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 Designs
If you are going to start on your first interior design challenge inside your house, chances are you’ll wonder how important it truly is to know the modern trends in interior design. You want to make sure that whatever decorating scheme you select will enhance the resale price of your property.
Many designers will say interior planning should reflect you and your individuality, not necessarily the trendy and fashionable. However, if you are the kind of person who’s first in line to shop for the latest electronic gadgetry in a constant quest to be up to date, the newest trends in interior design are really appropriate.
It can be tough to maintain with all the most up-to-date fashion simply because they have a way of changing rapidly, often from year to year.
Designers also inform us that sorting through modern day decorating fads and assessing them with classic designs helps us to establish what we like.
Assume you take a moment and explain (blank) the way in which you would like to make use of your home along with your lounge room. You allow it a lot of thought and produce a big checklist, the final item being: it has to be easy to maintain clean. As an operating principle, that could be a bit of a stretch; yet it is vital that you you, so it’s appropriate.
For your lounge room one of the latest trends could be the usage of natural stone look wall panels. These are extremely dramatic, giving a 3D effect by their own varying use of stone-look raised designs. The grooves and nooks and crannies provide depth and texture for the stunningly dramatic effect.
Now it’s to the kitchen area, where natural stone countertops carry on growing in popularity. However, the shiny glazed finishes of granite tops are getting to be less fashionable as well as the most recent fashion is the granite finish.
This finish is produced by very fast device buffing which yields a minimal luster finish that resembles stone in the natural environment. The stone must be thoroughly sealed with the expensive sealer and repeated often. Even when covered properly, the countertop could be more challenging to clean compared to less fashionable polished marble top. The extremely refined glow resists adhesion of food particles to the surface, that the lower luster finish doesn’t. Finally, if the seal fails, the countertop can spot.
Some interior designers advise trend lovers to play it safe with the expensive decorating items – like the countertop – and opt for the newest trends in your choice of room accessories.
A Misunderstood Profession: Interior Design
Define your career. If you are a doctor, you diagnose and treat peoples’ ailments. If you are a hairdresser, you cut, colour, perm, and style hair. If you are a police officer, you uphold the law, investigate crimes, and in general protect the citizens of the district in which you work. Most careers can be at least briefly described by almost anyone. If you have one of those careers, you are very lucky.
Before I entered the work force and opened my own design firm, I never would have imagined that I would be getting calls to mend curtains, remove stains from carpets, find out why one bulb in a chandelier will not work… I am an interior designer — I design interiors; but I can recommend a seamstress, carpet cleaning company, electrician… Then the dreaded question comes, “What do you mean you design interiors?”
Once-upon-a-time-ago I thought that to be an easy question to answer. Somehow, I now find it easier to explain to a child why the grass is green.
Rather than trying to define interior design, I have taken to explaining the process of designing an interior.
I analyze, ask questions, draw, review the budget, draw some more while asking more questions. Slowly, what started off as sketches develop into floor plans and other technical drawings. Some of the drawings get coloured in. I help my clients make informed decisions regarding the use of space, materials, products, colour, lighting, layout, construction methods, other professionals… The drawings/plans then go to contractors and specialty contractors. I review the submitted process with my clients — one submission is higher, but that is not necessarily bad because the others are each missing things. A contractor is selected, the contract signed and the work begins; I’ll be there routinely while the work is in progress. I basically act as a representative on my clients’ behalf, as well as a protector to my own design. Time schedules are reviewed frequently, problems that arise are handled in such a way that my clients may later know the solution but not the headache involved to understand and work out the problem. The work is wrapping up, only the finishing touches are left but I am already preparing a list of things that have to be finished, repaired or touched-up.
What had been a noisy, dirty, smelly construction site has now fallen quiet and already been cleaned. I walk around looking at and examining the full-size, real thing of all the drawings I had done weeks, if not months, ago. Back at the office, I edit the deficiency list started a few days before and send it to the contractor and clients. The job is soon completely finished, but my work is still not done.
My clients call, happy with the finished space. There are some last minute questions concerning maintenance of some of the new items, where to find certain decorative things and accessories that suddenly have importance, placement of these things, and so on.
About two months later those clients are likely to call again. The voice on the other end sounds either a bit annoyed or even slightly panicked. The tile grout is crack in one area on one wall. It’s probably just because everything has had the time to settle; I’ll come by to see it, then contact the contractor.
Define my career. I am an interior designer. I am an analyst, an artist, an educator, an interrogator, a project manager, a site supervisor, a purchaser, a space planner, a specifier, a decorator, a technician, a draftsperson, a troubleshooter…
But can I help a client plan an outdoor project? Can I design a cabana or gazebo for a client’s yard? Can I design custom furniture or lighting? Work with other professionals to provide technical drawings for things that do not fall into the scope of work of an interior designer? Work with clients and their real estate agent to help in the selection of the perfect home or commercial space to meet their needs? Provide consultation services to do-it-yourselfers? Handle the enlargement of a building? Work on new constructions as well as renovations? Plan the enlargement or relocation of a kitchen or washroom? Do I know the building code? Can I help obtain renovation permits from the municipality? Design spaces for use by people with physical disabilities?… Yes, and more.
In a rush, I sometimes describe interior design as the career that fills the gap between architect and decorator, but the accuracy in that statement is something even I have debated. So I am still left without a solid definition of my own career.