The Real Value Of Interior Design Is Unlocking Further Creative Options

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When it comes to interior design, it’s very easy to fall into hyper-specifics. This means that often, interior design magazines or websites are geared to give you tips, but also to recommend exact products or certain means of ensuring your home formats itself correctly, rather than teaching you the grand principles of interior design and how they can unlock further creativity.

Of course, that’s not always a bad thing. Going over the basics too much will prevent you from coming to any advanced decisions or identifying what your style may be.

However, for those starting out in interior design, or those who wish to unlock more from their property, laying the groundwork to inspire a range of creative options from then on can be extremely healthy, and no uncertain amount of fun.

For this reason, we hope to discuss just what exactly a home can thrive on and why it thrives that way, relating to the best interior design principles you can use for your given space. In that way, we become much more able to understand what elements of interior design inspire us.

But enough with the preamble, let’s get down to brass tacks:

Natural Lighting

Natural lighting is one of the most coveted considerations when determining the utility and value of a home’s aesthetic. Why is this? Because it’s hard to ‘force’ more natural light from the sun, or to completely reorient a building once its plans and foundations have been laid.

However, what we can do is make the most of the natural lighting we have coming into the property, and what we choose to do with it. To begin with, orienting our furniture can help us ensure the windows aren’t blocked, and that light is able to properly bounce around the room. This is further aided by lighter colors that reflect light, serving as a useful aesthetic backdrop in rooms that get little natural light throughout the day (by the same logic, you can more easily justify darker colors in rooms that can an abundance of natural light throughout the day).

Furthermore, ensuing that your windows are top-quality, clean and can allow for this beautiful light to come in throughout the day is important. You can view the homepage of Renewal by Anderson to see just how much of a difference beautifully installed open windows can be, particularly in rooms that might justify a larger option.

In this way, we can return to our primary point by suggesting that natural light allows us to decorate more openly, to place more items in a room, to experiment with color more evenly, and to simply see our gorgeous interior design efforts more prominently during the day. In that respect, natural light gives us so many more options as to how we’d like to personalize a room, allowing it to serve as the natural backdrop we need.

Orientation & Navigable Floor Space

It’s very essential to consider just how much navigable floor space is in a room. Of course, you don’t have to have a minimal decorative taste to maximize your living space, nor do you have to do without essentials, such as side tables or coffee tables in your living room, or furniture decorations.

What matters is learning how to orient these items to make sure that an open and easily navigable space is competently applied. For instance, if you can only open the door to a room half way (enough for people to get in, but certainly knocking against a piece of furniture), then you may wish to reorient.

This can motivate you to use wall storage options in your children’s bedroom for instance, rather than having their gigantic LEGO collection take up every single step. Considering how legroom is used to provide people access to your living room sofas could be another consideration, or understanding if your living room size justifies a non-portable footrest or not can also be a good idea. In this way, navigable space comes at a premium.

It might seem like prioritizing this will simply minimize our options, but instead of this, it can help us think more creatively with a ‘budget’ of space rather than overbearing a room with too many items. For instance, you may find that placing a couple of stools at your breakfast bar can help you save the space placing an actual table in the kitchen, allowing you to access cupboards more easily. In that respect, we have pivoted our direction to find a more promising result. That has to be a net positive for our creative application.

Storage

An often overlooked aspect of interior design is exactly how you’ll use your storage solutions to your advantage.

This is because stored items fit two categories, either publicly displayed or privately hidden. Books on a shelf might be seen as publicly displayed and decorative storage, as well as mason jars containing baking ingredients laid across a kitchen shelf. Private storage, of course, is where we place our possessions that we’re happy to keep out of sight, accessing when we need them. This might involve kitchen cabinets, pantries, under-bed storage, a DVD or Blu Ray cabinet in your living room, and more.

Considering how storage solutions will function in each room gives you a better backdrop for helping your long term design. In some respects, you can integrate it into the design. For instance, book shelves are a great example. A popular item we see in rooms with a nautical theme involves a halved small rowing boat laid vertically, with the seating partitions serving as shelves. In this way, storage and aesthetic have merged.

Of course, height and versatility play well into storage, and can help us save some floor space in the long run. This might involve hanging toy baskets for your children. It could mean wall storage boxes if you have enough wall space open. In some respects, it might mean storing items on top of a dresser cabinet, or implementing a pantry into the wall rather than over it. Storage can also involve corner drawers that open diagonally in your kitchen.

As you can see, why storage isn’t necessarily the most attractive part of interior design, its a fundamental aspect of simply living in a home. For this reason, it’s worth considering, and if you can come up with more elegant solutions to either privately or publicly displaying your belongings, you’ll be better equipped to enjoy the results.

Flooring

Flooring is also an often under looked aspect of interior design, not because it’s unimportant or because people forget to integrate flooring in their homes, but because the visual impact is so strong, people should more regularly consider this an essential and vital part of the interior design process.

Flooring defines how your entire space will look. Unless you enjoy high ceilings, it will often be the largest and most visual aspect of your room (despite the equal size of its corresponding ceiling above). For this reason, getting the format of your flooring correct is essential.

This might involve considering if you need a laminate or vinyl flooring, what colors and patterns floor tiles may take, how the upkeep could work, and what the room could be used for. Carpet in a bathroom is a bad idea for the most part, for instance, but stone tile could become freezing in winter without underfloor heating solutions. Furthermore, areas with plenty of furniture moving could also influence your decision, as scuff marks may need to be overcome. As you see, flooring is much more than just a simple decision to handwave, its aesthetic and utility will define how you make design decisions from then on.

With this advice, we hope you can get the best out of interior design using these most fundamental priorities and principles to guide you.