Tips from the best interior designers on how to shortcut your way to beautiful and cozy spaces
Welcome to our blog where you will learn (super easy) tips and shortcuts to create beautiful and cozy spaces for your home. We will be covering different topics to guide you all along this fun journey through different posts that will also help you to choose the best handmade natural fiber rug.
Design steps to transform any space and make your dreams come true are:
- Examine the structure/design
- Plan the arrangement of the furniture.
- Plan the lighting
- Plan the design scheme
Examine the structure/layout
The first task in the design sequence is to draw a plane of the spaces as it is before you begin the renovation. At this point, try to put aside your ideas for the style theme you have in mind. Although you may be full of wonderful visions of how fresh, modern, bright, luxurious or attractive it can make spaces look, keep those thoughts aside for now.
In your head, remove all furniture and accessories from the room and concentrate on the structure. This will also help to dimension the correct size of the rug that will be part of the final composition. If you've taken pictures of space, it will help you a lot.
Now, take the measurements of the room. You can then simply use paper and pencil to draw the walls, gaps and projections of doors and windows indicating their swing. To check the measurements, add the individual lengths of the characteristics and verify that they are sum up to the total length of the wall. When you only look at the outline of a room, it's much easier to judge proportions and features and see where you can make improvements.
If you want to go a step further, you should also make elevation drawings that show:
- ceiling height -
height, width and position of the windows
- heights and width of doors
- services
- light switches, radiators, electrical points, etc.
- Architectural features: fireplace, arch, floor level change, sloping ceiling, etc.
You can also include appearance/ orientation of the room: looking north / south / east / west
Bonus: What we love and rather not about rug sizes in living rooms
Get a rug that will be able to contain all the furniture on top of it. Normally rug surfaces should cover up to 60 cm around the footprint of the furniture above it.
If this is not possible, have the rug to expand at least up to below half the extension of the sofa and surrounding chairs (In the example in the picture above, we recommend at least the rug that is 2 x 3 meters).
We would rather not recommend a rug that is only big enough to cover the area bellow the coffee table, neither round rugs for the center of a living room. These will draw too much attention to the center of the room and make it look smaller. Seated guest´s feet should always fall on top of the rug.