No matter if you’re decorating a bachelor pad, renovating the interior after a breakup, or if your significant other finally agreed to let you infuse some masculinity into the place (if it’s the last one, consider yourself whipped, dude), the task before you if a nuanced and complex one.
While every man should strive to keep it simple when decorating, creating a truly masculine home does require careful planning and strategizing in order to accentuate your debonair personality, attract the ladies (or dudes, calm down), and design an interior that exudes masculinity and bravado. So let’s take a look at the five essential steps you need to follow in order to create a truly masculine home.
Set up a macho foundation
It all begins with the colors on the walls and how they set the stage for the furniture, amenities, and various accessories that will complete the picture once it all comes together. Needless to say, a real man who has nothing to hide can choose any color he likes, but there are some hues that speak manliness more than other.
So instead of going for pastels and off-whites, consider a darker themed palette consisting of all types of grays, metallic, charcoal, and pure black. Why? Because these colors present the perfect alpha backdrop for leather furniture, free-standing lights, and all kinds of rustic accessories you’re going to introduce later. But before you start bringing furniture in, you need to develop the right mindset.
Make it feel collected, not decorated
A bachelor pad’s interior, or simply a home that exudes masculinity, needs to look like it was carelessly assembled over time, like it had accumulated all of these amazing pieces and rustic layers by chance rather than intent. The keyword you’re looking for here is collected, not decorated.Well, of course you’re decorating the place, but nobody else needs to know that – not your girlfriend, or your crew. In order to achieve this “effortless” look, you want to opt for elements hailing from different design eras. An excellent approach would be the industrial design (more on that one later), but can also be anything that creates a symbiosis of natural elements, mid-century furniture, and even an antique sofa. The possibilities are endless, you only need to find the pieces that work well together.
Open up the space
If there is anything that speaks confidence, freedom, masculinity, and portrays you as the king of his domain, it’s the open-space floor plan. Don’t worry, knocking down a wall or two in order to create an open floor plan is easy and it doesn’t require much manual work, but it does require careful planning if you are to get it just right. If you choose to renovate this way, you can seek professional guidance from the team at Superdraft. They can help you not only open up the space to make it more spacious and functional, but also instruct you on the best ways to create a seamless masculine design throughout. Remember, an open-space plan might be the ultimate “alpha pad” design, but only if the new space is decorated properly.
Go for that rustic vibe
It should go without saying that a real man is not expected to have too many shiny, polished, or even new amenities and accessories around the house. In fact, the fewer, the better. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should get your stuff at the local landfill, but it does mean that you should strive to achieve that effortless rustic vibe throughout the household. While the ladies love their own pads to be polished and full of pastels, they want to see the exact opposite when they come in for a “cup of coffee”.
A rustic interior simply speaks manliness and ruggedness, the two traits no woman can resist. So consider strategically positioning furniture that looks as if it had aged just right, boasting a few aesthetic marks, bump, and bruises, but is still in good shape overall. If you do like your furniture to look new, though, you can always introduce some natural elements such as greenery and hardwood floors to bring a bit of that rustic feel to life. Or, you can go full industrial.
Industrial is always in
Exposed brick walls, charcoal hues, metallic accents, fluffy neutral area rugs and plenty of wooden features – these are the aesthetic elements of a truly industrial interior design, which by the way does an amazing job at creating a masculine living environment. While you mom might disapprove, your girlfriend is bound to be amazed and turned on by the sheer amount of ruggedness that this type of setting emanates.
So opt for leather furniture, wooden accessories such as tables, chair and bookshelves, and complete the look with metallic fixtures and hardware throughout in order to let that alpha vibe permeate the entire house.
Decorating an interior that openly and unapologetically portrays your masculinity to the world is not exactly an easy project, as achieving an effortlessly debonair look does require planning and preparation. Nevertheless, by following these steps, you’ll have no problem creating a truly manly bachelor pad every girl, and dude, will fall in love with.
