Why Use Antique Mirrors? Understanding How to Style Your Home

Creating a beautiful and stylish look throughout your home requires the right combination of quality furniture and an understanding of light, space, and harmony. Simple additions such as a beautiful antique mirror or the way in which you position certain furniture items in a given room can have a huge impact on the way your home feels.

You don’t have to be an interior designer or furniture expert to beautify your home. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know in order to create a more natural traditional French look in your home. We’ll also cover the best place to find  antique mirrors for sale so that you have just what you need to capture the perfect look you want.

Using Light to Improve the Atmosphere in Your Home

Light is easily one of the most underrated aspects of creating an elegant-looking home. Without a decent grasp on how lighting affects the look of your decor, you might have trouble creating a particular look.

Many pieces of antique furniture can appear dull in poor lighting. Without the proper light in a space, shadows can obscure even the prettiest pieces of furniture or decor arrangements. And while you might be inclined to compensate by using lamps, it’s all-too-easy to crowd your home with these items, further cluttering your arrangement.

But what do you do if a certain space in your home simply doesn’t receive enough natural light? We’re not all blessed with beautiful bay windows in every room, and even relatively large rooms can feel dark and cramped depending on where they are located in your home and how many windows are present. In cases like this, you might want to consider utilizing a beautiful antique mirror to lighten things up a bit.

Why not use a lamp or even a chandelier instead? If you have a certain room in your house that is truly suffering from poor lighting, a stylish vintage chandelier is certainly an option you might want to consider. Before installing one of these fixtures however, you may want to investigate how a mirror might be able to alter the way the room looks.

Even if its your living room or dining room that needs a bit of an enhancement when it comes to the lighting, a mirror might be the solution here. Although you may be accustomed to mirrors only being placed in bathrooms and bedrooms, these elegant decor items actually look great just about anywhere in your home and can be used to direct light and define spaces as needed.

This is important because poor lighting can have a strong impact on the way your furniture pieces look. If you have worked diligently to put together a lovely French Provincial home but certain areas feel off or are muddied at certain times of the day, the lighting is probably to blame. When arranging your furniture pieces, you want to be mindful of your windows and the direction that light enters the room. You need to be mindful that you only cover your windows with large furniture pieces if absolutely necessary and that you leave plenty of space for walkability and so that your home doesn’t feel cramped.

Having too much furniture in too small a space can contribute to stuffiness and a feeling of imbalance. The more furniture you have in a given room, the more shadows that you will naturally be dealing with as well. One of the reasons why certain rooms feel cramped or darker than they are supposed to be is because the abundance of furniture pieces create overlapping shadows that take away from the details and aesthetics of your carefully-chosen furniture pieces.

If you want your antique furniture to stand out and look its best, you will want to leave plenty of space in each room so that your furniture can breathe. This means not trying to cram too much in any one place unless you have immaculate lighting to work with. A beautiful bright room that gets ample lighting is the perfect setting to experiment with a playful and crowded design, but if you only have limited lighting to work with, its best to find a happy balance between style and functionality when it comes to the amount of furniture you select for a given room.

How Mirrors Create Depth in Cramped Spaces

The gorgeous antique mirrors for sale in our store are just what you need to brighten your home and create depth where it is lacking. The right mirror is the perfect element to add to rooms that need better lighting that can’t be found through natural means.

While mirrors certainly offer plenty of practical value in vanity areas or in the bathroom, where being able to see yourself comes in handy for making sure your outfit or makeup look flawless, you have to consider the variety of other uses these decor items have. The reflective properties of mirrors give them the ability to easily shift the appearance of rooms and give them more depth with ease.

Think about the way in which we perceive space. A large mirror can immediately add the illusion of another area even though on a certain level we understand that it is merely a flat surface. However, mirrors have been used for thousands of years to help improve the atmosphere of indoor spaces and create the illusion of depth, and this same technique can be used expertly throughout your home.

For cramped spaces, the addition of a large antique floor mirror can dramatically enhance the general feeling of the room in question. Not only do they immediately seem to increase the available space, they also help to improve the lighting as well. By reflecting back the available light, the surface of the mirror becomes another light source in itself. Rather than installing a new light fixture or cramming another lamp into an already crowded space, you can place a mirror so that it is opposite an available light source in order to create a variety of attractive effects.

