At Lavender Fields, our customers love modern farmhouse style - it’s one of our most popular categories on our site. Our interior design and e-design customers also love farmhouse style decor, and we layer their rooms in our favorite farmhouse style rugs, bedding, furniture, wallpaper and more. Here are our designer tips on how to decorate in modern farmhouse style.
What is modern farmhouse style?
Modern farmhouse style offers a more updated farmhouse aesthetic for your home. Most people love the feel of farmhouse living, but don’t want to live in a house straight out of the 1800s, filled only with antiques or old-fashioned finishes. Going the modern route lets you blend in different styles of artwork, furniture, and wallpaper. For example, you can do a rustic reclaimed wood farmhouse coffee table with clean white walls, a more midcentury-style sofa, and a great piece of contemporary art.
As interior designers, we’re adept at blending these styles together well. If you’re not a designer and are nervous about mixing styles, we have some tips for starting with your modern farmhouse journey.
Classic French Farmhouse vs. Rustic Farmhouse
Some people differentiate between a more industrial farmhouse look and a more classic or French farmhouse look. We think that both styles can live harmoniously together, if done right. We like industrial farmhouse elements like cool lighting, iron beds, and unique hardware, but also love the softer look of cozy French farmhouse chairs and more cottage-like French farmhouse bedding.
You can easily do a guest bedroom with an iron bed frame like our Corsican standard bed in white and your master bedroom with a custom upholstered headboard in a pretty slate gray linen. There are no hard and fast rules! In fact, the last thing you want is for your home to look “themed” or matchy-matchy, so mixing it up (within reason) is even better.
Start with the basics of your room
The easiest way to start decorating your room in modern farmhouse style is to start with a clean palette. From a designer’s perspective, we want the farmhouse furniture and accents to really stand out in this room - if we add too much “stuff” or color, the room will look less modern farmhouse and more antique farmhouse.
When we decorate a home in this style, we start with a fresh coat of white paint on the walls. We like Benjamin Moore’s Simply White - it’s a warmer white that offsets the warm tones of the rustic wood you’ll soon be adding.
A lot of people think of shiplap walls when they think of a farmhouse thanks to HGTV, but this is an expensive and time consuming treatment. You can get that same clean feel with just a fresh coat of the perfect white paint.
If you’re doing a kitchen or bathroom, we like clean white subway tile or penny tile with black or white grout. Not only are these inexpensive options, they give the perfect palette to the farmhouse decor you’ll be decorating with.
We love wallpaper when done judiciously.If your home is open concept, finding a wall to use wallpaper on can be difficult, as you don’t want it to just end in the middle of the room. Good spots to use wallpaper in these homes are smaller rooms like powder rooms, laundry rooms, mud rooms, bedrooms, and dining rooms (if your dining room has its own room with its own walls and isn’t part of the open concept area). Contrary to popular belief, wallpaper won’t make a small room look smaller; in fact, it turns a powder room or laundry room into a fun little jewel box, making an oft-overlooked space into a special one.
Layer in your Farmhouse Rugs and Furniture
A rug is a huge part of your decor - you may not realize it, but from a design standpoint, it takes up a huge part of the visual landscape, even though the furniture covers part of it. Some people think they don’t need a rug in a modern space, but rugs warm up the room and make it feel cozier and more liveable.
At Lavender Fields, we have a huge selection of Dash and Albert farmhouse style rugs. If you’re sticking with a more neutral look and bringing in color elsewhere, stick with a sisal or jute rug. If you want to bring in a little bit of subtle color, try a Pom Pom at Home one, like this pretty blue stripe Beechwood rug.
Next, choose your furniture. Unless you’re hiring an interior designer, most people don’t buy all new furniture in one fell swoop and instead select one investment piece at a time. We have a great selection of artisan-made, heirloom-quality farmhouse furniture on our site. It’s all made from solid wood, and will last you for decades to come. A rustic sideboard cabinet or reclaimed wood dining table looks fresh in a room with fresh white paint, a new sisal rug, cool industrial lighting, and modern farmhouse accents.
Add in your Farmhouse Style Art and Decor
We love to create gallery walls for our design clients. With clean, fresh white walls, the artwork can really shine. We’ll put their most treasured photos in our Traditional Modern Farmhouse Reclaimed Wood Frame or the Farmhouse Reclaimed Rustic Wood Picture Frame Set, which comes in a set of 1, 2, 3 or 4. For a gallery wall, we might add something whimsical, like our farmhouse style art painted on barnwood. We like to finish it with a Spicher and Company Letter Print with the first letter of the family name.
For a more contemporary feel, our Hyden Horses photography collection is perfect. They’re available framed or unframed, and at 54”x42”, they make a major statement.
If you’re looking for unique farmhouse style artwork, we love our Sugarboo collection. The fabric tarps are handmade, and in our clients’ homes we hang them with Sugarboo’s hand-forged metal nails. We like the Sugarboo Designs Handmade Botanical Wall Tarp - Each Flower Must Grow wall tarp in a living room.
We always finish a farmhouse room with farmhouse style throw pillows. Our favorites are the Sweet Gumball Farmhouse Lumbar Pillow, the Taylor Linens Farmhouse Stripe Boudoir pillow for a bedroom, the Taylor Linens Old Glory pillow for an Americana vibe, and our Damask Linen Euro Pillow Sham for a French farmhouse feel.
Modern Farmhouse Kitchen and Bathroom Ideas
A modern farmhouse vibe works especially well in kitchens and bathrooms. Most of us don’t have old homes with original 18th or 19th century kitchens, (and to be honest, would we even want them?). You can have a beautiful kitchen with marble countertops and white cabinets but get that modern farmhouse feel with gingham roman shades, cup pulls on your cabinets, farmhouse cross back chairs, and vintage-y lighting, like our Jamie Young Provisions pendant.
To add some decor to the kitchen, we love a Spicher and Company Farmer's Market Tomato Seeds Framed Print to bring a Farmer’s Market vibe. Somerset Bay Oakville Stools are classic country home, but in 22 finishes you can go all white or bring in a little color (we love a bold navy blue).
For a powder room, we’d do a pretty farmhouse-inspired wallpaper paired with a simple penny tile and a pedestal sink.
Bathrooms need decor too - we’d add our handmade Etu Home French Mason Jar in small with fresh flowers and whimsical farmhouse artwork, like our Rosie the Cow barnwood artwork.
The trick to keeping the “modern” in a modern farmhouse is restraint. In bathrooms, we like to do that by keeping the soft goods like towels and shower curtains white - let the artwork, wallpaper, and decorative accents give the farmhouse vibe. Some of our favorite classic but never boring white shower curtains are the Pine Cone Hill Diamond Embroidered White Shower Curtain, the Pine Cone Hill Diamond Eyelet White Shower Curtain, and the Pine Cone Hill Trio White Shower Curtain.
For towels, we stick with our Pine Cone Hill signature white towel collection - always soft and absorbent, always classic. If you want to add a little color to your farmhouse bath mat, we’d go with our Pine Cone Hill Rowe Shale Stripe bath mat; otherwise, we love our Pine Cone Hill Modesto Bath Mat to add some texture.
Decorate your home with modern farmhouse style
Our customers and interior design clients alike come to us for modern farmhouse furniture and decor. Get in touch with us for our e-design services, or shop our farmhouse collection on our site here.
