Decorating the entrance to your home for the season is fun and simple. I love autumn and by autumn I mean the pretty fall colors, the crisp cooler air, and the delicious apple and pumpkin foods that appear everywhere. I do not mean Halloween. I loathe Halloween. Okay, except for maybe the candy…but the decor usually ranges from tacky to gruesome and I REALLY don’t care for most of it. Jenna has promised me a post on elegant decor for your haunted Victorian mansion in time for Halloween, but there will be no gravestones, severed limbs, skeletons, dancing ghosts, or giant spiderwebbing involved!

Back to autumn decor…Your front door is the introduction to your home for your guests.  With these tips you can be ready for fall with an entrance that says “welcome to my home” (as opposed to “welcome to my theme park!”).

Take the exterior colors of your home into consideration – particularly the front door. 

If you have opted for a statement color for your front door, it may or may not work well with the traditional fall colors of gold, red and orange, and if you need help deciding on a front door color – check out THIS post. That doesn’t mean you can’t decorate for fall, it just means you have to think carefully about the choices you make so your seasonal décor doesn’t clash with your house! Perhaps your fall decor could include purple mums, purple and green kale, and white and green pumpkins rather than the more expected fall tones.

Consider other exterior spaces

Depending on your entry, you may have just a front step and door or you may have window boxes or a porch to spruce up for fall.  If your garage is prominently placed, it too may need a touch of seasonal décor.

Carefully decide whether to use real or faux

If you are going for a gracious look for your entry, and I assume that you have lovely taste, then you can’t go wrong with natural elements – fall flowers, berries, colorful leaves, pumpkins, and gourds.   I am a big fan of good looking faux versions for outdoors…we have very feisty squirrels here that nibble on our real pumpkins like we laid out a buffet just for them!  And if you live in warmer climates, the window for real pumpkins is short before they rot and turn into a puddle of slime on the front steps. And half eaten pumpkin sludge is decidedly NOT gracious and welcoming. Bonus: faux natural elements can be used for more than a single season!

Edit Judiciously

Many people go all out with their seasonal décor adding signs, bales of hay, cornstalks and the like.  I confess to having tied corn stalks to my front columns and stacking bales of hay to arrange pumpkins in my distant past.  There is a fine line between lushly decorated and theme park.  For simple elegance, less is more.  Beautifully curated items will be easier on the wallet and take less time and storage space than a whole craft store full of décor.  I have edited down to decorating my entrance with a wreath or basket on the door, a garland on the ledge over the door, a pair of urns filled with seasonal flowers or pumpkins, and seasonal décor in my window boxes.  BUT, scale is everything!   A whole bunch of small items is going to look much more cluttered and have less impact than a few well chosen statement pieces.

The natural bittersweet never seems to produce berries until well after the fall decorating season, so I opt for faux stems - the bonus is they don’t fall off or shrivel up like the real ones do! And I often use an assortment of different colored faux pumpkins in my window boxes along with sprays of faux fall leaves.

Here are some traditional color everlasting fall decor ingredients (click on each image for more info):

 And here are some less conventional colored fall decor pieces (click on images for more info):

 And finally, some large scale urns and candleholders that are worth investing in since they will work in all seasons. I plant my urns with flowers and ivy in the spring and summer, pumpkins or kale in the fall, and evergreens with berries and pinecones in the winter! (click image for more info:)

Happy Fall Decorating!

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