Western Decor Style for Your Home

Theme decorating has always been in style since there have been homes to decorate. Even the homes of ancient Rome had murals depicting various styles and scenes. Step ahead to our time and you will find that children's rooms and kitchens have almost always had a "theme" to them. The Wild West or rustic farm style has quite a few fanciers. There is a small distinction between southwestern style and western style. The southwestern leans more toward the Navajo and Hopi Indian designs where as the western style is more cowboy, cattle and horse based.

Decorating with a western flare or flavor can run the gambit from prairie settlements, cowboys and Indians to the rip roaring gold rush days. I have seen people decorate a family room in the style dedicated to the old west gunslinger complete with reproductions of photos showing the deceased gunslingers in their coffins or just after they were brought to justice. Your western decorating doesn't have to go quite that far and I have a few tips to get you going.

One of the cheapest items you can put up is pictures. If you have any family photos with horses, cattle or the old west, frame them and put them on display. You can also scan them into your computer and make them appear old by changing them to a sepia print. The internet is also a fine place to find photos of the old west which you can print out and frame. Don't limit yourself to just photos of the old west; one of my favorite personal photos was of a buffalo herd taken in the past few years. As a color photo it was just a nice ho hum nature shot but when I changed it to sepia the photo looked like something out of the old western days of the Indian buffalo hunts. My favorite way to search for photos on the internet is live.com and use the "image" tab. Live.com has more photos than Google and you can scroll on them instead of looking on the next page.

Adding unique items like spurs and horseshoes to the room can really add a touch of authentication. Old spurs can be either hung on the wall or displayed next to a photo on a shelf. Spurs can be found at antique stores, online on eBay and feed stores. You can either go with the rusty old type of spurs or buy a pair of new ones. If you want to make a rusty pair simply bury a new pair of regular steel ones for about a month or 2 in some mud. Horseshoes can be found at local feed stores or horse supply stores (known as tack shops). You can either bury them like the spurs for that rusty look or paint them and nail them to the wall.

There is a whole cottage industry based on western decor. Some companies specialize in making western decor items out of horseshoes like Wild West Collectibles and others make items out of carved leather. There is a wide variety of fabric prints that can add a dash of the old west to any room available at most fabric stores.

Ideas can be found by focusing on your favorite part of the old west whether it is cowboys, horses or the many old time inventions of the day. Let you imagination run wild.