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The art of Pinterest

Designing our new home one pin at a time.

By Life & Muse

August 11^th, 2019

I feel like I’m in the minority amongst my circle of friends and peers, but I use Pinterest a lot. Like, a lot a lot. From fashion, to watches, to illustration, Pinterest is my source for inspiration and reference, and virtually the modern day rendition of my early-2000s bookmarks list. Only prettier.

And of course, as Hanna and I embarked on our latest project, one that would truly stress test our home decor acumen, I intuitively knew where to begin. And in an effort to keep sharing progress on our new abode, I thought I would show how we’ve used Pinterest to plan, research, and design all our new found spaces (all while sharing some of the visual directions we’re headed in).

The Pinterest board

First things first, this is our home design Pinterest board.

One of the immediately noticeable flaws of Pinterest is that most of the things featured in pins generally don’t exist or are completely unrealistic or impractical for the average person. They’re great for inspiration but terrible for getting real world projects done.

So right away we made sure to separate the fantasy pins from the “real” pins that regular humans can attain. In fact, our board actually now has a number of categories to keep our pins organized (leveraging the “sections” feature):

Themes: collections of the aforementioned fantasy/inspiration pins that helped us build a vision for different thematic areas.

Spaces: inspiration pins for more specific spaces (agnostic to any theme).

Shop: real products that actually exist that we’re considering.

Purchased: stuff that we already own — helpful for assessing what existing pieces we can keep using (and what needs to go).

(Eventually) Short list: the stuff we have the intention to buy from the heaps of choices in our Shop sections.

Workflow

In the beginning, we started our board section-less and just freely pinned inspirational stuff we came across. As themes developed naturally, we created new sections and moved pins around accordingly.

Once we started committing to some themes (the green, coral, and BW themes were our stand-outs), the shopping began. This is one of the slowest parts of the process and can span months of semi-passive browsing. When we come across a product we’d consider buying, we simply pin its URL to the relevant section. Over time, we’ve created Shop sections for furniture, artwork, rugs, wallpaper (our current obsession), lighting, and miscellaneous home goods.

Pro tip

As you pin real products to your board, Pinterest will show you “More to shop” and “More like this” sections within each pin. This is super helpful for circumventing the fantasy pins when you’re in shopping mode.

In essence, the more real products you pin, the more real products you can find on Pinterest. That said, not all pins are created equal, so browse accordingly.

Now and next

Like with past projects, this board has been helpful for helping Hanna and I form, organize, and review our vision on what we’d like to see in our new home. This time around specifically, the board has also been a great tool for informing our interior designer’s process.

If you end up following our board, you’ll be seeing updates with new couches, wallpapers, and artwork added weekly. This has been our main focus as we aim to nail down our wall finishes (paints and wallpapers) and major furniture pieces in the next few weeks.