Ideas For Decorating Large Spaces

Just as in home decor, the size of your space determines the scale of furniture, accents and lighting. When you have a large space to decorate you will find that using larger pieces will bring greater impact. My sister recently hosted a surprise birthday party for her friend and I loved the decorations she made for the party. They were the perfect, bold and fun statement to transform the space from a mulit-purpose basketball hall to a party room. Best of all, her decorations demonstrate that having a large space does not always equal the need for a large budget.

We were still setting things up a little bit (isn’t that always how it goes, once the party is going you just get going and don’t take pictures!) but you’ll get the idea:

She purchased colored butcher paper at Zurchers. They offer several colors and it is only about $.50 per yard! You can also find it at craft stores and other party supply stores for very similar prices. She was inspired by this post on crepe paper fringe (you can buy the large rolls of crepe paper here). To create fringe from the paper she cut long 12″ strips and used a paper cutter to slice it into fringe. She also hand drew the Happy Birthday sign – don’t you want to hate people that have good handwriting? Mine is bad, and just gets worse when I write on a chalkboard or am trying to make a sign.

The fringe was hung from the center of each end of the rectangular shaped room and draped out to each side. She also made – and this is actually my favorite detail – paper airplane garlands that hung on each side as well. I wish the photos showed them better, because they were so cute. I loved that they were modern and perfect for her Art teaching friend, but not trendy and overdone. Maybe they will be after this post since they really were SO CUTE! Let’s start a paper airplane trend, k?

Down the center of the room, from end to end, she hung large 24″ green and white paper lanterns with paper airplanes in between each lantern. Important note, she selected a bright, crisp color pallet and didn’t add in any pattern. There is a lot of texture with the fringe, airplanes and lanterns, but pattern would get lost in such a large space.  

Unfortunately, my photos of the entire room turned out blurry – thanks in part to the fact that I was trying to wrestle my wiggly toddler in one arm and part to the fact that I was taking photos with my phone since I forgot my real camera. Fortunately, you get the idea that the large blocks of color, paired with the large scale and choosing texture over pattern for visual interest.