Inspiration

Anybody can be an interior designer – all it takes is a bit of research and a lot of passion. It doesn’t matter whether you’re merely a decorating enthusiast or a pro in the business; serious interior designers need fresh inspiration. Thankfully, in the 21st century inspiration is not at all difficult to find.

On the contrary, today there are so many websites available for interior design ideas that it’s difficult to weed out the best sites among the chaos that is the World Wide Web. Just as anyone with a bit of passion can be an interior designer, so too can anyone share their interior design knowledge with the world over the Internet.

To save you from toiling through endless pages in search of the inspiration jackpot, we at PictureStore have compiled our top go-to websites for the best pictures, latest trends and most useful advice in interior design. We’ve broken it down into portals, blogs and networking sites to guide you.

Portals

Lifestyle Home

Lifestyle Home is a fantastic portal with articles and videos to advise you how to decorate your home. The website has great stores of articles to inspire decoration ideas in all manner of living arrangements, from small spaces to period homes, home offices to nurseries.

Near the bottom of the home page is a list of DIY project categories to suit just about any interior design challenge. This is the website you want to use to collect inspiration direct from the experts on the best colour and pattern coordination ideas for your home.

Homelife

Homelife is a great resource to navigate for a wide range of interior decorating ideas. The website breaks interior design ideas down into the various rooms in a home to help you easily locate the articles that will best inspire you with your interior design project.

Head straight to the Decorating page to access a range of articles organised by Kitchens, Bathrooms, Bedrooms, Storage, Living and Dining, Outdoors, and Trends.

Home-Designing

Home-Designing is a nifty little portal where you can access all of your visual needs for inspiration. This website is all about the pictures; visualization is after all an important step towards creation. Expect image-heavy articles featuring curated pictures from across the web.

As with most interior design portals, Home-Designing offers articles around specific room designs, but our favourite segment is under the Decorations tab. This section gives great ideas on how to jazz up a room according to your own particular tastes, holiday themes, budget and more.

Freshome

Freshome is replete with inspiration and advice for those interested in home improvement and interior design. It has over 7,000 posts and more than 90,000 images of interior products and architectural projects.

There is a focus on fashionable furniture and unique or nifty products you may want for your bedroom, kitchen, living room or bathroom. But the décor and design ideas are inventive, inspiring and hugely tempting to adopt.

Blogs

Desire to Inspire

Just as the title suggests, the Desire to Inspire blog aims to motivate you to achieve your own interior design dreams, so expect big, bright pictures and few words for each post.

The posts have no particular focus, but are rather simply a celebration of quirky ideas that work and good tastes that last. This is a blog that you want to visit when you simply want to browse beautiful pictures of innovative interior design – and where you may just find the inspiration for your next project.

sfgirlbybay

This blog, sfgirlbybay, with its light and airy design, represents what it calls ‘bohemian modern style’ interior design ideas. Articles showcase the latest designers, artists, products and trends in the interior design world.

We recommend you head straight to the Inspiring Interiors category and find the best muse for your next project. Art on Walls, Home Furnishing, and Accessories and Homewares are the other pages worth visiting for fresh inspiration.

Apartment Therapy

Apartment Therapy’s focus is on calm, beautiful, and healthy homes. Every article is stocked full of images and there are plenty of areas to explore so be prepared to spend some time on this website.

This is the blog to visit if you’re looking for inspiration for light, cheerful rooms, small spaces, or specific décor styles. You can browse by advice, room, style, and even lifestyle choices.

Décor8

Décor8 is a great place to visit to check out fresh finds, inspiring interiors and ideas for creative living. It is known as a reliable design resource worldwide, with over 48,000 daily readers.

Browse the articles in the ‘Homes with Heart’ column, where you can tour fashionable homes or follow the ‘Top Trends’ column to get the latest and greatest designer trends for your newest interior design project.

Networks

While blogs and portals are great places to browse, if it’s quantity you’re looking for then online design networks are guaranteed to deliver the goods. Houzz and Pinterest are two of the best:

Houzz

Houzz is a leading platform for home design. From this website you can find design information, project advice, product information and even professional reviews. You can search items using just about any home category there is, including topics as varied as the subway tile, the breakfast nook and the beadboard, to name but a few.

What we at PictureStore love about Houzz is the endless gallery of home design photos – over 3 million photos have been uploaded by home remodelling and design professionals. From this collection you can select your favourite images and store them in your own virtual Ideabook.

Pinterest

Last – but by no means least – is Pinterest. This website is, of course, the number one place to visit if you just want to browse through endless temptations for your interior design ideas. Because of its popularity, the possibilities for interior design inspiration on Pinterest are infinite. To make browsing easier for you, we’ve included our favourite boards that inspire us and will inspire you.

• Impressive Interior Design – This is a pinner who wants to make your search for interior design ideas that much easier by collecting examples of good interior designs. There are boards here for apartments, all the rooms in the house (including attics and cellars) and more.
• InStyle-Décor Interior Design – This pinner features boards all geared towards luxury design. Intended as inspiration for the interiors of hospitality venues, InStyle-Décor focuses on Hollywood-style furniture, lighting and décor ideas.
• Sabi Style – Sabi Style is an Interior Design and Decoration studio based in Brisbane. The company’s boards include a variety of unusual, chic design ideas, including front doors, lighting, inspiring spaces, ecodesign and stairways. There’s also a focus on various particular spaces, such as restaurants, cafés and bars, shops and libraries.
• Interior Design – For our final recommendation, we’ve included this interior design board by Glitter Guide. This board offers a selection of bright, modern ideas to fill your home.

Be Inspired

Half the fun of interior design is the search for flashes of brilliance and inspiration. Naturally, we turn to the internet to see what others have done and what we can do to freshen up our own homes. But it’s not always easy to tell which websites carry authority and hence which publications you can trust.

The websites above should meet all your interior design inspiration needs. Prepare to be bedazzled by the variety, choice and quality of the publications we’ve listed. But keep pen and paper at hand – you’ll want to start making notes immediately!

Richard Tarrant - Bio