How to Choose the PERFECT Pillow for Your Space | Interior Design Tips
How do you choose a pillow that doesn't just LOOK good, but actually makes your space FEEL good?
And makes you feel good inside yourself. In this video, I share not just the aesthetic ways to choose a pillow, but also the emotional connection angle that makes the biggest difference in how our spaces feel when we are in them.
I walk you through exactly how I chose a pillow for one of my chairs — and why such a small detail can completely change the feeling of a room.
I'll show you how I think about design elements such as:
- Proportion — why the size of a pillow matters
- Color & contrast — how to keep things from feeling too “matchy-matchy”
- Texture — why mixing textures can make a space feel more interesting - Shape — how contrasting shapes can soften or balance a room
- Function — choosing pieces based on how you actually want to use your space
As well as:
- Emotion — how fabrics, textures and objects can connect you to memories and influence how you feel in your home
Because interior design isn't only about creating a room that looks beautiful. It's about creating a space that feels good to live in. A fabric might remind you of the ocean. A texture might make you feel calm. A pillow might remind you of someone you love. These little details can create an emotional connection between you and your home.
And this is just a tiny example of the approach I teach in my interior design courses: learning how to design from both aesthetics AND intuition, so you can create spaces that genuinely feel like you.
✨ Want to learn more about my interior design courses?
Visit intuitionandinteriors.com
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How to Choose Decor That Actually Feels Like YOU and makes you FEEL good inside.
I teach you how to create an intuition-based design world, inside your home and yourself. Take care, Violette ps.If you enjoyed this video, subscribe for more interior design tips, creative inspiration, and ways to create a home that feels uniquely yours. @violette_intution on instagram (just getting started, thank you for following!)
Video Transcript:
Violette Phoenix (00:05)
Can you see me?
kind of an awkward spot, but today I briefly just wanted to share how I picked out the pillow for the chair And it's seemingly a little thing, but it's in the smallest details that can hold so much meaning.
And something so small as one pillow and one chair can actually serve as a great example of how we can make our interiors feel amazing to us.
And yeah, I just want to preface that this style may not be for you, but that's okay. I teach you how to feel out what is gonna feel good to you. this style feel good.
the style feels good to me and and everyone's style is gonna be different for everyone. And I teach you how to do that in my courses. I'll tell you that later.
So for my chair, I was needing
I was needing a pillow, I'll show you what it was before. It just comes as a chair Actually it doesn't even come with the ottoman. It's just it's just the chair, but
I thought the chair by itself feels better with the ottoman because read, chill, nap. function first. What do you want to do with the space?
Yeah, actually that's a good point. That it's more than just the aesthetics, it's about the functionality too. And so I didn't want a chair that just looked good like a chair. I wanted to think about what I wanted to do in the space
Okay. So when you're thinking about a pillow at first, by the way, this episode is video enabled. feel free to
Go on to YouTube or Spotify where you can see the video. So at first I was thinking, okay, maybe I'll do like a slate blue square pillow It's a little more gray, which is called desaturated. It's a little more desaturated. It's not that like bright vibrant blue, not even as bright as this, like oceanic.
Blue. It definitely has more like dove gray. I don't know if you can see. And it's actually a very similar material. It's a yeah, it's a brushed velvet. It's actually really soft and really pretty.
so anyway, this is what I thought at first. And I was like, yeah, great, blue and blue. And then I looked at it and I'm like, no. To me, the pillow is too large proportionally for this chair. It takes up like half the chair.
This pillow can work like on a long sofa because there'll be more blank space in between and maybe you'll have like a layering of different pillows on a sofa, but just proportionally in this one kind of square cubic chair, this square
Yeah, you can say almost cubic, pillow is too much. It's too matchy matchy. And that goes too with the color. Like when I take a step back, sure, the colors are slightly different, but they're so similar that it just kind of blends in. To me, it looks like blah so I'll show you what I did instead. Instead, I ordered this pillow. It's so cute!
Yeah, I ordered this pillow, which is a spherical boucle white boucle pillow. And then step back and look at it.
That's another tip. When you step back, you can kind of get a better perspective of how things feel when you're actually living in the room. Up close, it can feel like almost blinding, but
back afar you can you can get better sense.
And for me personally, I love this. The thing I love about this, first I'll do aesthetics and then I'll do emotions. Thing I loved about it aesthetically is it provides contrast. So
The blue is dark and the white is light. And versus that pillow that I showed you before where the colors blended together, this pillow is gonna pop out because it's much lighter than the chair. As well as this light color kind of ties in with the light wood of the side table.
and even like the white wall, it's in that same light family. And actually with the light coming in through the window, it makes this top part a lot lighter than this dark part. It just provides a really beautiful variation of white shades within it.
