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“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Albert Einstein
Having just completed a post about interior design trends, I feel like I should take a minute to qualify some things before everyone runs out to heat their driveway and yank out their spiral staircases and bamboo flooring.
Proper interior design and decor is about great ideas, innovative thinking, being fun, being new, and only those designers that are interested in your own opinion will give you a comfortable and personable design. Yes there may be plenty of talented “freaks” out there, and they can easily dress up your home in styles they are comfortable with imposing on your sensibility. However the best decorators and designers will never force a trend on you, nor will they try and convince you that their style brilliance is better than your own idea. The truly talented designers cater to your specific needs and your own personal trends – not the current magazine issue definition – but trends based on your own personality.
A good designer will take his/her time and try to inspire people to empower their own lives through the home design, not offer a cookie-cutter version of a photo spread or TV show. You will notice at Interior Living Room I have yet to include those massive photo spreads you see on most design and remodeling web sites. Of course there will be tons of pictorials to come, but I really felt it necessary to start this site by showing that ideas for design and decor come more from what inspires you on the inside, not strictly from visual stimuli. One should strive to be the sort of designer that can translate what people want into their own story, as told throughout the entire home environment. You can’t get that from pictures of a stranger’s home being flashed in your face by a lazy or egocentric designer. When you are looking for a design partner, or perhaps deciding to do things on your own, keep this in mind.
The trends that you should be gravitating toward are your own trends and styles. Whether or not it’s current or “artsy” makes no difference if the design chosen makes you feel uncomfortable in your own skin. Ask yourself these questions… What is it that makes you tick? What colors make you feel relaxed? What styles and symmetry really, really leave you feeling relaxed and refreshed? There simply is no rigid set of rules when it comes to designing. It comes from within, as it should. The best designers in the world are those who know exactly how to get that inner voice of yours to speak – through careful and collaborative design choices.
A good way to look at designing is to pick what’s right for you, have a foundation for your core idea (what you wish your outcome to be) and then connect the dots. To help facilitate this technique many people use whiteboards – complete with photos of furniture options, paint swatches, photos of the empty rooms. Once the board is populated they will set to arranging and pinning various decor and design items wherever they look the most appropriate. This can make for a very useful blueprint in your decorating and designing choices. I’ve even seen examples of decorators that will take a life-size print of furniture and fixtures and proceed to spread it throughout an empty room. Quite elaborate I admit, but useful none-the-less.
Nowadays with technology being ridiculously freaky and amazing, most forgo the traditional white-board for more efficient and easily manipulated design software packages. At Interior Living Room we have many recommendations for software that can really help you get the most out of what you want. In a previous post (this one) I detailed one of my own personal favorites. Punch! Interior Design Software is the software I reviewed in that article, and although it does have a slight learning curve it can truly give you some brilliant design ideas and it’s not going to cause an economic crisis should you decide to buy it.
As you can tell by the title of my blog, my absolute favorite room to design is without a doubt the living room interior. The reason for this is simple really. The living room is exactly as the title implies. It’s the room you live in. To me this is the one room that most tells your story. It shows how you want your most comfortable space to look and react to your movement; it shows how you like to wind down; and it shows your friends and guests the things you hold dear, along with the decor you find most attractive.
The best advice I can offer? OK. In a nutshell, once you have the living room interior space defined to your own specifics, use that room as the inspiration for the rest of the home. Too many times people will cause their homes to become inconsistent – thanks to the vast amount of choices in designs and decor available. I’ve seen homes wherein each room has it’s own mutually exclusive theme, and that’s not gonna win you any free tickets to the “Designers R Us Convention”. Plus it’s bloody confusing for your pets.
Not only do style inconsistencies make you and your guests feel confused and uncomfortable in your home, it all but destroys the concept of your home being one cohesive habitat. It becomes nothing more than a building full of separate rooms, joined only by walls and electricity. While this may appeal to some, a true “home” is a synergy of style and function that should correlate one common theme, and that theme can only come from one place, your personality.
So I guess the point is that while it’s only prudent to keep an eye on current trends it is much more important that your trends come from within, from your own gut instinct. Something that may look stunning in a magazine or pictorial may not make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It should always fall on the shoulders of the person living in the spaces, not by the designer and decorator. And if you’re the designer and decorator, remember to stick to a common theme. And all that, of course, means that Einstein was not an interior designer.
To conclude, I’ve just received word from NASA that I can now accept RSS subscriptions on the blog! Apparently, if you fill in the form (up and to the right or by clicking the preceding link) this blog in its’ entirety will be sent directly to your in-box. How cool is that! OK, so what if people have been doing this for years now, it’s my first RSS subscriber thingamajig, and I’m proud of it.
