If you’ve been following along with this Soulful Home series, you’ve done quite a bit of work already.

You’ve cleared a space and taken stock of what is and isn’t working in your home. You’ve taken time to dream instead of jumping immediately into solutions. You’ve thought about your lifestyle: what you actually do at home and how you want to live. And you’ve explored your aesthetic: the colors, materials, places and images that make you feel most alive.

All of that has been about Discovering Your Soul Style.

Now we are ready to do something with it.

But before we start buying furniture, choosing fabrics or falling in love with a fabulous wallpaper, it helps to understand where we are going. Because creating a Soulful Home happens in three basic stages:

Discover Your Soul Style.
Build a Timeless and Classic Base.
Finish It With Layers.

These three steps are the foundation of my design process. And while every home, and every person, is different, the order matters.

Why the Order Matters

One of the easiest mistakes to make in decorating a home is to start with the thing that catches your eye.

You see a beautiful sofa online. You fall in love with a rug. You find a fabulous pair of lamps. So you buy them and figure you’ll work everything else out later.

Sometimes you get lucky.

Other times, you discover six months later that the beautiful white sofa doesn't stand up to the dog. Or it looked substantial online but feels puny once it arrives in your large living room. Or it simply doesn't seat the way your family actually gathers.

Now you're $3,000 into the wrong sofa—and still need a sofa.

That's what I mean by spending good money after bad.

It would have been better to slow down, understand what the room needed, and spend $5,000 once on the properly scaled sofa in a durable fabric that can handle your actual life.

This is why we don't begin with shopping.

We begin with you.

Step One: Discover Your Soul Style

Your Soul Style is the combination of your lifestyle and your aesthetic—how you want to live and what makes you feel alive.

That's what we've been uncovering throughout the first four chapters of this series.

Before making expensive decisions about your home, you need some understanding of what you're asking the home to do for you. Do you curl up and read? Host twenty people for cocktails? Have grandchildren piling onto the sofa? Do you want a quiet retreat at the end of the day, or a house buzzing with family and friends?

And what kind of environment makes that life feel like yours?

Your Soul Style becomes your true north. It doesn't give you a shopping list. It gives you something much more valuable: a way to evaluate the choices in front of you.

In my upcoming book, I describe Soul Style as a guide for working through virtually any home-design problem.

And we're about to put it to work.

Step Two: Build a Timeless and Classic Base

Once you understand yourself, you can turn your attention to the physical room.

What does this room need in order to work?

I call these essential pieces the building blocks. They give a room its basic form and structure. In a Soulful Home, however, they do more than fulfill a generic function. They need to support the particular way you live.

Think about your wardrobe.

Most of us have a few dependable pieces that form the foundation of what we wear: the little black dress, the great blazer, the jeans that fit perfectly.

They're not necessarily the loudest pieces in the closet. That's not their job.

They're simple, versatile and enduring. You can dress them up or down. You can add a great scarf, shoes, jewelry or jacket. The accessories can change with your mood, the season and even the trends; but the beautifully fitting foundation remains.

Your home works much the same way.

For a living room, the timeless and classic base might be a sofa and two chairs.

Or it might be a sectional and an ottoman.

Those main furniture pieces anchor the room. Once they're right, the coffee table, side tables, lamps, pillows, rugs, art and accessories begin to fall into place around them. As I explain in The Soulful Home, even the coffee table follows the seating because its appropriate size and shape depend upon the furniture around it.

The sofa and chairs - or sectional and ottoman - are the equivalent of that little black dress.

They are your timeless and classic base.

The manuscript describes these pieces as a kind of blank canvas: strong enough to last for years, but simple enough to allow everything around them to evolve.

And "timeless and classic" does not mean boring.

Nor does it mean that everyone should own the same beige sofa.

Your building blocks still need to reflect your Soul Style. A modern, practical person's ideal sofa may be very different from the sofa chosen by someone whose Soul Style leans traditional and sensual.

The point is not that the pieces all look alike.

The point is that they fit.

They fit your body. They fit the scale of the room. They fit the architecture. They accommodate the things you actually do there. They can withstand the demands of your household. And aesthetically, they feel like you.

That's where the work we've already done begins to pay off.

Then, and Only Then, Come the Layers

Once the building blocks are right, we can Finish It With Layers.

This is where the room really begins to unfold: rugs, lamps, pillows, textiles, color, pattern, art, books, objects, window treatments and all of those collected things that give a home its atmosphere and personality.

Layers are important. In fact, they're often what we notice first when we walk into a beautiful room.

But they come after the foundation.

And there is something wonderfully freeing about that.

You don't have to figure out the entire room today.

You don't have to buy everything at once.

Once the important pieces are right, you can spend good time and money on what really counts, and then allow the rest of the room to develop. You can live with it. Pay attention to it. Find the artwork on a trip. Discover the strange little antique table you never would have known to search for. Change the pillows. Add a lamp. Save for the rug you really love instead of buying one you don't simply because the room feels unfinished.

This is part of what makes a Soulful Home different from a room that has simply been "decorated."

It has time to become yours.

The manuscript describes this process as allowing the home to develop in stages: once you know what needs to happen first and what can happen later, you can relax, live with the room and curate the finishing touches with greater intention.

So What Are the Building Blocks of Your Room?

For the next few chapters, we're going to use the living room as our laboratory.

It's a wonderful room for this exercise because it sits right at the intersection of lifestyle and aesthetic. A living room might need to accommodate conversation, television, reading, children, pets, entertaining, lounging, a fireplace, a view - or all of the above. That's precisely why the manuscript uses it as the case study for building a timeless and classic base.

And we'll begin with what sounds like a very simple question:

Does your living room need a sofa and chairs - or a sectional?

The answer isn't in a furniture catalog.

It's in everything you've just learned about your Soul Style, your lifestyle—and in what the room itself is telling you.

That's where we'll go next.