How To Turn Home Inspiration Into Reality, With Style Sourcebook

There’s no shortage of dream home inspiration out there. But how do you get from swooning over beautiful homes to taking action? That’s where Style Sourcebook comes in!

The first step in refining your vision for any interior design project, is creating a mood board. This is where you collect your ideas, source product, and start to get a sense for how everything will come together in a space.

Style Sourcebook makes mood boarding easy, with their simple drag-and-drop tool, and a marketplace of over 130,000 interiors products to source from, all in one place.

Here’s our step-by-step guide to creating your very own mood board using Style Sourcebook, inspired by one of our favourite TDF homes; the dreamy Ivanhoe renovation of designer Sarah Conly.

Tip 1. Start with a space that inspires you.

There’s nothing more daunting than a blank canvas – or in this case, a blank mood board. Kick off the creative process by collecting reference images of spaces that inspire you. You don’t need to go crazy, two or three pics is a great start!

Tip 2. What catches your eye first?

Now it’s time to really dissect what it is about your reference photos that really takes your fancy. What catches your eye first?

In this case, the distinctive features of Sarah Conly’s dining room that really stand out to us are the hanging paper pendant lamp and the woven rattan dining chairs. The coloured glassware on the table in golden tones is also a gorgeous finishing touch.

Once you start looking closely at your reference pics, it quickly becomes clear what components you need to find, to re-create a similar look!

Tip 3. Source your biggest items.

Next up, it’s time to start sourcing. That means actually hunting for the items you need to create the look you’re after.

In Sarah’s living room (adjoining the dining area) there is a gorgeous oversized leather couch, complemented by textural cane armchairs and a vintage-style rug underfoot.

Within Style Sourcebook we searched for ‘leather sofa’ and ‘cane chairs’, and selected our favourite pieces.

At this stage, simply drag and drop your favourite items onto your mood board (don’t worry too much about layout, this is the ‘collecting’ phase).

Tip 4 – Add personality with paint, finishes and decorative details.

Now it’s time to add some personality!

Use the ‘paint + finishes’ drop-down menu to choose paint colours, tiles and other finishes. Then, use the ‘products’ tab to add finishing touches. Under ‘decor’ you’ll find artwork, cushions, ceramics, glassware and more.

Tip 5 – Make your mood board beautiful!

You’ve refined your style, sourced and collected everything you need to create the room (or home) of your dreams, now it’s time to make your mood board beautiful!

If you’ve got lots of sourced images to organise and arrange, start by grouping products together in zones. For instance, place all the dining table components in one group, and all the artwork in one cluster.

It’s ok for items to overlap – you can use the ‘forward’ and ‘back’ buttons within Style Sourcebook’s mood boarding tool to push items behind or in front of others.

When placing items on the mood board, consider scale. Generally speaking, try to keep things at a scale that makes sense in the real world – you don’t want a giant pot plant towering over a tiny armchair.

It’s ok for items to be cropped – a large couch might be too big to fit on your mood board, so it’s fine to have it cropped out of the frame on one side (as we have done here), and a pendant light always look good dropping in from above!

Once you’re happy with your mood board, you can save it and download it, email it to yourself, or share with friends, family and clients – and you’ll be one step closer to making your vision a reality!

With a House & Garden marketplace of over 130,000 products, and an easy-to-use ‘drag and drop’ mood board tool, Style Sourcebook is a free online hub that brings together all the tools and ideas to help you create your dream home. Discover how to create your perfect mood board. Try it for yourself here.