The reasons to invest in home interiors are a different discussion than the myriad of strategies for how best to invest in them. This article delivers on both perspectives: how-to and why.
Stretch Space Without A Sledgehammer
Most clients wish some area of their home was bigger, whether to better support a particular “feeling;" accommodate a favorite piece of furniture, or to create a “sense of spaciousness," purely for enjoyment’s sake.
Architecture can be pushed. By interior design.
For space cravers, some powerfully effective sleight-of-hand design devices include high-mounted drapery panels, a restrained use of overscale patterns, leaning into receding wall colors, carefully controlling the contrasting color ratio in a space and strategizing furniture scale. In the right combination, these deliberate design strategies can markedly appear to lift a ceiling, make windows look bigger, create the illusion of pushing walls outward, or all three.
Increase Square Footage Function
Studies point to room design as having the measured ability to enhance focus and productivity or diminish it; to create restfulness and relaxation or its opposite.
For example, data associates higher ceilings to enhance creative thinking, while lower ceilings optimize linear focus and finite detailed thinking. Using this example, if planning a renovation that includes adding a home office for a full-time work-from-home lifestyle, a graphic designer might be well served to push for a higher ceiling height. An accountant may not.
Environmental psychology aside, ideal furniture layout and scale are significant drivers in any space’s function and no amount of aesthetic detailing can fix a miss.
Yet beyond function, driving devices is another reality. Undesigned rooms and empty rooms are unused rooms. Interior design powerfully enhances square foot usage by transforming unused rooms into often-used ones, and little enjoyed spaces into favorites, all through the benefit of investing in interior design.
Augment Daily Life
“Raise the aesthetic in a home and the people in that home feel and function better," is a favorite popular quote, possibly because it’s from this article’s author. But it happens to be true.
Beyond the daily, life-enhancing effects of waking up to, coming home to, and living life in an environment that’s aesthetically pleasing, the opposite of this environmentally driven lift is shown to be problematic.
Half-empty, or poorly designed spaces are shown to be actual daily irritants to the percentage of the population who are particularly sensitive to the environment.
Dosing a home with perfect-to-the-inhabitant mood-driving colors, ideal function, soul-stirring art and objects of beauty, and all organized in a beautifully thoughtful way, can have as great an impact on enhancing mood as an environment lacking these qualities can be detrimental to it.
Think Five-Star hotel replete with creature comforts and fine design appointments vs. a sterile roadside motel.
While not all people need a beautiful environment, there are masses of us who do. Regardless of budget, investing in beautifying the space where most of life is spent pays great dividends to those sensitive enough to require it, and wise enough to know it.
As a multi-award-winning interior designer, Donna's company, Impeccably Designed Homes, specializes in high-end, luxury interior design, from single room design to whole homes of 20,000 square feet and more; from decorative design to full-scale renovation; and new construction.
Donna is deemed a design thought leader in Forbes, Real Simple, TV and radio. She's also called the "nation’s No. 1 design coach," after founding TheInteriorDesignAdvocate.com online courses that empower DIYers and design professionals internationally.