7 Affordable Decorator’s Tricks from Southern Living's 2025 Idea House That Will Elevate Your Home

Southern Living’s Idea House is back, and it’s packed with style that's sure to inspire—from small DIY updates to a whole-house color scheme. We spoke to interior designer Charlotte Moss, who was tapped to design the interiors of the Charlottesville, VA, home, about how to infuse new construction with personality, charm, and a sense of history—without breaking the bank. 

“At heart, I'm a teacher. It's important for me as a designer that people walk away from my spaces feeling like they learned something. I don't want them to come and just look and say, ‘Oh, that was a pretty house,’ but that they'll get ideas,” she says. Here, she shares seven ways she made this home sing—and how you can do the same in your own home, too.

1. Keep It Simple

At first glance, the living room is an ambitious mix of colors and patterns, but look closely and you’ll realize it’s far more restrained. “It’s funny because there's really only two colors in the room: greens and browns and shades of them. You don't have to create a 'scheme' necessarily—just do shades of a color,” says Moss.

The palette was inspired by the curtain fabric from Schumacher, which also connects the room with the outdoors. “I felt like it breathed enough to let you look beyond outside. It didn’t stop you visually. It’s what I call a great joiner—it joined the inside with the outside,” she says of the floral pattern, which makes the room feel bigger.  A cerise lampshade in front of the windows adds a single burst of contrasting color, further drawing your gaze.

2. Be Bold with Paint

Moss champions paint as a budget-friendly way to quickly and easily transform a room, and strong colors can make the biggest impact. In the living room, rather than defaulting to a soft or earthy tone of green, she opted for Sherwin-Williams Chartreuse. “I love the strength of it and the room can take it because of all that light and the light fabric,” she says, noting that a leafy green would have felt sedate.  

She also used paint to elevate utilitarian spaces, painting the mudroom and laundry room Sherwin-Williams Studio Blue Green, inspired by childhood trips to Colonial Williamsburg. “When you come into the house through the mudroom, I wanted it to feel a part of the rest of the house in terms of decorating, not like an afterthought. Color and paint are the number one answer to that,” she says, adding that the GE Profile appliances in jade green created a cohesive feel.

3. Put Fabric to Use

Creativity is at the heart of decorating, so it should come as no surprise that, despite her polished and pristine interiors, Charlotte Moss loves a good DIY moment.

• The presto-chango: Get out your scissors and repurpose one thing into something else. Cue the kitchen's cafe curtains: “It was a linen tablecloth that I bought in Italy, and we cut it and made the curtains, no lining," she says. "Not everything has to be overly wrought, thought, and constructed. Some things can be nice and loose."
• The all-in approach: “Take something that most people think is ordinary and use a lot of it,” says Moss, recounting the time she enveloped her teenage bedroom in gingham—curtains, bedskirt, everything—that cost around 40 cents per yard at the time. “Something ridiculous!" she says. "You could do muslin all the way around a room, gathered on curtain rods, and make it look fabulous. It’s learning to be generous with an inexpensive material that makes it look luxurious.” 
• The hardware store upgrade: In the primary bedroom, you’ll spot a mirror from Lowe’s above the dresser. Moss had the frame wrapped with Thibaut fabric for an instant upgrade. “This is what I do. I spend my Saturday at Home Depot and Lowe's because that's where you get your jollies when you can find something cheap and cheerful that has great possibilities. Stop and give ordinary things a chance,” she says.

4. Consider Antiques

If you are in the camp that thinks brown furniture is best left in the past, think again. “There’s great value in antiques. People who poo poo them without really studying them are really missing the boat,” cautions Moss, who notes that you can often find antique wooden pieces, like the secretary in this bedroom, for a much lower price than you’d pay for a new one. Antiques also add patina, contrast, and drama to contemporary rooms, not to mention a story—whether you can recall its provenance or just the thrill of the hunt.

5. Trick the Eye

Entering the foyer feels like stepping into a greeting tent with its enveloping striped wallpaper—but the ceiling is actually flat. “There’s no dimension to it. It’s just the way the wallpaper has been mitered. We just sliced and diced it,” says Moss, showing that you can create a sense of architecture without investing in structural changes. 

On the entry floor, black and white marble tiles selected by the architects at Rosney Co., create a worn feel in a classic checkerboard pattern. “I thought it was brilliant because it really gives the house a sense of age and gravitas when you walk in, which I think is really important in a new house,” says Moss. The same effect can be achieved with ceramic tiles by choosing those with a weathered appearance.

6. Create Flow Between Rooms

Moss has a knack for making all the rooms in this house flow together without feeling the least bit repetitive. Her secret? Use color to unify the rooms with the landscape and each other.

“When you come into the foyer, I wanted people to flow through it and go right into the living room, because the living room is straight ahead and the whole back is windows. So the landscape pulls you in and inspired my color palette,” she explains.

By pulling hits of those greens, creams, and browns into every room—but in different proportions—the spaces flow subtly together. You can do the same by applying your chosen color on the walls in one room, and on simple throw pillows in the next.

7. Give Yourself Guardrails

Of course, tucked-away bedrooms are one place where you can freely branch out from a tight color palette, as Moss did in this bedroom. To design it (and the home as a whole), she came up with an imaginary client and decorated within the parameters of that story. Like decorating around the latest aesthetic, it’s a clever trick to keep yourself on track—and to avoid buying things you don't need.

For this bedroom, that fictional client was a young girl whose grandmother gave her a book on fashion icon Gloria Vanderbilt. Moss muses: “She really took an interest in doing collages and quilts, and her whole room is based on old chintz, quilts, and collaging.” Even the lampshade is made out of a quilt fragment—DIY, of course.

Visit the Southern Living Idea House

The 2025 Southern Living Idea House is open to the public from August through December, Thursday through Sunday. Tours are available from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays. The Idea House will be closed on Thanksgiving Day. For more information, pick up Southern Living's September issue, or purchase tickets here.