I'm scouring the flea-markets, garage sales, and thrift-shops for secondhand
French Provinicial-style furniture. Specifically I'd like to get a small sofa and a couple of lounge chairs and an end-table. I think ones like those in the link above would look awesome in my living room, with green/brown/salmon/cream paisley upholstery. I'm doing my living room walls in a ragged olive-green over cream (actually about the same color of green as in the above link). A lot of this style of furniture has been sold in the US since the turn of the last century, I can probably find something that was made within the last 60 years pretty easily. I don't care if it is beat up pretty badly, because I want to have it re-upholstered, and make a matching slipcover for our existing sofa. The existing sofa is of no particular style nor distinction, but it is very comfortable, though it is aggressively ugly. I am holding off re-covering it until I find the other sofa and chairs, then I will do them all at once, to compliment each other.
Overall, my home-decor style is flea-market chic. None of our furniture really matches or comes from the same era, and the other
objets de art around the house are just goofy stuff we have accumulated over the years. I don't like a "done" house...to me it feels very impersonal to have things too perfect. I like the organic feel of acquiring stuff piecemeal over the course of time, and just kind of letting your decor happen. Generally speaking, I usually prefer older furniture to new furniture--I like older styles, and I can't afford new stuff anyway. I don't like IKEA because they are too modernistic for my taste and often their stuff is kind of flimsy. One of my big considerations is that any furniture I own is a permanent piece. I do not buy "throwaway" pieces, I do not "re-do" my entire house whenever fashions and fancy sieze me. Any piece I get is going to be a fixture in my household from here on out, to be refurbished as time goes by and upholstery grows shabby. Therefore anything I buy must be sturdy and good quality and must be capable of being taken apart, refurbished, and put back together. Plasticky stuff is generally not a good bet for me.
As far as colors go, I like strong colors for paint. My kitchen is very bright yellow, and the dining room is going to be a rusty burnt-orange, and the living room will be the olive/cream combination, with most emphasis on the green. The living room and dining room have excellent dark-colored woodwork and the whole house has natural hardwood floors. The bedroom is probably going to be a kind of turmeric yellowy-orangey color with reddish-orange trim and my sewing room will probably be salmon, turquoise, and silvery-grey, for a very 1950s feel. I think I might paint the bathroom walls silver and stencil bright, multicolored tropical fish as a border around the room over the "chair rail" that exists in there, and as a frieze over the lowered soffit over the tub and the enclosure the tub is mounted in.