Finding Your Home Design Style Series

You’ve saved hundreds of inspiration photos. You know which kitchens make you stop scrolling, and you can immediately tell when you don’t like something. But when someone asks, “What’s your design style?” you have no idea what to say. Modern? Traditional? Mountain? Cottage? Farmhouse? Maybe a little bit of all of them?

If that sounds familiar, you’re definitely not alone. One of the biggest misconceptions about building a custom home is that you need to know exactly what you want before you begin. In reality, many homeowners come into the process knowing what they like without necessarily knowing what to call it—and that’s actually a great place to start.

At Bison Build Co., part of the design process is helping you take all of those individual ideas, inspiration photos and preferences and turn them into a home that feels cohesive and, most importantly, feels like you.

Forget the Label for a Minute

Design styles can be helpful, but they can also make the process more confusing than it needs to be. You might love the warmth and natural materials of a mountain home but prefer the cabinetry of a traditional kitchen. Maybe you love the simplicity of Scandinavian design but want your home to feel cozier and more collected. Or perhaps you like elements of modern cottage, French country and farmhouse. That doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong, and your home doesn’t have to fit perfectly into one design category.

Instead of beginning with “What design style am I?” we like to start with a different question: How do you want your home to feel? Maybe you want it to feel warm and cozy, light and airy, rustic and natural, clean and minimal, elegant and timeless, dark and moody, casual and comfortable, or old and collected. Those words often tell us much more about your design preferences than a style label ever could.

Start Saving What You Love

Pinterest, Instagram, Houzz and even screenshots from homes you’ve seen online can be incredibly helpful when you’re beginning the design process. The trick is not to overthink what you’re saving. If you love a kitchen, save it. If a fireplace immediately catches your eye, save it. If you love the feeling of a room but can’t identify a single thing you’d actually put in your house, save it anyway.

At first, you’re not trying to create a perfectly coordinated design board. You’re simply collecting information about what naturally catches your attention. Once you’ve collected enough inspiration, patterns usually begin to appear.

Look for the Common Thread

This is where your collection of seemingly random inspiration photos starts becoming useful. Go back through the images you’ve saved and ask yourself what you’re repeatedly choosing. Maybe nearly every kitchen has warm wood cabinetry. Maybe you consistently save rooms with creamy walls instead of bright white ones. Perhaps your favorite homes have black windows, natural stone and exposed wood, or you keep gravitating toward arched openings, traditional cabinetry and aged brass fixtures.

Pay attention to the wood tones you’re choosing. Are you drawn toward light white oak, medium natural woods, dark walnut or rustic rough-sawn finishes? Look at color as well. Do you prefer warm neutrals, earthy greens and browns, crisp black and white, muted colors or deeper dramatic tones?

Materials are another big clue. Notice whether you repeatedly save spaces with stone, brick, wood, plaster, tile or metal. Look at the shapes and lines within those spaces, too. You may prefer clean, straight lines or find yourself drawn toward arches, curves and more traditional detailing. Even the amount of contrast you like can tell us something. Some homeowners love dark cabinetry paired with light countertops, while others prefer softer, tonal spaces where the finishes blend together.

Finally, pay attention to architectural details such as ceiling beams, fireplaces, trim, cabinetry styles, doors, windows and built-ins. These details often define the character of a home even more than furniture and décor do. When you start seeing the same elements appear again and again, you’re beginning to uncover your design style.

Knowing What You Don’t Like Matters, Too

Sometimes it’s much easier to say, “I don’t want gray floors,” “I don’t like an all-white kitchen,” “That feels too modern,” or “I love wood, but I don’t want my house to feel like a log cabin.” Those reactions are incredibly useful during the design process.

Knowing what you dislike helps narrow down your choices and keeps the project from moving in a direction that doesn’t feel right for you. You don’t need to know the design terminology or explain exactly why something doesn’t work. You simply need to be able to react to what you see. We can help with the rest.

Think Beyond What Looks Pretty

There’s another piece of finding your design style that Pinterest can’t completely answer: How do you actually live? A beautiful home still needs to function for the people living in it.

A family with young kids may have completely different needs than empty nesters. Someone who entertains frequently might prioritize a large kitchen and open gathering spaces, while another family might prefer smaller, cozier rooms. Think about your everyday routines. Where does everyone drop their shoes when they come inside? Do you cook together? Do you really need a giant kitchen island, or would that space be better used somewhere else? Do you want an open floor plan, or do you prefer rooms that feel more defined? Where will backpacks, coats, toys, dog food, small appliances and all of the other pieces of everyday life actually go?

Your design style isn’t just about choosing beautiful finishes. It’s about creating a home that looks like you and works for you.

Your Home Can Be a Blend

Here’s one of our favorite things to tell clients: You don’t have to choose just one style. In fact, some of the most interesting homes are a combination of influences.

You might be mostly Modern Mountain with a few Traditional elements. You could love Modern Cottage but prefer a slightly darker, moodier color palette. Maybe you lean Scandinavian but want warmer woods, more texture and a little more character. The goal isn’t to perfectly recreate a design style or make sure your home checks every box associated with a particular category.

Instead, the goal is to identify the elements you genuinely love and find a thoughtful way to make them work together. That’s what makes a custom home feel personal instead of looking like a copy of something you’ve already seen.

Don’t Design for Everyone Else

Building a custom home comes with a lot of opinions. Friends have opinions. Family members have opinions. The internet definitely has opinions, and trends are constantly changing.

While it’s smart to think about longevity and resale, your home should ultimately reflect the people who are going to live there every day. If you love natural wood and someone tells you painted cabinets are more popular, that doesn’t automatically make painted cabinets the right choice for you. If you love a darker, cozier home while your Pinterest feed is filled with bright white interiors, you don’t need to change what you love.

A custom home gives you the opportunity to make intentional choices based on your family, your lifestyle and your personal style. Take advantage of it.

You Don’t Need to Have It All Figured Out

If you’re considering building a custom home but feel like you don’t know enough about design, that’s okay. You don’t need to walk into your first meeting knowing your cabinet species, countertop material, flooring color, plumbing fixtures and paint palette.

You can start much simpler. Bring us the Pinterest board. Show us the kitchen you love. Show us the house you absolutely hate. Tell us you want your home to feel warm, cozy and timeless. Tell us you love that one fireplace but have no idea what style it is. Those little pieces give us somewhere to start.

From there, we can begin turning inspiration into an actual design direction, then carry that direction through your floor plan, materials, finishes and selections. Eventually, all of those individual decisions come together to create something much bigger: a home that feels unmistakably yours.

Finding Your Design Style: What’s Next?

Now that you know how to start identifying what you’re naturally drawn to, we’re going to take a closer look at some of the design styles you may be seeing in your inspiration photos. Throughout this series, we’ll break down the materials, colors, architectural details and finishes that define each style—and, more importantly, show you how to make those styles your own.

Next up: Modern Mountain — warm, natural and right at home in the North.

At Bison Build Co., we don’t expect you to come to us with every detail figured out. Our job is to help you take the ideas you have, discover the ones you didn’t know how to describe, and turn them into a custom home that showcases your personal style while fitting the way you actually live.