Home Front: How to make good interior design decisions
Cate Burren of Angel + Blume Interior Design takes a New Year look at the art of making good decisions when it comes to the interior of your home
In theory, decisions about the interior of our homes shouldn’t be that hard, not in comparison to some of the other decisions we have to take in life. But the combination of the fact that changes to the home can be expensive, that they can cause controversy amongst the occupants of the home and that it is upsetting if you find yourself not really liking the outcome once the effort and expense have been put in, mean that we may find ourselves procrastinating over home improvement decisions, both big and small.
I think there are broadly two different types of decisions that need to be made for your home. The first is how your home functions – what you use rooms for, what furniture is in them, what lighting you have, what storage you have and so on. These decisions require you to take an honest look at what you need, think about what you actually have in terms of space and then work out how you make your home function well for you and your family. Space planning is an art and you may find you need some help with it – more on this to follow.
The other type of decision is visual – what is it all going to look like? For these types of decision, the best advice I have for you is to not start with the products – the paint colour, the fabric, the tiles etc – I always try to start with some inspiration for what you want the overall look to be. This can take the form of images of rooms that you find that you love, a place you have visited or sometimes even interiors in films or TV programmes that inspire you. You will probably find that you don’t want to copy the exact things in the picture (although there is nothing wrong with that if you do) but it helps to have a feel for what the overall space will look like and what combinations of products give you that effect. I think this is a much more productive way of deciding how your home will look than simply staring at a paint chart and thinking ‘what colour do I like?’
Although these two elements broadly work together to make up the interior of your home, I think they need to be tackled separately so that both are properly considered. It is easy to get carried away with what a room is going to look like and forget to think about how it will work, or vice versa.
Unfortunately, one of the things that you may not be able to fully control is timing – you may encounter no time pressure at all when deciding on a new lamp or an armchair, but if you have builders arriving any day, or a family member who can’t sleep without those new curtains, the pressure can add horribly to the possibility of making a poor decision. It’s an obvious thing to say but give yourself time – if you are hoping to have your bathroom done in a year, right now is the time to start thinking about what you want. I would aim to have made ALL necessary decisions well before the work starts but that doesn’t mean to say that you shouldn’t keep an eye on things as the work progresses because as spaces unfold, you sometimes see things that aren’t quite right, or could be improved, and the sooner you get on to this, the more likely you will be to be able to correct the situation.
One of the things that can happen, particularly if you do find yourself under pressure, is that you can put off decisions by thinking ‘I’ll get this (normally cheaper, readily available) item and I will change it later’. Can I say to you, this rarely happens and so you end up with the interim option for ever more. Try to avoid this at all cost. It’s a waste of money and effort and I would only do it in the most extreme situations (in which case make the interim item as impermanent as you possibly can).
At the risk of contradicting myself, or indeed confusing the situation, I do think that sometimes holding back on making a decision is not necessarily a bad thing. If you find yourself paralysed in the face of a decision, listen to your instincts and try to work out what is holding you back. It might be that you are actually on the wrong path with the thing that you are considering, or it might just be that of the options you have in front of you, there really isn’t anything you like. Either way, you need to stop and work out what the problem is before trying a different approach.
If you find you are completely stuck, you may need to ask for help and an interior designer, who has fresh eyes (which really is a secret weapon) might be the answer. Remember that you don’t have to hand your whole project over, sometimes just buying an hour or two of professional advice and ideas can make the difference. If you ask for help from a friend with good taste and good intentions, make sure that they are picking something that you will like, and which will work in your home, rather than something they like and that would look good in their home (they may do this unintentionally, but it does often happen when advice is sought from friends).
Finally, what I can tell you is that in my experience, the really, really good decisions can come unexpectedly – you can plan to within an inch of your life, and that is good because it eliminates many of the poor decisions, but that golden moment when something looks absolutely amazing, can appear out of the blue and that is to be cherished. Make sure you commend yourself for those decisions, just as much as you berate yourself for things that don’t work. Interior designers are better at these things because they have training, experience and an obsession with interiors but I would challenge any professional interior designer that can’t admit to things that didn’t go as well as they had hoped and things that turned out to be much better than they expected. It’s just not an exact science and the grown-up thing to do is to deal with the mistakes (correct or accept but move on) and rejoice in the better than hoped for stuff.
Image: I can’t tell you why, but this lovely room by Maria Speake at Retrouvius (retrouvius.com) was the inspiration for my own bathroom redesign. We already knew we needed a bigger bathroom space and we ended up sacrificing a bedroom in order to achieve that. When it came to what it looked like, I started with a similar deep warm yellow and a wooden floor, then added quite different fabrics, tiles, bathroom fittings and artwork. I think our finished room has the same warm vibe as this space but inevitably looks quite different. However finding this picture was a tremendous aid to working out what our own bathroom should look like and thus what products we selected.
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Cate Burren