Houseplant Design Tips for Every Room

Houseplant Design Tips for Every Room


Houseplants add life to a room while reducing stress and increasing joy. What's not to like? Here are six rooms and the plants that make them more livable and attractive. By Karen Weir-Jimerson
Deck out Your Dining Room

Deck out Your Dining Room

A centerpiece of cut flowers is the classic dining room table decor. Until now. A table dressed with a houseplant is just as beautiful and also more long lasting. Houseplant centerpieces can set the style and tone of the dining room. Think what sculptural succulents can do for a streamline mid-century Danish table. Or what an airy Pilea peperomioides adds to a room when displayed on a white farmhouse table with a hand-woven blue-and-white table runner.

Add A Conga Line on a Tabletop

Add A Conga Line on a Tabletop

A conga line of dracaena is a cool way to adorn a dining room table for a dinner party -- and you'll enjoy the look long after your guests have left. The dracaena family offer a wide range of leafy plants -- and mixing and matching them on a table top is great fun.

Hang Up in the Kitchen

Hang Up in the Kitchen

If you have limited surface area in your kitchen (because for some reason you like to use your countertop to prepare food rather than pack it full with plants), then a hanging plant is ideal for your kitchen. Hanging plants allow you to use vertical space near windows or in corners of the kitchen to add cascading plants that will infuse your eating area with green love. You can forgo curtains altogether and display a screen of hanging plants in a window that will create a natural view.

Hang out with hoya! Grow easy-care hoya in a variety of light levels (low, medium, or bright light.) Although hoya tolerates low and medium light, it doesn't typically bloom in these conditions. Like most flowering houseplants, the more light your hoya gets, the more flowers it will produce.

Ensure Sweet Dreams

Ensure Sweet Dreams

Whether you have a small bedroom or large one, most everyone has a nightstand--a spot next to the bed for a lamp, a good book, and a glass of water. Oh, and a houseplant. Adding a houseplant to your bedroom adds natural beauty, but also can help make your bedroom--the place you spend at least 8 hours a day--be a more healthy spot. Read more about how plants can cleanse the air and help you get better sleep.

As colorful as flowers! Red agalonema is a Thailand native with almond-shape leaves that are splashed with exciting streaks of red, pink, lime green, and white. Neutral-color-palette bedrooms benefit from a little pop of color from this leafy friend. Choose variegated plants to add texture and color to minimalist bedrooms.

Live It Up in the Living Room

Live It Up in the Living Room

If you want to make a big statement and make it fast, a tree-size floor plant is the way to go. In the corner or standing sentry beside a chair, sofa, or loveseat, a tree-size plant offers vertical greenery and life to a room. Rubber plant, fiddle leaf fig, and dracaena offer a wide range of leafy options. (Rubber plant has glossy leaves, fiddle leaf figs have rough irregular shape leaves, and dracaenas sport a frilly top knot of foliage.)

Decorator’s dream plant: Ficus lyrata. The fiddleleaf fig has long been the plant of choice when selecting one green element for a room by top designers. Flip open the pages of any decorator magazine (or check out design sites) and you’ll find the classic, good-looking fiddleleaf fig. Discover how to care for this plant.

Add Tropical Flair to a Porch

Add Tropical Flair to a Porch

Sun porches, screened porches, back patios--they are all outdoor rooms that generally have a lot of space to fill. Floor plants add a vertical accent to porches and patios. And while some indoor rooms may feel a bit cramped with a tree-size houseplant, outdoors it feels natural and grand.

Welcome, your majesty! If you want to add a tropical touch to your screened porch or back patio, add a majesty palm floor-size plant. Big, leafy, gushy, this palm offers a spray of bright foliage. It’s a plant that makes a statement. 

Beautify a Bathroom

Beautify a Bathroom

For plants that love humidity, a bathroom placement is a dream come true. Not only is your bathroom the most humid room in the house, but with all those faucets staring you in the face, it’s unlikely you’ll forget to water your plants. Bathroom surfaces, such as bathtub surrounds and insets in showers, are ideal spots to add a plant or two. Orchids love steamy spots. Orchids are epiphytes, which means that they take they moisture from the air. If you are so lucky as to have an insert built into your shower, place an orchid there. The thick air roots ofmoth orchids will drink in water every time you shower.

Here are other plants that grow well in bathrooms.