you're planning to redecorate, you might have seen lots of pictures that you like in magazines, but you can't really get an idea of how that style or scheme might work in your own house without trying it out on some scale," she says.
"A moodboard helps you focus and helps you keep your ideas together, so that you don't start going over the top - it's a reminder of what you need and don't need and what colours you want to work with. It's easy to get distracted and start buying all sorts when you're redecorating, only to find it doesn't work when it's all put together. A moodboard helps you sort this process out."
I've recently been tempted to try out a grey and yellow colour scheme. I have been tearing out images in these shades that grab me from favourite reads such as Living Etc and Elle Decoration, and collecting velvet and wallpaper samples.
When I met Hearne, I dumped the whole lot on a table to sort through for our moodboard. She too came armed: she carried a huge bag stuffed with magazines, sticky tape and a metal rule.
"I don't even bother with scissors - the whole point of the board is to not take too much time making it look perfect; it's just to let the ideas come together," she explains.
Some interior design schools say you need a certain type of board, or a certain type of glue gun. But unless you're planning on being a professional interior designer, you really don't. We stuck everything on to a whiteboard using masking tape - it's messy and sprawling but easier to tear things down if you don't like the look of it against a particular colour or background. You could just as happily use a pinboard, or Blu-Tack pictures on to a piece of thick cardboard as you go.
I started by picking out my favourite wallpaper samples - Dandelion, Muscat and Saplings by Miss Print - all various shades of yellow and ochre, some tempered with a greyish silver.
Hearne says: "It's always best to start off with one piece that you want to build the rest of the room around - it can be wallpaper to set the scene, or it can be something like a favourite armchair or a rug whose colours you love. It sounds silly but if it's a possession that you already have - like the rug or furniture - then take a photo of it, print the picture, and actually stick it to the wall so you can see it in context with other colours."
Against the wallpaper, I started taping up pictures from magazines to get an idea of what a room in those shades would look like - a cool grey room with yellow accents from Elle Decoration and a grey bedroom from a Living Etc shot. Hearne suggested a piece of green velvet, in a shade of lime that I'd never have considered, and when we stuck it up speculatively, it surprisingly matched.
"That's the point," she smiles. "You get to experiment with styles and colours and textures before you commit to them."
Did it help me focus? Yes - although I thought I wanted feature wallpaper, the moodboard made me change my mind and stick to a soft grey background instead. It gave me new ideas, too, such as injecting a hit of midnight blue here or lime green there, along with the yellow.
If nothing else, it's always fun playing at Blue Peter-style sticking and pasting. Whether I actually implement the ideas on the moodboard is another matter …
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