I keep noticing if these stems are in the water enough. But yeah, they're covered. Okay. I don't know if you can see the texture, but this is a boucle texture, so it's kind of like a sheep skin. It's not real sheep, but it's like
Very textured and dimensional. And chair's velvet is very soft, but kind of one dimensional. It doesn't really pop off from the chair, nor nor should it, nor should it, nor does it have to. But the contrast, the difference in that this is very textural and this is not very textural, it allows your eye to go to this pillow, like, ooh, what's that? I like that pillow. It's like if this chair were very textured too, it'd kind of all get lost.
So contrast is definitely helpful. another example of contrast is the shape. So because this chair, as we were saying, was rectangular or cubic with those like angular edges, the circular pillow kind of softens it and they kind of meld together and it looks good. So I mean, also speaking of functionally, like it's kind of fun to hold it. It feels good. Or you could prop it up on your back.
Let's see how we would do that.
Yeah, no, that's not how I use it. I kinda use it like something to hug something to hold on to. Yeah, that's fun.
What's
So beyond aesthetics, tapping into emotions, this pillow is so soft, this chair is so soft, and when you sit in something really soft and comfortable, your body just naturally relaxes. Like,
safe.
I'm safe to be here. I'm safe to relax here. And that's really important how you feel physically, but that also ties to emotionally.
in anything related to interior design.
emotional effects or the emotional goals can be different for everyone. So while I enjoy feeling safe, you may want to feel
know, excited or inspired. And let me get an example. maybe this fabric inspires you to take a trip. I don't know where it makes you think of. but like maybe this fabric reminds you of travel and fabrics
while you're abroad. And so you want a fabric like this to like make you feel excited and remind you about your trips. Well, you can pick out a fabric and then fabrics can be applied to any pillow this probably would look better on a rectangular pillow because it's very linear and rectangular, versus this pillow. But yeah, maybe that inspires you, it makes you feel
Maybe that fabric inspires you. you know, maybe this fabric, speaking about emotions, reminds you of the ocean and the beach and your favorite place to go with your family or your grandparents. And so every time you see this fabric, you're like, like it emotionally softens you or makes you feel happy. And that's the power of interiors. I'm getting chill saying that.
That
interiors really can transport you places based on the emotional connection that you have to the things in your interior. So let's say this does remind you of a happy memory with your family at the beach. Well, you have this fabric on a pillow, and every time you see it, you're like, I love those trips. Like you just start to feel excited and happy in your current space. Your brain doesn't
like sure, on the surface your brain's like, I know I'm in my apartment, but on some level, your brain connects that memory and is like, but I'm also at the beach. Ooh. Yeah. So then you feel those sensations of warmth and happiness in your body right here
we go into other fabrics in the course, but really just starting to get a sense of
and sometimes it's not emotion, sometimes it's purely aesthetic. You're just like dang, I love that. I love it. I love that texture. It's really three dimensional. I love rubbing my fingers on it and I love the vibrancy. It's like moss, you know?
Yeah, okay, that was like a super quick rundown of how I picked a pillow for this one chair, but
point zero zero one percent of what I teach in my course. If you'd like to learn more, you can check out my courses at intuitionandinteriors.com the courses
they're over eight weeks. You meet two times a week. and instructions and PowerPoints so that you really understand how to design. But then also
practices and exercises. so you actually get to practice and it isn't like reading out of a textbook, you're actually doing hands-on exercises. So your body, your mind, it all sinks up, you start to understand, I see what it feels like to design. And on top of that, the courses include
I'll call them energy exercises. So there are meditations, yoga, stretches, journaling. We really get in touch with the underlying drivers and factors that influence how we feel in a space. So that it's more than just our head or the aesthetics. We're really uncovering how do we want to feel in our space
How do we want to feel in our spaces that we design?
And the extra benefit is that
I give you the tools to help you feel calm while you're learning to design. sometimes learning something new, like a new artistic endeavor, can feel overwhelming and scary, like I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know if I have enough experience.
Don't worry, don't worry. I help you through that. The courses
when I designed these courses, took me about three years, to create, I really wanted to make sure there was no stress, that there are no grades, that there's no judgment. It's a totally safe space.
So you feel free to have your inner creative essence come out. And I give you actual practices.
to help calm your nervous system so that
what we I was gonna say we, but what what I experienced in school, which was like panic before exams or cramming to study for a test or anxiety before a presentation. No, none of that. I want your nervous system to feel totally safe in the design process. So you enjoy the learning process and you learn how to enjoy the design process. So that joy is with you even after my course.
a super quick summary. I hope you found this helpful. And if you did, feel free to share it with a friend this episode or can check the show notes for my Instagram handle. Follow me on YouTube.
just getting started. And when you like or follow or share this episode with a friend, I know that it's resonating. I don't know if it is. I hope it is.
I think that's it.
Yeah,
Okay.
Violette Phoenix (12:01)
genuinely thank you for being here.
Violette Phoenix (12:11)
I hope you all have really, really spectacular days and I'll catch you next time. Yeah, I'll catch you next time. Is that is that something people say?
Mm-hmm.