A lot of people talk about it. There’s been a lot of blog posts on it. It’s very much one of the fundamentals of bringing everything in a designed home together but there is more to a ‘Red Thread’ thank meets the eye. Firstly a room should have a design thread, red thread, just as much as a whole home project. Secondly, you can use the rule along with other repetitions in your over all home design to make your life a lot easier, especially if you’ve got a lot of design to undertake – a full refurb for example or new build.
It can often feel like a crazy amount of stuff to think about with a large scale project and decision fatigue is real. What the red thread brings and is very closely related to is repetition which, in these situations, is your BFF.
If you have a design element that you keep bringing back, or as a constant, then it’s easier to start bouncing off ideas, because you’ve got something to start with in each space. That’s a lot easier than a starting with blank page every time.
Repetition is everywhere and we feel comfortable with it as humans. Our eye likes repetition. It likes balance. The red thread repeats a design choice or feature throughout your home in order to bring it together.
So what exactly can a Red Thread be? The answer is, it can be anything really. It can be a colour, a fabric, a pattern, a fabric type. It can be a texture. Or it could even be a shape that repeats, but let’s just initially take one of the easiest. A colour.
Now. I’ll talk about how to find the colour in a minute, but whatever that colour may be, the nice thing about it is that if you use a colour it can translate into different types of items, for example an artwork, pattern or finish.
Different gradients of a colour work well too. So it’s not a hard and fast rule of ‘this is my chosen colour, I need to match it and I need three pieces of this colour in every single room.’ That’s just going to look staged and cheap. Yes, you want a red thread to be noticeable, but you also want a certain element of subtlety, discovery and richness to it in the way it’s featured.
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