How to make your family home more beautiful

If you’ve read our previous blog post, you’ll know exactly where to start and what to consider when it comes to improving your family home and making it look more beautiful. If you missed it, you can find it here .

Once you’ve ticked off the planning and strategy considerations, the next stage is to turn your attention to the visual and emotional aspect of your design – how it’s going to look and feel.

Reading area with fitted bookshelves in a kitchen painted in Farrow and Ball’s Inchyra Blue. Photograph by Anna Stathaki

The following steps should be started once you’ve thought about how the rooms are going to be used and when, so if you haven’t worked this out yet, it’s best to consider this now before moving on. Once this is under your belt, you can start thinking about the concept behind the design. This can then be used to influence your design decisions throughout your project and keep you on track. The concept is basically the big idea, your design goals and what you want to achieve. There are several factors which can influence the design of a room or building. It could be the location of the property, its architecture, a story you want to convey, the feeling you want to create or how you intend to use the space or a combination of these aspects.

Creating a concept board

It’s a good idea to visualise the concept, so you can refer back to it at various stages of your project. It’s as simple as finding a few visuals which illustrate your ideas and capture the feeling. It’s not about the actuals products you want to include. This comes later. For now, it’s more abstract than this and simply sets the tone.

A concept board featuring a selection of images to reflect a modern coastal design scheme.

Planning a room layout

The next steps are to understand the size, shape and orientation of the room or rooms. The amount of natural daylight they receive will have an impact on the colour and material choices while the size and shape will obviously influence the furniture.

Another consideration is to ensure that there’s sufficient space for the activities in a room. Whether it’s entertaining, dining or relaxing, it helps to understand how much space is needed so you’re not bumping your legs on a coffee table or feeling trapped when you sit down for dinner. The scale of the furniture you choose is important, as if it’s too large or small for a room, it’s never going to work.

Floor plans

When we’re working on a design, we carry out a measured survey and then draw up the plans using SketchUp. The furniture is then plotted to scale. You can do the same and draw out the plans by hand or if the space already exists you can mark the furniture out using sheets of newspaper or masking tape. This should give you a pretty good idea if your chosen furniture is the right size. One word of warning, if you are buying larger items, do make sure you can actually get them into the property and into the relevant room. It might sound obvious, but it’s easy to overlook.

2D floor plans of a living room using SketchUp.

The interior design mood board

Once you’ve determined the design direction, you can start looking at specific furniture and fabrics. You’re not going shopping quite yet. There’s just a bit more planning to be done. It’s at this stage that you can create a design mood board. This is more specific than the previous visual board. Now it’s about the details: furniture images, fabrics, the colour scheme, surface treatments etc. This gives you a chance to see how everything works together. It will also ensure that you’ve allowed for different textures, have created contrast and that there’s plenty of visual interest.

Putting all the elements of a room together will show you how the different items work together to create a cohesive design.

Cushions - Oka, light shade - Design Vintage, Sofa - sofa.com, ottoman - Oka, rug - Benuta, fiddle leaf fig plant and pot - Patch, chair - Darlings of Chelsea, stone vase - Charles Ted, side table - Galvin Brothers

In a nutshell

To recap, we’ve learnt that the practical needs of a room go hand in hand with the aesthetics. If you consider both of these aspects, you’re on your way to achieving a well-designed home, that’s harmonious and balanced. Understanding your design goals, what you’ve got to work with and the big idea will help to influence your design decisions and steer you in the right direction. It can also help you from getting distracted and diverting from the brief.

If you feel you could do with a steer in the right direction, our Helping Hand Design Consultation could be just what you need. Our two-hour consultations are specifically designed to solve your design dilemmas. During a home visit (location permitting) we’ll provide plenty of tips, suggestions and design direction.

Contact us today so we can get started on finding a solution that’s right for you.