This works especially well with natural light sources, which tend to be less concentrated. Mirrors do reflect back the lights of lamps and sconces of course but these concentrated light sources tend to blot out everything else when they are reflected on a mirror’s surface. In general, as you style your home, you want to make use of natural light as best as possible in all circumstances. In most cases, natural light sources are going to be more flattering for your furniture pieces, easier on the eyes, and will be more inviting to look at in general.

With the right kind of vintage-style mirrors, you can also utilize layering to create even more interesting looks. You can easily place decorative objects like vases and books in front of an elegant floor mirror, or place your mirror behind an armchair or sofa in order to create a dynamic look. Because of their slim frame, it is easy to utilize a mirror in ways other kinds of furniture and decor cannot. This adds to the value of mirrors and why it’s certainly worth having a few in your home if you plan on creating an atmospheric arrangement.

The Unique Properties of Antique Mirrors

Another reason why antique mirrors specifically make incredible decor items for your home is that they possess elegant properties that other mirrors lack. Typically, most modern mirrors have extremely minimalist frames that, while versatile, tend to lack any sort of defining element or carvings that would make them stand out as artistic pieces in their own right.

A beautiful antique French mirror will usually have an array of unique carvings featured on their stately solid-wood frames. These can range from delicate enhancements that provide a feminine aspect to the pieces, to highly elaborate and unorthodox Baroque designs that would look more appropriate in a shabby chic setting.

High-quality handcrafted antique mirrors are easy to place within an established French Provincial setting. Based on the particular carvings and other designs that your mirror has, they tend to pair well with other pieces of French furniture such as vanity tables, dressers, armchairs, and benches.

These special properties of antique-style mirrors are part of what makes them so potentially transformative for your home. No matter what style or look you are going for in your home, one of these antique pieces could certainly compliment the rest of your furniture and give your home that luxurious feel. Whether you are trying to create the perfect Provincial bedroom, a tiny little reading nook in your living room, or an expansive dining hall that needs a bit more natural light, the use of a mirror or two could go a long way.

Now that you know a little more about how useful a mirror can be, it’s time to go about finding ones that will fit your home and provide that true sense of French luxury.

Finding High-Quality Antique Mirrors For Sale Online

Once you realize how versatile these beautiful decor items can be, you will want to pick up a mirror or two for yourself. If you are looking for an easy way to brighten a certain room of your home or create a more artistic look without completely remodeling or installing anything, quality vintage-style mirrors are the best solution.

It’s not always easy to find high-quality mirrors though. Even most high-end furniture stores tend to have a very limited selection of attractive options here, especially when it comes to luxurious floor mirrors that can have a powerful impact on your home. It’s important to be able to have access to a great selection of mirrors, in order to find just the right ones that will fit your home and suit your individual needs. While many antique mirrors are versatile in the sense that their designs can be implemented alongside many other varieties of furniture, this is not always the case. If you are looking for a mirror that has a particular kind of Provincial feel to it or if you are specifically on the lookout for an antique mirror that has floral carvings for instance, it might be difficult to come across one if you don’t know exactly where to look.

For a wide selection of lovely antique mirrors for sale, you are likely to find what you need right here in our online furniture boutique. Here at Eloquence, we understand the importance of both quality and selection when it comes to vintage furniture and decor. Finding a piece of high-quality furniture is one thing, but if the selection is limited, how are you supposed to truly create the right kind of look in your home?

With a wide variety of meticulously-crafted furniture to choose from, our store is sure to have what you are looking for. We have complete vintage bedroom sets in a variety of lovely styles, elegant armchairs, bookcases, dining room sets, antique mirrors, chandeliers, and more, all of which are of the highest quality to ensure that your arrangement will come out just the way you want.

When it comes to beautiful mirrors specifically, we have an incredible selection that is unrivaled. Mirrors are one of the most versatile pieces of antique furniture you can include in your home, allowing you to enhance your home in a variety of ways. Our selection reflects this fact, with designs ranging from stately to fantastical, you will be able to use these fine decor pieces to build a truly stunning arrangement.

If you have any questions about which of our antique mirrors is right for your home, or if you want to know more about any of the vintage-style pieces listed in our online catalog, you can easily reach our team by calling 310-876-0661. Not only are we known for our incredible furniture pieces, but our knowledgeable customer service as well. We want to help you create the home of your dreams with the help of our luxury furniture items!