The furniture and accessories in today’s contemporary living spaces do not all need to match — in fact, your rooms will be more interesting if they don’t. However, there are some guidelines to follow when mixing furniture styles that will keep your spaces from looking like they were put together haphazardly or without thought. The home decor specialists at Bova Contemporary Furniture in Cincinnati, OH, offer a few designer tips for mixing contemporary furniture styles in your home.

Here are three expert tips for mixing contemporary styles of furniture:

• Choose a Main Theme: If you have a large piece of living room furniture you love and do not want to replace, that piece should dictate your main design theme. With neutral-colored walls, your main theme becomes a starting point you can carry throughout, while adding pieces of another style to complement it.
• Apply the Rules of Balance: To be visually appealing, the furniture and accessories in a room should be distributed so they seem balanced or have equal visual weight. Ideally, everything in your room (except for perhaps a focal point piece) should have something else in the room that complements or matches it in style, shape, size, or color. For example, you may have a side chair that doesn’t match the other pieces of furniture, but your overall look can still achieve balance if the chair matches a couch pillow and the lamp shade. Likewise, a bedroom set does not need to have matching nightstands, but the furniture on either side of the bed should be of similar size and shape to achieve balance.
• Mix it Up: If you have more than one style of furniture in your room, split up the similar items and distribute them evenly. This will provide balance instead of drawing attention to the difference in styles. If you have an item you want to keep but it doesn’t “go” with anything else, add another piece that has a similar element somewhere else in the room. For example, if you have a chair with colorful upholstery that doesn’t blend in, try adding a couch pillow or vase in that same color elsewhere in the room. Repeating an element at least once in the same space adds visual balance.

When you’re in the market for high-quality contemporary furniture, turn to Cincinnati’s leader in modern home furnishings. A family-owned business serving Cincinnati and Dayton since 1985, Bova Contemporary Furniture offers a wide selection of furniture at attractive prices. For more information about all their products and services, call (513) 247-9100 or visit them online.