If you’re ready to refresh a single room or your whole home, try mixing metals in your decor. This used to be a design no-no, but now it’s all the rage. Mixed metals deliver an elegant, collected look with a fashion-forward edge. While it may seem daunting to pull off this decorating style successfully, these tips from Odyssey Lake apartment homes in Brunswick, Georgia, will help take the guesswork out of the process and deliver a successful end result.

Pick One Dominant Metal

As when choosing a color scheme for a room, you want to settle on one metal as your primary focus and then choose one or two secondary metals as accents. Your dominant metal should sync with your overall style. Stainless steel or aluminum for a contemporary feel, gold, brass or bronze for a more traditional or European feel, and iron or galvanized metal for an industrial look.

Mind Your Tones

Metals have warm, cool, and neutral tones just like colors. If you choose a cool toned metal as your dominant color, use a warm metal as your accent. For a dominant warm color, add cool-toned accents. Neutral metals will pair well with either warm or cool metals. Warm metals include brass, copper, nickel, and gold. Silvery metals such as chrome, aluminum, and stainless steel are cool. Neutrals include cast iron and other black metals.

Putting it Into Action

If your kitchen has a stainless steel refrigerator, cabinet knobs, and fixtures (cool tones), you would treat this as your dominant metal and accent it with a warm toned metal such as copper. So a copper kettle or pot displayed on your range, and a copper finished cookie jar or decorative candlesticks on your counter would provide an on-trend contrast. Or if you want a silver and gold bedroom, assess the rest of your room’s color palette. If your room has predominantly warm colors like yellow, taupe, brown, and orange, use warm brass as your main metal with cool silver as an accent metal.

Finishing Touches

To ensure your mixed metal look reads as intentional and not haphazard, unify the different metals by ensuring they all have the same finish – whether that’s polished, brushed/satin, or oiled. To reinforce your mixed metal scheme, you can use materials other than metals. Metallic-sheened fabrics in silver or gold, mirrored surfaces that echo silver tones, or a piece of art with your dominant or accent colors and tones among its subject or in its frame will also add to the layered effect.

Have fun mixing and matching metals to update the look in your home. For more great decorating and lifestyle tips, visit the Odyssey Lake blog.