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.
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.
December
24
Interior House Doors – Doors For Modern Design and Home Decor
When you’re buying a new house or refurnishing and remodeling an older one, there are plenty of things to consider-what color you’d like to paint your walls, whether you need to replace your insulation, how to seal corners and edges so that they don’t get dirty, whether to replace the floor or add new sections.
One aspect that many people don’t consider, however, is the doors inside the home.
Why are house doors so important? Well, they are used very, very often without us even realizing it. If we have an annoying door whose lock is broken, it bothers us when we’re going to the restroom or trying to find some solace in our own room.
Doors can be bothersome if they are too heavy, difficult to open, or easily jammed, so plenty of consideration must be given for the type of house doors you want and the way in which you install them.
One of the major doors in the house is the exterior door. This may be your front door, side door, garage door, or patio door, and are visible from the outside.
Exterior house doors give visitors a first impression of the state of your home, so it’s nice if your exterior house doors match your outside walls and look fairly solid. Solid-looking doors also fend off thieves.
If you are looking for a wood door, be sure to pay attention to the type of wood and the finish done on it; higher quality woods and finishes will preserve the life of your door. Thicker and wider stiles and rails generally indicate a better, sturdier door, and make sure that your door includes seals to fend off bad weather.
Glass doors are also usable for exterior house doors if they are highly resistant to shattering or breakage (such as the Pease-Shield glass by Pease Industries). Good quality steel and fiberglass doors include a thermal break (a layer of insulation) that keeps the cold from outside from getting indoors through the frame.
If you live in a cold area and are considering a fiberglass or steel door, it is necessary to get one with insulation, else frost may form on the inside of the door in the wintertime, making it freezing to the touch.
Regarding interior house doors, many types and sizes exist.
Conventionally, there are four major types of interior doors-the folding door, the bypass, the pocket door, and the conventional hinged door.
Folding doors are commonly used where conventional swinging doors are unable to be used-for instance, in small spaces or for larger closets with shelves that would block a swinging door. Folding doors work like a fan to expand and fold.
Bypass doors are usually used for closets and storage places and usually hang from rollers and slide to the side in order to open. These are usually in sets of two or three and pass each other in order to open. Pocket doors also slide, but there is usually only one door, and it slides into a “pocket” in the wall.
When deciding what type of door you want, be sure to consider the function, as well as aesthetics.