Before you bust out your Christmas decorations, there is another season to salute. It’s not too late to decorate your front porch or walkway beautifully for fall. After all, it’s decorative gourd season.
Short on time and done with DIY? There are local companies, such as Sovereign Style Interiors, that offer seasonal decorating and design services. Reps will come to your home, assess your porch and decorate for you. Then, on the appointed day, they will swoop in and remove the lot, just before you tire of it.
If you value the experience of crafting your own display to suit your home but don’t know where to start, there’s no need to get your pumpkins in a knot. As luck would have it, some design rules are timeless, and you can apply them to whatever season you find yourself in, and whatever nook of your house you want to spruce up.
We asked the team at Simone & Ivy in St. Albert for some general design tips that we could apply to seasonal decorating. The store doesn’t specialize in fall or porch decor, but retail associate Hannah Shank was able to give us some advice.
Many front porches are small spaces, and can be heavy traffic areas, making added seasonal design a little more challenging. So think vertically, varying the height of your decorations to maximize impact. “You could have a tall plant, pair it with a shorter side table,” Shank says, “and you could add decorations on and under it.”
Think about the items you want to display, and don’t be boxed in by the big, smooth-skinned pumpkins from the grocery store. Instead, opt for a few smaller gourds or other decorations in varying sizes that you can stack on and around your side table. “Odd numbers are better,” she says.
Add a beautiful, seasonal mat and a textured wreath to your stylish entrance — they’re not just for Christmas.
Shank says that the decor at Simone & Ivy favours neutrals. She adds that you probably don’t need as many colours as you think for an impactful porch design — just two or three.
Most fall colour schemes will include a bright orange, a brown and deep red to mimic the season, but you can play with your colour combo. Black and orange are bold and arresting, or a metallic gold accenting your fall colours make them pop. Or keep to earthy neutrals like a rich cream, paired with sage green and straw yellow.
“Stick with colours in the same palette,” Shank says, and your porch decor will welcome you, rather than overwhelm you.
Perhaps you have a chair out front and you want to style it for the season. If that’s you, Shank says you could keep this trifecta in mind: a solid, a pattern and a texture. You might have a fluffy, fringed blanket and a couple of throw pillows on it, one in a bold print and another in an anchoring solid colour.
“If you are doing patterns, don’t add too many,” she cautions.
This kind of fall decorating welcomes a Halloween pumpkin when it’s time, but doesn’t depend on caricatures of green-faced ghouls that you can’t wait to pack away. When you are decorating for fall, you can be intentional and stylish in a way that makes you want to settle onto your porch with a mug of cocoa and think about how you’ll style the area next for the winter holidays.
Simone & Ivy
Lacombe Park | #20, 580 St Albert Trail, St. Albert | 587.805.2414 | simoneandivy.ca
