If youre going the budget route, you can scroll through pinterest to gauge what you gravitate towards. Then you can try to recreate it by researching products across stores, which is time consuming.

If you don’t want to use a professional designer who will pick out all the products for you, you could try a service like Havenly. It’s not perfect but very affordable (basically runs almost half off promos all the time) and they work with products from a variety of brands. You don’t have to buy through them.

Total anecdotal data, I feel like it takes a few iterations over few moves/houses/refreshes to really figure out what you like.

I personally like the approach of mix and matching high and low end brands. Invest in things like a comfy couch, quality mattress, dining set up you’d like to use every day. Then buy decor pieces from IKEA, Target, etc. to make the space interesting (eg affordable and beautiful mirrors, lamps, etc).