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 :-)

Add your own personality to your decor

Whether you have got your interiors done from anyone, don't leave the styling stage without adding your own personality. When someone visits your home for the first time, they judge you by your surroundings. If it has your personal touch, it will reflect your personality. 

By personal touch, I mean the sort of decor objects that you put around. For example if you visit someone's home and you see fresh plants and flowers in the decor at multiple places, you can judge that the person is fond of flora. If there is a use of natural materials like jute, pebbles, sea finds like corals and shells, and less of acrylics, you can figure out that the person is more close to nature and like collecting and enjoying inspirations from nature. 

For example, if you see a console top with the following vignette, you can guess a bit of personality of the person living in that room. 

And believe me when your surroundings too reflect you as a person, you are at more ease and comfort.

Tips on adding new life to your home

Not everybody is buying new home or refurbishing it every other month. But how do some homes always look different- full of energy and new life?

If you are someone who likes to keep your ambience always beautiful, just try this. Within the same decor, you can keep charging it by adding a bit of style here and there to make it look fresh and new. You can do it every week, every fortnight or every month depending on how much time you have. But it just takes a few minutes to do that. May be you can just target a few places in your home which are good for adding vignettes and keep changing them. These could be some corners, shelves, consoles or just table tops. This does not require you to keep buying new stuff. It just require you to change the vignette by changing mood, patterns, colours, adding fresh flowers, plants, having you favourite books, candles, cutlery(may be just a tea pot) or whatever that can be accommodated in that place which reflects your mood and personality.

For example : There are times when you want more pattern and colours. Simply pull out a different table cloth, table mat, small rug, or may be just cut an old suit, a torn saree and bring a beautiful piece of cloth form a background of your vignette. Then start layering it with your favourite books, candles or just small sculptures.

My Vignette today: Added a few books, candles, indoor plant & some cutlery

     

So just adding these and rearranging them, lighting a few candles makes a huge difference. Adding lamp or candles adds to the mood. If you have different sorts of lights available in the room, don't use them all together. Just highlight one space at a time. It brings more highlights and shadows instead of making it flat from all sides. Also prefer warm daylight lights as compared to cool day tube lights( white tube lights) which tries to flatten the surfaces.

Adding a life to the vignette like an indoor plant, fresh flowers or say a fish in a glass bowl makes it perfect and lively. And if you could give a few drops of your favourite fragrance oil- nothing beats that. 

Last but not the least, if there is a way to have your vignette blessed with a special spot or focus light- 3 cheers!

Keep experimenting!!!

Size of objects while creating vignettes

An important rule while creating a vignette is to group different elements of different sizes.  They should not stand with same size competing with each other. Essentially one requires a mix of vertical object, horizontal object and something that bridges both. For example if you have a vase or a table lamp(a vertical object), you can add books as horizontal element and say a small sculpture bridging between the high and the lows in the arrangement. Just like the below:

 

The little Buddha is bridging between the books and the lamp. It is an important element here else our arrangement will look incomplete.

Some de-cluttering hacks

Everything in the house should have a dedicated place. This essentially means a dedicated place for all stationary, dedicated space for for tools and hardware and everything else. 

De-cluttering hacks:

1. Save your courier cartons for de-cluttering. Put these into your drawers, cupboards and wardrobes. They make good containers for same sort of stuff. For example all pens can be kept in one box, similarly all adhesives like tapes, Fevicol, araldite etc go together in another box, all hardware tools in one, cutting tool in one, all charger and cables in one, gardening related stuff in one etc. Similarly all hair accessories together, one for hankerchieves, one for belts, one for ties, sewing accessories in one etc.  This way all things similar are together.

2. Use labels for containers so that other members in the family are aware that everything in the house has a designated space n they also take care while keeping back the stuff. Reading the label just ensures that they don't miss the rule of picking n keeping back stuff at designated space.

3. Use cable ties or rubber bands for saving charger cables from intermingling.

4. Wide PVC pipes act as a good organiser for badminton and tennis rackets. If you spend 10 minutes in any hardware shop, you will find plenty of such low cost hacks.

5. Save your old used crates and have wheels below them. Use brush and acrylic paint to add some interest and if you have some stamps-awesome!!!

Crates on wheels

Clutter free spaces and less chaotic mind

Over the years, from my teenage years to mid 30's, I(just like many others) have gone through different state of minds, liking and disliking. Same was true for me in terms of my liking towards keeping my space around. I have thoroughly enjoyed my teenage being a clutter loving person(only in terms of keeping my space around). But as I grew up, one thing was surely understood- after a chaotic day of work, a clean and clear surrounding gives a sense of the much needed peace. But how does it happen actually-?

While I completely believe in my theory as I experienced it myself, I also conducted some experiments with a few people around. The best time to experiment was where they were already going through a chaotic phase in their lives say some issues in office or something else. I tried this experiment with different people lying on the different extremes of liking/disliking for organising their things and clutter/clutter-free surroundings. My first experiment was with a completely disorganised and clutter loving person when they were in some chaos. If i tried adding a little more clutter in their living spaces, they got very uncomfortable and they wanted to cleanup the mess. So basically there was a limit to which they could handle the clutter and in already chaotic situation, it was uneasy for them to handle more chaos around. So they started to sort some of their stuff. Some other day, in similar situation, i just cleaned up the mess before they returned home after a chaotic day. And as expected they were little more peaceful seeing things in place.

I tried same experiment with totally organised husband of mine.  And there you see a huge difference!

Just tweaking the place of a key from left to the right on a shelf hook would make him go crazy and they would not find it when it is still in front of their eyes. And ofcourse if you introduced 4 new unrelated things to say their work desk, they would be upset and will be seen more impatient. But in similar situation if they see everything cleaned up and lying at the designated place, whatever situation they are in, they seem more relaxed.

All of us are busy in our lives and in families where all are working people, it gets very difficult to keep cleaning and organising things around. For such people, the mantra to be followed is that the home should have only those things which have a designated space for them. Then you do not need to find special time for organising or cleaning your surroundings. 

So if you ponder over the next line for 5 times, you would find it easy, really easy:

If a thing A has a accessible and convenient place say X,Y coordinates in home, then it is never too difficult to place A at X,Y when it is not in use and pick it again from X,Y whenever needed. 

We all just need little and very little discipline to feel more peace in life. 

So just ponder over above, you will find many answers to the chaotic state of mind you deal with everyday!