Interior Impact: Setting the Mood with Your Event Decor
There’s a reason so many interior design aesthetics exist - they put language and visuals behind the way people want to feel in their home. But you can also drive impact if you use aesthetic descriptions and the manifestations of them within your event decor. A while back, I wrote about refining your brand experience by writing down how your brand is represented by each of the 5 senses. Those descriptors can also be used to identify a style of decor that serves to make an impact at your next event. Here are some ways basic interior design principles can help drive impact:
Layout & Functionality
Before selecting your rental furniture, you should be well acquainted with the measurements of your space including the square footage. Make sure you lay out your venue on paper - either by hand or using one of the many online tools available - to ensure you have enough space for the furniture you want. Also, ask yourself if you’d like to leave some floor space open for people who want to mix and mingle while standing, and if your activations, serving tables, booths, etc have enough space for guests to navigate around or interact with. If you signed up for my newsletter, then you also have a free infographic that tells you how many square feet of venue space you should plan to allocate per person NOT taking furniture into consideration. That should help guide your decisions.
Aside from laying the furniture out in the venue floor plan, you also want to consider the functionality of your decor. If this is a seated event, is there adequate seating? Are the pieces serving the purpose you wanted them to? Does the scale of the furniture provide balance and allow lines of sight where you want them? Functionality is arguably more important to event decor than other bells & whistles. If your venue is immaculately styled and none of the decor serves a function, guests can end up frustrated by lack of places to rest, socialize, be inspired, etc.
Add Texture
A key component in interior design is balancing not only the scale of your furniture but also the textures used in your decor choices. While raw materials like wood & steel can create a natural or industrial feel, softer fabrics like velvet can create an air of luxury. Think about what you want your guests to be doing while in the space, and choose pieces that align with that goal - are you fostering an environment of creativity? Are you aiming to create a whimsy space perfect for imagination and daydreaming? Or are you going for a clean, modern, sleek look? Putting together a mood board of the pieces you’re eyeing can help you build a cohesive picture alongside your floor plan. If you did the sensory descriptor exercise from my previous post, consider incorporating the ones you identified for your brand into your mood board to ensure the decor aligns with your desired feeling. It may even be helpful to pull visual references from places that have a clear tone and objective in the decor they’ve selected. The Apple Store, for example, with its light wood tones, clean lines and minimal displays is a great reference point for clean, modern, bright decor that brings focused energy and an air of creativity. In contrast, a hotel bar or lounge may have softer seating that guests quite literally sink into, and intimate pods set up for leisurely conversation.
Texture in decor can also extend beyond furniture to small touches from plants, flowers and pampas grass to curtains and even metal, plastic, or bamboo eating utensils. Everything the guest touches and interacts with is an opportunity to evoke a specific mood or promote a specific goal like networking or brainstorming.
Clean, Minimal Design
The Apple Store is one of many brands known for its distinct decor - the clean aesthetic promotes focus while the light wood tones remain inviting.
Include Personalized Touches
In the Everyday Experiential Planner, I touch on not feeding your own ego as the event host, and instead leaning into making your guests feel seen, heard and understood. That said, strategically placed personal touches can be a great way to show off a little while also make guests feel like they’ve walked into your living room and have an intimate view into your true persona. These can be particularly important for name / brand recognition and recall, but are usually nuanced and subtle.
Have you ever put a napkin in your purse at an event because it had the perfect saying on it? Or felt compelled to take a picture in the bathroom because you felt like you stepped into a private retreat? This level of attention to detail is almost imperceptible - and that is why it’s so effective. The effectiveness of these details often lies in their subtlety, making them feel like natural extensions rather than overt branding. People begin to believe you (or your brand) are who you say you are, and an intimate level of trust begins to develop where there may have only been vague consideration previously. While these things should feel like a natural extension of the host and be almost too small to notice, some examples could potentially include small wash cloths for hand drying in the bathroom instead of paper towels, napkins with subtle branding (not a logo), even custom wine labels or shrink wraps for beer and water. You could also try non-consumables like candid BTS photos littered throughout as easter eggs, and even custom signage with insider sayings or jokes. Get creative, and have fun!
The Bottom Line
At the end of the day, your main goal as the event host - whether you’re a small brand or an individual - is to influence people’s emotions, actions, or both. Taking extra time to think through decor instead of just using brown metal folding chairs can be the difference between a guest who has fun and goes back to their normal life, and a guest who has fun, recalls details of your event days, weeks or even months, later, and even potentially shares with others or drives purchase consideration if that is your goal.
It’s important to remember, however, that small intentional touches can often make more of an impact than big splashes. Throwing everything but the kitchen sink into your venue for the sake of amping up your decor may likely have the opposite effect, so intentionality in your decision making is paramount. That said, when it’s done right it has the potential to take your guests on a magic carpet ride.
Good luck, and happy decorating!