This January has seen not only the start of a New Year, but new decade, filled with all sorts of promise for a return of the “Roaring 20s”. But before we get stuck into what may be round the corner for the next few years, the one thing the crops up every January is what people can do to make their lives easier, happier, productive and more fulfilled.
The priority this year is on how to relax and enjoy our environment properly. In terms of our home interior, this means creating an atmosphere where we feel comfortable, at ease, and where we can express personality through décor.
In a home, the most important space is your living room. It’s where you sit to unwind and socialise, where friends and family gather but also, where you can spend time alone. This environment should be a space that you enjoy, with surroundings that you appreciate and details that make you happy, creating that all-important feel and vision, which sometimes only happens when a talented top interior designer is involved.
It can be overwhelming to decide where best to place furniture, what colours to choose and how to accessorize the space, and also difficult to articulate exactly what scheme you want to create. So for a luxury interior designer tip, start off by selecting images (from magazines, photos, or the internet) of arrangements, colour schemes, furnishing styles and accessories that you love. This isn’t so that you have a scheme to simply copy, it’s so that once you’ve compiled a collection of ideas, you will have the building blocks with which to understand what you like design and style-wise. And don’t limit yourself to just images of a sitting room – a collection of colours from other rooms; fashion, the natural world or something totally unrelated can be just as important in terms of creating the mood and atmosphere you’re after.
The next layer is arrangement, both in terms of furniture and lighting. Where to place furniture after all, isn’t just a matter of lining the walls with sofas and chairs, plonking a coffee table in the middle and crossing your fingers. If in doubt, an experienced interior designer will not only know how to deal with considerations such as how a living room is used, traffic flow, focal points and conversation areas, but will be able to elevate a scheme of which you can be proud.
When it comes to lighting, a professional will have the expertise and experience to gauge where to place task, ambient and accent lighting, at what height levels, intensity and size. The latter is most important when considering pendant lights, particularly if your thoughts are veering towards a statement piece such as a chandelier.
Once these major pieces have been decided, the next all-important element is fabric. This can make a huge impact on a room, so it’s essential to get it right, and not just in terms of the colour and size, but also the pattern and texture and usage. For example, are the curtains in a living room primarily there for impact, decoration, warmth, privacy, light extraction, or possibly all of the above? These considerations will help dictate exactly what style to go for and narrow the choice.
Following from these decisions, comes tweaking the shades of the hues you’ve already chosen for your colour palette. It’s good to start with a general mood board, but bear in mind this can change totally when sourcing furnishings or artwork that you love. A stunning teal button-back Chesterfield for example, might not necessarily fit with the Retro look you were after initially, although a London interior designer will be able to manipulate a scheme to make it work and give a room that all important sense of cohesion.
If this happens, there’s no need to panic – the downside to choosing paint colours is that it can be easy to get wrong, the plus side is that it’s a relatively easy thing to correct. Either way, choosing a high end interior designer will take the pain and heartache out of the decision making, planning and execution, to give you the results you were after…and very possibly more.
Essentially, the living room should be furnished with the best items and ideas possible to reflect your needs and personality, so you can live the best life you can in a home you love, with any extraneous elements or clutter tucked away. As Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote: “A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”