For the Home: Personalization vs. Clutter..where to draw the line?

Being the daughter of a Realtor who sells almost exclusively high-end homes in the Northern New Jersey/NYC Metro-Suburban area, I think I may have a skewed perception of home decor. Almost every home I've seen and loved has been immaculately decorated by an interior designer for the homeowner's personal use or by a professional stager for the purpose of selling the home. The most important element of all this is that for the purpose of allowing a buyer to envision themselves living in the home, the seller often opts to remove any personal affects from all visible surfaces in the home. Of course it leaves the home looking immaculately clean, and growing up this was essentially our home's perception of "clean".

Similar to the idea of when your mom told you to clean your room that meant to "make your bed" which translated to you to simply throw all visible contents on the bed into the closet and close the door. Which I essentially did too, but the same went for everything on my desk, the floor, the chair beside the bed, etc. All surfaces needed to be clear, because everything had a place, and more than likely that place had a door/drawer.



So now when my family comes to visit, I think about clearing the surfaces of my home, but the more friends apartments and homes I go to visit, home decor blogs and pins I see on Pinterest, I start to feel like my home isn't cozy. It's clean, but I don't feel the warmth that only personal affects, excuse me, visible personal affects can bring. And so as I decorate my new home, which is a blank canvas for me to express myself in and feel comfy in, keeping in mind that space is limited, how do I manage to maintain the balance of personalization without looking cluttered or messy?

I love the way Meredith of "Meredith & Gwyneth, The New Yorkie" has maximized space and personalized her roughly 500 sq ft studio, but also can't help but think can this get messy really quickly if just one too many things are out of place?

How do you keep this....

(via The Decorologist)

from turning into this...?

(via Google Search)

Woe is me. lol

xox