Florals for Everyone

Featured Pro: Kristan Cunningham
Category: Home Décor
Time: 1:30


KRISTAN CUNNINGHAM: Hi, I’m Kristan Cunningham, and I’ve got another GMC Trade Secret for you.

Florals have always been heavy hitters in design schemes, and for good reason. They’re a timeless subject matter and can offer a really nice, soft note to a space. But if your taste skews just a little in the masculine direction, how do you incorporate them without going full-on girlie? Well, come with me and I’m going to show you how.

This room doesn’t feel so girlie, and yet we have four pretty distinct florals happening. Let’s start with the rug. We’ve got a pretty sharp pattern going around the edge and the black center, and the floral itself has very hard edges rather than soft kind of cabbage rose pattern. Rugs are always a great place to find a stylized floral, whether it’s wool or kilim or a woven rug. That’s a good place that you’re going to be able to find something that’s graphic and hard-edged but still a floral.

Then we’ve got this pattern here. It’s a classic quatrefoil pattern, but it reads like a flower. So you get the softness, but you still have something that’s graphic and sort of more modern. And we have this pillow, two colors. That’s the key there. We eliminated all the pinks and greens and blues and yellows, everything that we kind of associate with feminine florals, and we get all the softness, but we’ve kept it to a very sophisticated color scheme.

And here I actually have fresh flowers. I try to stick with one flower, do a few of them, and do them in an unexpected container, maybe even something utilitarian; in this case, a jelly jar – nice and simple and very ungirlie.

I’m Kristan Cunningham, and that’s your GMC Trade Secret about how to decorate with florals.