interior design
Interior Design
A luxurious lifestyle is not about a huge house with lots of rooms and furniture and fixtures. It is all about quality things that are inside it, and the charm and personality of its decor. Even if you are living in a small house, you can make it very cozy and elegant through clever interior design.
Interior design is a process where one can shape the experience of the interior space and manipulate its available volume. A small home can look bigger, if you just know how to utilize all the space and use the appropriate furniture and accessories. Actually, there are three basic guidelines for a successful interior design – whether your room is very small or very big. Interior design can only be considered successful if it is functional expresses a mood and exhibits a sense of harmony.
A room is considered functional if it serves its intended purpose. Keep in mind that no matter how beautiful your room is, it will be useless if it does not fulfill the function you need it for. Take your bedroom for example; if it is not a convenient place to sleep in, it fails the guideline test.
Your room should express a mood. Mood refers to the general look or feeling that you want your room to give off. As you create your room, you have to see to it that every aspect maintains the same mood. The furniture, the colors and the window and floor treatments should be consistent with this mood.
And lastly, the room should exhibit a sense of harmony. This is attained when all the separate elements in a room work together in harmony. All elements should be harmonious in mood, scale, quality and color.
In every interior design project that you do, you must follow these guidelines. They will guide you in attaining your interior design objectives, no matter how big or small they are.
Interior Design – The Power of Blue
Wherever we go, wherever we turn, a shade of blue always follows: the sky, the ocean, blue flowers and birds, blue mountain tops and deep blue lakes. Blue is a calm, restful color, perfectly suitable for interior design, especially for bedrooms. It’s a Mediterranean color, one that reminds of the summer and the sea, a define mood booster. For this reason interior designers started to use this color in offices, day rooms and even to decorate summer gardens and kitchens.
Blue in offices has a good impact on the attentiveness of the workers. People are more productive in blue rooms, focused and creative. Even sportsmen perform better in blue rooms. Blue generally symbolizes harmony, peace, healing and happiness, but it could have “dark” meanings too. Lovers of blue tend to be introverted. While pale blue describes a happy personality, as the blue gets darker it becomes moody and depressing, especially when it’s not associated with “positive” colors. Too much blue for a room and that space will become gloomy and depressing. Interior design deals with shapes and colors, combining them to create a pleasant atmosphere in every home.
Navy blue is a dark color that requires careful employment in a design composition. But used in the right amounts and on the right spots, navy blue can be the decisive element to enhance a design transforming a primarily dull space into an oasis of joy. Navy blue is the color of the deep seas. It’s used often in designing the interiors of beach hotels and terraces. It reminds of handsome sailors (NAVY sailors do have those already famous navy-and-white striped t-shirts) and sailing adventures. What could better boost your mood than a dining room bathed in summery lights, where the 5 o’clock ice tea waits for you on a navy-and-white striped placemat?
If you are going to use navy blue to decorate your bedroom, you should always combine it with light, positive colors: white, camel, light beige, light gray, pearl. To make the blue d
Interior Design: Achieving Harmony
This is a two part series of articles dealing with creating harmony in interior design.
Harmony is likened to a jigsaw puzzle in interior design. Putting up together a myriad of pieces that seem to be unrelated is an interior designer’s challenge. The designer’s task is to put all the pieces together and come up with a beautiful interior design. Putting the pieces together to produce a harmonious room requires a vivid imagination from the designer. Interior designers develop in their minds a finished picture of what the room will actually looks like after all the pieces are placed together. This mental image usually guides an interior designer on how to execute every move successfully and come up with a design that elicits his or her client’s happy approval.
How do interior designers develop this mental image of a finished picture? There is a basic decorating philosophy that interior designers follow. This is to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative and when it cannot be eliminated, camouflage it. Take for example a room with windows that don’t appeal much to the designer, but since the budget doesn’t warrant the removal of the structure, eliminating the negative is not an option; rather camouflaging the negative becomes the better way out. To come up with a better interior design, usually the designer in this case designs a window treatment that will hide the undesirable feature and make the windows look more attractive.
You may want to redecorate your own home or help a friend create beautiful changes in his or her place. How do you use this philosophy in your own interior designing projects? You should look around the room. Notice any distinctive features and these should include both the good and the bad features. Have a conversation with the room. This could be a good starting point for all your plans. Create a mental image of a finished picture that will terminate in a well-executed interior design of a given room. Look for striking features such as a beautiful view, a fireplace, a sweeping staircase or a distinctive architectural detail. Let’s say you want to change the interior design of your living room. The first thing people will notice when they enter the room is your fireplace. How should you handle this? Is it a good feature or a bad feature? Do you want to accentuate it, eliminate it or camouflage it? Also look out for problem features like badly placed columns or pillars. After identifying these distinctive features, whether bad or good, ask yourself on how to accentuate any good features that you see. For bad features, ask yourself whether to eliminate them or just camouflage them.
After deciding on what to do with the distinctive features of the room, you should realize that you have already started to formulate a picture in your mind of how the finished room will look. From this budding mental image of the room, you will find that other pieces of the puzzle will start fitting right into place and you are on your way to creating a wonderful interior design of any given room and this is just the beginning.