Home Estate

Home Improvement and Real Estate

Archive for September, 2009

Home Design Sense – New Home Decorating

When decorating or making decorating decisions for new homes, it is important to remember that your decisions will be a part if the home for a long time – unless you can afford to re-decorate every few years. Before purchasing any furniture, paint colors or accessories consider your lifestyle and how you plan to live in the home. Also, throw out any pre-disposed notions of your old home; since the new one is structurally different. This is when you need to be open-minded and creative. Take your time and don’t rush and by all means don’t be influenced by friends, family or trends (unless you absolutely love the ideas).

The most important matter of concern when designing or planning interior design for new homes is to build an environment that caters to your specific needs. Creating a space that is accommodating to each person’s lifestyles is the general principle of new home design.

This may seem like very unusual advice concerning interior design for new homes especially coming from someone who is working within the design industry; but there is good explanation for this reasoning. A large, open space without viewing or visualizing any furniture content within that space is quite easy to get a little carried away with while making structural changes.

Try to get an idea of the type of furniture style you will want. If you already have a specific style be sure it will fit in the specific areas of the new home. Some furniture might be too small for large rooms.

Paint color should not be decided until you get all your items (furniture, fabrics accessories, ect.) together and finalized. Painting the wall color before deciding on the furniture could be costly if it does no work with he furniture colors.

Wallpaper is another choice that you might reconsider using while building interior design for new homes. Again, removing wallpaper and resurfacing the surface is often times quite a headache that can be avoided by using other alternatives for creative wall finishing. A great alternative for wallpaper that adds a great texture to the wall surfaces would be a finishing technique such as faux finishing, sponging, or stenciling. These choices offer you a variety of substitutes that are equally appealing and much easier to change then wallpaper. If you absolutely must have wallpaper in any of the rooms, try using a border to achieve the look you’re going for instead of covering the entire wall surface. If you prefer wallpaper be sure to follow the installation instructions fully or hire a professional.

Interior design for new homes can be a tricky process. There is a good possibility that the area pertained in your new home will be slightly larger or smaller then the space in your previous home. It is this reason that planning placement and theme of each space in your new home is so vitally important to successful interior design of new homes. Be sure to measure widths of furniture and doorways before moving day comes in order to avoid hassle while getting the furniture into your new living space. Take careful notice of any moving activity that occurs into and around your new home. Careless moving errors can disfigure floors and walls and create flaws in your new house before you have even begun living there.

Placement of furniture in new homes is one of the key aspects of unique interior design for new homes. If a room is very large you may want to consider making several seating arrangements rather than spacing the pieces out to fit the room. And separated seating groupings can give more privacy for reading and conversation away from the rest of the room activities.

Understanding Bathroom Design – Vessel Style Washbasins

Professional bathroom designers are masterful at merging both function and form to create breathtaking results. In this eight-part series which I call “Understanding Bathroom Design,” I draw on my experience working with some of London’s top bathroom designers to explain this exciting field. This sixth article focuses on the vessel-style washbasin – a true designer delight!

The vessel-style washbasin has been around for many centuries. It originated not in London but in Ancient China, before the existence of piped water or water treatment facilities, when people simply needed a vessel in which to hold water that had been drawn from the local well. But in the context of bathroom design, today’s vessel-style basin is free-standing and sits directly atop a bathroom counter or similar furniture unit. The London interior designer can source all sorts of different styles, dimensions and appearances, to match almost any bathroom design imaginable. One can select from a wide array of standard materials, including metal, glass, and semiprecious stone, or – for super-luxury bathroom designs – one may turn to gemstone-embedded or jewelled models.

What are the advantages of a vessel-style washbasin over a more traditional model? These basins aren’t constrained to slide into a regular-sized hole within a standard counter. Accordingly, London’s top bathroom designers can benefit from much more creative designs and shapes, with non-symmetric detailing and unusual footprints adding visual interest. Many vessel-style basins are taller in the back than in the front – a big boost for a smaller London bathroom design that needs a “touch of flair” but that has no space for a rear splashback.

Clients often tell me they have fallen in love with a standalone basin but just can’t figure out where it should go, perhaps because it doesn’t quite fit in their existing bathroom design. In such cases I may recommend the basin be installed in a London powder room, where it will serve mainly for handwashing – instead of shaving, brushing one’s teeth and giving the household chihuahua a bath.

In the next article in my series “Understanding Bathroom Design,” I’ll return to eco-friendly bathroom designs in London and discuss how to clean and maintain your bathroom in a way that helps protect the environment.

source : interior design london