Style quiz result: Boho & Eclectic
Boho and eclectic is a fun, relaxed style that mixes different colors, patterns and textures. It often incorporates elements from various places around the country or the world, and it feels collected and full of personality. The quiz files the two together because the people who choose them want the same thing: a home that tells their story.
If the quiz landed you here, you kept choosing the room with the most personality in it. That is the best instinct a client can have. The most common problem in homes that are beautiful and expensive is that they do not reflect the people who live there. You are not going to have that problem. The risk you have instead is chaos, and that is a design problem we know how to solve.
Style labels describe surfaces. Three decisions locate the room. Here is where boho and eclectic sit on each, and why the third one matters most.
Either. Boho tends light: pale walls, rattan, linen, plants. Eclectic can go heavy and moody: navy walls, velvet, a black stone fireplace, a wall of framed records. Decide this first, because the mix has to agree on it.
High. Different colors, patterns and textures layered together, collections on the wall, objects gathered from different places. This is the style where more is genuinely more, provided it is all yours.
This is the through-line. A collected room holds together when every piece shares one temperature, one material family or one level of weight. Pick it deliberately and the mix reads as a point of view rather than an accident.
When we go through a client's saved images, the useful moment is never that they are all eclectic. It is that every single one has warm wood and no chrome, or dark walls and brass, or pattern only on the floor. That consistency is the actual taste, and it is usually much narrower than the client thinks. It becomes the rule the whole mix obeys.
With a lot going on in a room, the upholstery has to be the calm part. A well-built sofa in a plain fabric gives the colors, patterns and textures something to sit against. It also has to last, because in a room full of things you love, a lumpy sofa is the only thing anyone notices. Upholstery is the number one place we ask clients to invest, and that holds doubly here.
A collected room is not an excuse for a bad plan. We space plan before we place a single object, because if the scale of the furniture or the lighting is off, the whole room feels unbalanced and the collection reads as clutter. Good bones let the personality show.
Boho cannot be bought in a single trip, and the attempt is what goes wrong. A room of rattan, macramé and terracotta from one store is boho as a costume: it has the surfaces and none of the biography. The same is true of an eclectic room mixing periods that were all chosen in one afternoon.
The collection has to be real. The guitars belong to somebody who plays them. The records were bought one at a time. The textiles came back from somewhere. The art was chosen because someone found it beautiful, not because it matched the pillows. Our job is to give those things a room that makes them look intentional, not to supply them.
Rooms from recent projects that share this sensibility. See more in the full portfolio.
Chicago condos, lofts and vintage walk-ups suit boho and eclectic rooms naturally: exposed brick, tall windows and open plans that can take a strong point of view. The through-line matters even more in an open plan, because the living, dining and kitchen all read as one room and have to agree with each other.
In the western suburbs, a collected room often lands in a large new house that has no voice of its own. That is freeing. There is nothing to work around, so the collection and its through-line supply all the character, which is exactly what the client wanted in the first place.
Boho and eclectic is a fun, relaxed style that mixes different colors, patterns and textures, often with elements gathered from various places around the country or the world. It feels collected and full of personality. What makes it design rather than accumulation is a through-line, usually a shared color temperature, material or visual weight, that every piece obeys.
Eclectic is about the mix of periods and styles and can be dark, formal or polished. Boho is a specific mood within that: relaxed, global, textured, with natural materials, plants and layered textiles. Both celebrate personality over a catalogue look, which is why the quiz groups them.
Two things: a through-line and a plan. The through-line is one consistent quality, warm wood, brass, deep color, that every piece shares. The plan is space planning done first so the scale of the furniture and lighting is right. Get both and a full room reads as curated; miss either and it reads as clutter.
Yes. The quality is carried by the construction of the big pieces, the custom upholstery, the millwork, the lighting, the rug, and by the editing. A collected room with a well-built sofa, a properly scaled rug and one wall given over to a real collection is more luxurious than a showroom, because it cannot be bought anywhere.
No, but you need to own something. Nearly everyone has objects they have carried through two or three moves because they actually love them: a chair, a rug, a set of plates, a painting, a textile from a trip. Those are the evidence of your real taste and the starting point of the room. We build around them and fill in over time rather than in one trip.
Very well, because it is forgiving. Layered textiles, performance fabrics where there are children or pets, natural materials that wear in rather than wear out. The relaxed quality of boho is a design decision, not a lack of one, and it suits a house that is actually lived in.
If the quiz gave you two styles, read both pages. The place where they overlap is usually the real brief, and it is almost always narrower than either label. Not sure where you sit? Take the style quiz.
Tell us about your home and how you want to live in it. We will walk you through our design process and what working together looks like.
