How to Style a Coffee Table: 7 Tips from Professional Property Stylists

We love styling coffee tables! From the home-staging perspective, a coffee table is the perfect spot for adding a lifestyle factor to the overall look, which makes homes for sale more attractive in the eyes of the buyers.

Being the centrepiece of the living room, the styling potential of a coffee table is enormous. Its small surface area is the perfect size to achieve the magazine-worthy look regardless of how much experience you have with interior design.

The best décor to use for styling a coffee table:

Candles
Books or magazines
Vases
Decorative beads
Plants or flowers
Coasters
Miscellaneous trinkets

Styling a coffee table is easy, as long as you keep certain guidelines in mind. Having styled hundreds and hundreds of coffee tables, we’ve narrowed these guidelines down to seven tips and tricks, that are guaranteed to make your coffee table look like it’s been styled by a professional Property Stylist!

1. Stick To One Theme or Colour Palette

If you love more than one style of interior design, don’t worry – you are perfectly normal. Most of us love the look of a few different styles. As tempting as it may be to mix & match multiple design elements, trust us when we say that a “contemporary mismatched” is not exactly the most aesthetically pleasing look. Choose and settle on ONE style or a colour palette and make it cohesive throughout your entire home. This creates a nice flow and makes your shopping decisions much easier!

2. Rule of Three

Three is the magic number when it comes to creating visual interest and making anything more memorable. When it comes to styling coffee tables, the rule of three refers to three clusters of objects, not three individual décor items.

Read “Rule of Three in Home Styling”.

3. Create Varying Heights and Depth

If all the decorative items were the same height or size, there’s a good chance that the arrangement comes across flat and boring. To break up the look, choose elements of at least three different heights and place them on the coffee table them with the tallest in the back and the smallest at the front, facing the entrance of the room (just like taking a family portrait).

Differentiating the heights and creating depth by correct placement of the accessories creates a sense of symmetry and balance.

4. Play With Different Textures & Shapes

This goes hand in hand with our previous tip. If you want to give your coffee table a dynamic and interesting look, mix up the materials and shapes. We like the combination of warm & cold materials (fabric + stone), rough & soft textures (rattan + cotton), and shiny & matte finishes. You can experiment with different shapes as well, for example placing a round tray on a rectangular table is guaranteed to create a contrasting, eye-catching look.

5. Add Something Green

A plant or a flower is an absolute must for a coffee table. It adds a sense of vibrancy and freshness to the arrangement, bringing the entire coffee table to life. In our case of staging homes for sale, anything green makes the real estate photos pop.

Read “How to choose the best greenery for property staging”.

6. Create Contrast With the Table Top Finish

At Foxy, we have a rule to never match the coffee table finish with accessories made from the same material. A glass vase with a glass trinket on a glass coffee table is too much of the one finish, which appears washed out and bland. Showcasing a medley of different textures is vital to create that magazine-worthy look.

7. Don’t Overstyle It

The more decorations, the prettier it is…. right? Wrong. It’s a tempting thought, though, we understand.

Because the coffee tables are rather small in size, it’s very easy to accidentally create an overcrowded, busy look. Make sure to leave some breathing space around the edges and create enough room to make it a functional space as well.

Read “Minimalist style from the perspective of a home-stager”.