Here, the designer gives her top 5 tips on planning your perfect room from where to start to its most important elements.
Room Planning Tip 1: Assess Your Space
Although at the first stage perhaps the most boring of the design process, the designer explains that it’s critical – You really have to do your planning and preparation to see if there are any problems with the room.” She recommends that features like low ceilings or lack of natural light should be noted.
Room Planning Tip 2: Find Your Star Piece
To achieve a really unique look the first thing you should choose is your star piece. “Hopefully that will have a lot of colour, texture and pattern in it and then you can pull the colours from [it and] introduce it into the colour of the sofa or the rug; patterns, […] I might pull into the fabrics for the designer cushions.” In fact, a room can be designed around a single cushion.
Room Planning Tip 3: Prioritise Quality and Timelessness
“It’s important to me that [an] interior is going to look good in five years time. I don’t want to have the sofa falling apart, the rug wearing through or the floor scratching because that’s not going to be the perfect space for the client if that happens.”
Room Planning Tip 4: Embrace Your Room’s Natural Features
In speaking of the sometimes dark spaces quite often, people will tend to try and overcompensate and try to make a dark space a bright space, whereas I tend to go with the darkness and emphasise that. Rather than try and fight against what the room naturally is, go with it.”
Room Planning Tip 5: Carefully Consider Your Lighting Scheme
Lighting for me is so important – it’s going to make or break a room,– “I think the one mistake people make with lighting is they try and plan their lighting far too early on. You shouldn’t design your lighting layout until you know absolutely everything that’s going to be in your room. What that will do is to allow you to do is emphasise the bits in the room that you want to emphasise.