How to Create a Pinterest Mood Board for Your Interior Design Project

Pinterest is one of the most useful tools available to anyone starting an interior design project. Used well, a well-curated board communicates your taste, priorities and vision to your designer more clearly than a written brief ever could. Used carelessly, it creates confusion rather than clarity.

This guide walks through how to build a Pinterest board that genuinely serves your project, one that gives your designer a true picture of what you are drawn to and why. If you have not yet put together your design brief, our interior design brief guide is a good place to start before you open Pinterest.

What is Pinterest?

Source: Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual discovery platform where users collect and organise images into boards. Think of it as a digital mood board. You browse images, save the ones that resonate with you, and over time your collection begins to reveal patterns about your taste that you may not have been fully conscious of before you started.

For interior design projects, it is particularly valuable because it bypasses the difficulty of describing what you want in words. Showing a designer twelve images that all share a particular quality of light, a material palette, or a sense of scale communicates something that would take pages to explain in writing.

Step 1: Start Broad, Then Edit Ruthlessly

Moodboard by House Designer

Begin by casting widely. In the first session, save anything that catches your eye without overthinking it. Do not filter too early. The goal at this stage is to gather raw material and let your instincts lead.

Once you have fifty or more pins, step back and look at the board as a whole. Patterns will begin to emerge. You may notice that you are consistently drawn to rooms with warm timber tones, or that every kitchen you have saved has open shelving, or that the bedrooms you love all have curtains that pool on the floor. These patterns are more revealing than any single image.

Now edit. The temptation with Pinterest is to keep adding, to treat a larger board as a more useful one. It is not. A board of two hundred images overwhelms rather than informs. Your designer cannot extract a clear direction from a collection that pulls in twenty different directions. Be intentional. Remove anything that does not genuinely reflect how you want your home to feel. Aim for a board that is cohesive enough that someone looking at it for the first time could describe your style in a sentence or two.

Step 2: Set Up Your Board Properly

Moodboard by House Designer

Create a dedicated board for your project with a clear name such as “Home Design Project” or “Living Room Redesign.” Keep it separate from any general inspiration boards you already have so that everything your designer sees is directly relevant to the project in hand.

Within the board, use Pinterest’s section feature to organise your pins by room or by theme. Sections such as Living Room, Kitchen, Bedroom, Materials and Colours, and Lighting help your designer navigate the board quickly and understand which ideas apply where. A single undivided board of mixed images is harder to read than one with clear categories.

Make the board shareable. In your Pinterest settings, ensure the board is set to public or that you have the share link ready to send. You will be sharing this with your designer before your first consultation, so having it accessible from the outset saves time.

Step 3: Add Notes to Your Pins

Moodboard by House Designer

This is the step most people skip and the one that makes the most difference. When you save a pin, use the description field to note what specifically drew you to it. Not just “I like this room” but what about it you like. Is it the colour of the walls? The way the sofa relates to the fireplace? The quality of light in the image? The material of the floor?

These notes help your designer understand not just what you are drawn to but why, and that distinction matters enormously. Two people can save the same image for entirely different reasons. Knowing which reason applies to you allows your designer to make decisions that honour your actual preferences rather than their interpretation of an image.

It is also worth noting things you do not want. If there is a style, material, or colour that consistently puts you off, say so. A board that shows what to avoid as well as what to pursue gives your designer a much more complete picture of your taste.

Step 4: Share It Early and Use It as a Conversation Tool

Share your board with your designer before your first consultation, not during it. Having it in advance means the conversation can go further faster. Rather than spending the early part of the session establishing basic preferences, your designer can arrive having already identified the patterns in your board, formed questions about specific pins, and begun thinking about how your ideas translate to your actual space.

During the consultation, use the board as a reference rather than a script. Your designer may respond to certain pins with questions that reveal something you had not consciously articulated. They may point out that several images you love share a quality that would be achievable in your home in a specific way, or flag that something you have pinned extensively would not work given your aspect, budget, or layout. These conversations are where the board does its best work.

A well-curated mood board is not the end of the brief process. It is the beginning of a dialogue. The more honest and intentional it is, the more productive that dialogue will be.

Step 5: Keep It Current as the Project Develops

Your thinking will evolve as the project progresses. A room you had not considered carefully at the start may become a priority. A material or colour direction you were uncertain about may become clearer once you see it in other contexts. Keep the board updated to reflect where your thinking actually is rather than where it was when you first set it up.

Remove pins that no longer feel right. Add new ones as you encounter them. If your designer shares references or suggestions, you can invite them to contribute pins directly to the board, which creates a genuinely collaborative visual conversation rather than a one-way presentation of your ideas.

Beyond Pinterest: Other Sources Worth Gathering

Pinterest is an excellent starting point but it is not the only source worth drawing on. Instagram accounts from designers and studios whose work you admire, interior design magazines such as House Beautiful, Livingetc and World of Interiors, and images from your own experiences, a hotel room, a restaurant, a friend’s house, often surface ideas that Pinterest’s algorithm would never have suggested to you.

Photographs you have taken yourself are particularly valuable. If you have saved a picture of a corner in a shop, a staircase in a building you visited, or a window treatment in a hotel room, share those too. They reflect a spontaneous, genuine reaction to something in the real world rather than a curated image optimised for engagement on a platform.

Bring everything together and share it all with your designer. The more complete and honest the picture, the better the design will be. You can also browse our own completed interior design projects for ideas, and follow us on Pinterest for regular inspiration curated by our design team.

Ready to start your project? Book a free consultation and share your board with us ahead of the call.