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Getting in the mood
homepack interiors
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Congratulations you have the keys to your new home snagging is done and everything has been cleaned you can now get down to the fun bit - the furnishing.
OK time to wake up, none of the above will probably be true. if you have left to the final stage to start thinking about furniture you are way too late, especially on an island where it can take up to four months for your furniture to come, unless it is in stock of course. Quite often you have to start thinking about furniture before there is a front door and curtains before you have windows which makes designing your interior not fun at all.
For the sake of this article lets pretend everything is perfect, you have the time you are not back for another couple of months so time is not important, you have a nice clean empty house in which to make your dream holiday home. You are faced with white walls, white ceilings and probably beige floors, the proverbial blank canvas. So where do you start?
Take a tip from Lawrence double barreled name from BBC’s Changing Rooms and Homefront. Before drawing a plan he would put together a collage made up of scraps of cloth and pictures of rooms and furniture cut from magazines.
These collages are called mood boards and are compiled to show you what your room could look like; sometimes called concept boards they can evoke an overall feel of a potential design.
Designers use the boards to ascertain the client’s broad aims and desires before zeroing in on the details and committing to a final design. They are a way of testing design concepts without committing yourself to a design and finding out too late that you are not happy with the end result.
Because mood boards require little or no knowledge of design, anyone make them, so we can use them for ourselves as an easy way to visualise how your room will look and to avoid decorating mistakes later. You can even let your children have a go when it comes to making their room. They are fun, get you thinking and give you inspiration.
So how can we make a mood board? Firstly begin collecting any room designs, colour schemes and pictures of furniture types that appeal to you from magazines, books or the Internet. In fact begin taking your camera every where you go and snap any idea that takes your fancy. Go to furniture shops and find fabric swatches that you like for window dressing and upholstery and collect paint swatches from paint shops.
Once you have these you can start arranging the different pieces on a board and find how your colours and fabrics work together, mixing and matching until you find a combination that you like. For best results layout the samples in the order that they will be in the room, for example place floor coverings near the bottom of the boards and furniture in the middle, this will give you a clearer idea on how the room will look.
Adjust the size of the samples in relation to each other, the sizes reflecting the amount of space taken up in the final room. For example the largest space will be wall colour so this should be the largest sample on the board. In Cyprus where most walls start white you could use white board to reflect this.
Once you have your concept you can start to zone in on the details and accessories. And once this is done, you can go out and order paints, curtains and furniture safe in knowledge that the colours and the styles work together.
Good luck designing.
