Design tip - The most important part are the corners of a room

Corners of a room form an important part of the decor. While your furniture and the walking space takes most of the visual floor space, an important aspect while doing a layout of the room is to boost corners. So from the very beginning of designing your room, one must always think about different aspects like the lighting of the corner spaces to the furniture pieces, corner walls, art work, plants and what not. Generally we plan this later looking at what space have been left after the furniture. However it should be done vice versa as your lifeless furniture can be brought into life with lively corners.

Some tips:

~ If you have not so big room, don't buy big sized furniture that will eat up your corner spaces.
~ While planning the lighting of the corners, they are plenty of options like focus light from the false ceilings to pendant light in one of the corner to some palette lighting in the corner to a nice table or floor lamp. If not, track focus lights from the adjacent walls/ceiling can work as great as any other option.
~ So once you have your corner light set up nicely, the ambience can be boosted up by adding a nice bamboo palm or Areca palm in one of the corners or may be any other indoor plants. My favourites in living / dining room are Bamboo palm/Areca palm as they are one of the highest oxygen producers. While in bedrooms, it is generally rubber plant, money plant or Peace lily as they provide oxygen during the night. Have two of each plants- one in balcony and one in room so that they can be exchanged for open air for longevity.
~ So now that you have a green corner. What's next? You can have corner shelves where you can put pretty things which highlight your personality. Like your favourite books? Teapots? Sculptures and what not!
~ Why should the walls be left behind? Enhance your corners with identical mirrors on both walls forming corner to enhance the depth. Say these mirrors can form background of your plant corner.
~ Your corner space can act as a wall art gallery. Have both walls forming a corner being used as a continuous canvas or a photo or art wall. It is interesting to converge two planes into one and use it for highlighting the room.
~ If you like nature and draw inspiration from it, you can have a fireplace mantle at the corner and have a water body or small fountain on opposite corner to balance the different forces or elements.

For example, if I define the following corner that I did, it shows the love for nature's elements like water, mud, plants, special love for tea pots, candles, Mr Buddha and hand embroidered Zardozi and moti work curtains. You almost read my personality just now as it is a corner in my living space! So it isn't that difficult. The only difficult part is to know your clients and to know they personal liking/dis-liking based on which I can boost the spaces ;)

A corner space defining the love for the nature

Hope my posts helps you or atleast inspire you to do a little makeover of your corner spaces :-)

Color Palette- How to choose?

Choosing a palette is Important!

While refurbishing your house, one step that makes a lot of difference is the colour palette that you choose!
It includes the colour of the walls, furniture, soft furnishings, the decor items you place like colour of the lamp shade, vase or even wall art. Freezing a palette at an appropriate time also saves you from adhoc shopping for your new home.

A color palette may have 3-5 colours depending on the size of the room. While choosing a colour palette, you should really invest sometime on what palette it is and how it will be used. The latter part is really not an easy one! Some of the following might help you deciding that-

1. If you have hired an interior designer, you MUST make sure that you are getting options of the colour palettes that would go in YOUR home. The reason is your designer might just have an opposite choice of colours than yours. So you must tell him/her "I love Teals and Oranges". Because the designer is not going to live there, it is you who is going to feel those colours everyday. And if your designer asks you the colour choice and you don't know an answer at that moment-take a break. Open your wardrobe and you will get an answer. Never go for what is IN or in fashion if you actually do not like that personally. Because in a few days, you would start hating it and repent your decision of the palette.

If you have not hired a designer but confused if your colour would look nice or not, you can take inspirations from books/magazines and internet to checkout how that colour is used. That colour may be too bright as main colour say for walls, but may just work fine as tapestry for say french chairs with some subtle hues on walls. So your favourite colour can become a pop in some other way. And I assure that you would certainly enjoy seeing it everyday.

2. Some people say one should either choose warm tones or cool tones. But believe me, one should always mix to create a balance. If my wall colours are cool, my furniture colour, lamps etc can add warmth to it and balance that. If you make everything warm or everything cool all the time, you will miss the other very often.

3. A very important fact for any colour palette is that you need to have a mix of low and high tones to create a contrast. Highlights are there to add punch while lowlights are to subdue them and create a balance. So both are very important. Going Flat adds no interest!

4. If there is a colour in the palette which you feel you might get bored off in sometime, keep it for replaceable items. A general rule of using colours(as per many books) is 60% primary colour which is for walls. 30% on upholstery and 10% on other decoration accessories. So you can keep the 10% for accessories that you can replace with the colour that you are least interested in the palette. For example- you can keep it for lampshade(replaceable shade) or for your table runner/mats etc.

5. If you are choosing palettes for all room, start with the entry, living and dining area. Now rest of the room colours should fall in order such that  there is smooth transitioning for the eyes and there is atleast one element that connects them to one roof. You may be having totally different palette in each room but you need to bind them together with some element that helps in easy transitioning for the brains.

6. Choosing light colours on walls gives more flexibility to play around with upholstery and accessories and add them as punches. Going dark on one or more walls make it Eclectic but leaves less space on playing around with rest of the things. So for formal settings, one can choose a couple of accent walls to be dark but having all rooms in house having dark place makes it difficult to find a place in home to relax. For bedrooms and restroom, better go for lighter walls!

7. One RULE if you have not hired and designer and not confident about the choices you are making- Nature never fails. So whatever inspirations you can gather from nature in terms of choosing colour palettes-they never go wrong. So colours from the earth, sky and trees etc are the natural colour palettes which are never heavy on eyes and our brain is always tuned to accommodate them with ease. So look at some good pictures from the nature and start filling your palette!

Enjoy the COLOURS in life! Wishing you all a Happy Holi  in advance :-)