How long has it been since you last changed the way your home looked on the inside? Spring cleaning usually brings about the desire to rearrange furniture, bring in new design pieces, and basically just redecorate, but not always so for everybody. Redecorating often means spending a lot of money to incorporate newer contemporary decorative pieces to replace older pieces that have gone out of style. Home makeovers are often annual events, but of course, contemporary chic often comes with a price tag that might raise eyebrows – older, cheaper chic also comes with its drawbacks, as more often then not, last year’s designs won’t readily match with this year’s style and your local home improvement store will most likely not have stock that’s more than a year old.
I’ve been involved in interior design in the past and I just wanted to share a few of my thoughts about home makeovers and redecorating. And since we’re coming out of a global recession that came about because of the bursting of the real estate market bubble, many associated industries have been affected and will try to recover loses now that the markets are recovering, so we’re thinking about cheaper and more sustainable – more sustainable meaning we’ll want the makeover to stay in style for longer than one year. We’ll cover three basic aspects in interior design: ambience, focus, and accents.
Ambience involves the atmosphere or mood of the environment in an interior space and sets the base that allows us to appreciate focus and accents. Ambience is very rarely loud and never distracting, but simply sets the tone for the overall feel of the room. Keep this in mind at all stages of your home makeover, as many of your current and future design choices will revolve around the ambience you’ve set inside the room you’re decorating.
Ambience is primarily dictated by the quality and volume of light and the room’s prevailing color. Because the volume of light changes as the day progresses, a good idea when redecorating is to take note of how bright it is when the sun is high but does not shine directly into the windows – this should be the darkest your room should get except when the lights are dimmed or turned off at night. The idea is you’ll want to replicate how bright the light is and what it “feels” like when you turn your lights on at night so that focus and accents continue to stand out. If your current light setup does this for you, then good for you, don’t change it, but if not then it might be a good idea to think about changing your lights. If so, think sustainable for this home makeover and consider the decision to start transitioning over to LED lights. LED lights last longer and run cheaper, and with recent advances in LED technology, are also now closer in light quality to natural sunlight. It will also help your room’s ambience if your room’s prevailing color is a cooler, lighter shade, because that allows light to spread and fill in spaces more efficiently.
The living room set in your living room, the dining table in your dining room, and the bed in your bedroom are all examples of the focus in a room. They are the pieces that define a room and draw a person in to actually use the space. Focus is one of the hardest aspects of interior design to address when conducting a home makeover as the possibility always lingers that you might have to replace a major piece of furniture. However, if you addressed ambience first, you’ll find focus as easy to address as changing the style or color of your bed’s bedding. The bedroom is usually the best place to start experimenting with changes in focus as bedding is easily changed. The same ideas in redecorating your bedroom can be applied through out most of the house.
Finally, there are accents. Accents are all the little things that make the focus look even better – wall decor, candles, flowers, and the like. The choices for accents are endless and the ideas behind successfully implementing them into a home makeover are relatively simple. Accents like cabinetry that are placed further away from the focus are usually best when they contrast in color to the focus itself, unless they are a considerable enough distance away from the focus that they make the room look empty. In this case, it is best to give them the same color as the focus so that they act as points of focus as well. Accents like candles that are placed very closely to the focus will tend to adopt the predominant color of the focus. Accents like flowers that are symmetrical will usually either be placed on top, above, around, or opposite the focus. And asymmetrical accents will always point toward the focus – a great contemporary example of this being the wall sticker or an ikebana flower arrangement.
On a final note, it’s best to chose simple designs, as these tend to stay in style longer than flashier and louder designs. It’s also a great idea to buy decorative items directly from the people who make them and it’s always a great idea to order these items online from China wholesale.
