Beginning a new project, it is always fun to find inspiration and get the creative juices flowing.
With the internet, there are some great websites like Houzz and Pinterest that offer a plethora of images that can give you great direction with your project. If you are old school, a visit to the local book store has aisle after aisle of magazines that will get you excited to begin your project.
Maybe your neighbor or friend has recently completed a similar project, and you are inspired by what you see in their home. There are also a variety of home tours, benefitting a variety of charities, that can give some great ideas!
However you find your inspiration make sure to also make note of what you do not like. It aids in the communication between you and your builder/contractor/designer.
Be very careful to use the images you have found as inspiration to your project and try not to merely duplicate your images.
Consider it like going to a hairdresser. We have all taken in images to our salon when we want a new style, color or cut. How many times did the new style not look exactly as we had wished?
Maybe the shape of your face is round and the picture you liked had the face of a more egg shaped person. Maybe your skin tone is a different shade, so the hair color doesn’t pop the same.
Interior design is much the same.
Many images you might find are professional images that have been lit with stage lighting. Maybe the picture you found has more natural light coming into the room than your room you are decorating has or maybe the shape of the room in the image is different from yours.
Or perhaps the furniture or fabrics in the image are more expensive than your budget allows. As a designer, it is our job to deduce what it is in the image that you like and try to create the same balance of scale, color, patterns and mood that caught your eye.
As I work with a client on a particular room, I will walk through the entire home. It is necessary for me to get a feel for the client’s lifestyle and what they like and don’t like in their home.
I ask my clients how they live, how they entertain and what their goal for redecorating is because maybe they are more utilitarian or maybe they want more of an aesthetic appeal. Or maybe like most people, they desire both.
No one wants to spend money on their home unless their family and friends can be impressed. It is my job as a designer to use all of this information and get inspired to design a project.
If you consider all of these details you, all by yourself, can successfully come up with the right answers for your project. Keep your eyes and mind open and get inspired!
