Advice with adult appeal

Halloween is a time when your decorating style can shine.

Associated Press

Decorating for Halloween need not be scary.

Neither does it have to be a kid-frenzied free-for-all of skeletons and spiders.

Believe it or not, this is a holiday on which style can shine, but it requires a “less is more” aesthetic.

“The moment you tack a jack-o-lantern on your wall, you’ve crossed the line,” says Vern Yip of HGTV’s “Deserving Design.”

For adult appeal, he recommends shying away from the traditional Halloween orange and moving to a more interesting, unexpected shade of that color.

“Think about orange with a brown undertone,” Yip says. “It’s more sophisticated, as opposed to the really saturated, bright orange.”

A splash of this warmer orange — in a chenille blanket, decorative pillow or pillar candle — may be enough to ready a room for the holiday.

Yip also recommends accenting with floral arrangements in various hues of orange.

Don’t worry about whether the oranges match.

“You can mix several shades of orange into one space and it’ll work beautifully,” he says.

Reach for the October issue of “Martha Stewart Living” magazine, and you’ll see similar advice: It recommends placing a variety of pumpkins of all colors and sizes both inside and outside the home.

“There are so many different varieties available,” says Marcie McGoldrick, the magazine’s Holiday and Crafts editorial director.

The magazine’s Halloween stories feature pumpkins, squashes and gourds in butterscotch and cream, and pale green and dark, mossy green.

McGoldrick advises combining the pumpkins with other items from nature that have a similar feeling.

For example, golden pumpkins with gingko leaves on a fireplace mantel.

“We’re using the colors of the pumpkins to create a more sophisticated environment,” she says.

Yip also recommends reaching outdoors for tree branches or driftwood to keep the decorations inside simple and subtle.

“It’s kind of Halloween-y, the whole idea that there’s this dead thing inside, but it has a sculptural quality,” Yip says.

He also advises using accessories already in the home to spice up the holiday.

For example, last year he used orange-and-white-patterned dinnerware to punch up his Halloween dinner table. He combined the plates with black trays and had a centerpiece of concrete cats painted a smudgy black. (He advises substituting black chargers or napkins for the individual trays he used.)

McGoldrick recommends creating little vignettes of creepiness — such as plastic bugs on a candle or spiders crawling up a window — that visitors don’t see right away.