Meeting of the Minds: 8 Tips for Decorating an Apartment with a Roommate

Whether your roommate is your lifelong bestie or a new acquaintance you met via Craigslist, chances are you'll have distinctly different decorating tastes. The style of your Springs luxury apartment home is hardly something you can learn to ignore. What to do?

Fortunately, there are peaceful ways to work out a compromise and live to tell the tale. Here are some of our favorite tips for combining styles while keeping both sides relatively satisfied.

1. Have the "Talk"

Clearly, you can't just wing it and hope for the best. Sit down with your roommate over a soy latte and discuss your likes, dislikes and deal breakers. Give yourself enough time before move-in so that you don't feel rushed and pressured to give in.

2. Pinterest Is Your Friend

Pinterest is home to an endless number of decorating ideas featuring all kinds of styles, colors and price points. The two of you can browse at your leisure to find items you both agree on. Doesn't that sound better than ending up with sore feet after days spent at the mall?

3. Pool Your Resources

Inventory your existing furniture and accessories and decide which pieces you can use in the new place. Sometimes you can do a little DIY tweaking to make items more cohesive. You won't need two of most things, so decide what you will do with duplicates. One good idea is to sell them and make some cash to buy new furnishings!

4. Make Your Bedroom a Sanctuary

Your bedroom is the one place where you can completely indulge your personal style. This makes it easier to compromise on shared spaces.

5. Divide and Conquer

Perhaps your roomie has strong ideas about what the bathroom should look like, while you have a clear vision of your dream kitchen. You can both take ownership of specific areas and reduce the amount of haggling needed to arrive at a consensus for each room.

6. Focus on the Big Picture

Don't try to force a square peg into a round hole. Consider the overall floor plan of your new apartment and choose a decor that sets it off to its best advantage rather than trying to shoehorn in your zebra print shag rug.

7. Think Neutral

People often have strong feelings about colors. Instead of arguing about whether to use her burnt orange sofa or your purple velvet loveseat, settle on a palette of neutral colors for the larger pieces and use accessories like wall art, throw pillows and picture frames to add pops of color.

8. Seek Common Ground

Learning each other's style is a nice way to strengthen a relationship. Ask your roommate about her fondness for a particular item, or compliment her on an item you find interesting. Just make sure that you're sincere and natural instead of forced.

Have you ever had to work out a decorating difference with a roommate? Tell us about it in the comments!