Dear Readers:
A woman recently asked me for the decorating secrets to creating an outstanding room. There are really no secrets. A truly great room requires careful space planning, wonderful furnishings (define wonderful however you like), and if not intuitive style than at least education and training.
Let’s get the furnishings out of the way, since this is what everyone focuses on. There is a big difference in quality and appearance -- not to mention cost -- between the merchandise available to the trade only and that which the average person has access to. (There are ways around this, but that’s the subject of another column.) You can still have a wonderful room on a budget, because even more important than placing great items in a room, is the ability to apply the principles and elements of design to the space. Some homeowners use these rules instinctively, but professionals use them deliberately.
What are the rules? The most important is the famous “form follows function”. A room’s design must meet the needs of the persons occupying the space; i.e., you shouldn’t have to adapt to your surroundings. The space should be carefully planned to handle the activities while allowing for traffic circulation.
The other design principles are ones that you won’t notice until they go horribly wrong. One is called
unity and variety, which seem like contradictory components. Actually they complement one another, like yin and yang. While each room needs a sense of planned order, the juxtaposition of opposites in it adds visual interest. Some people unfortunately carry variety to an extreme. Without the restraint of unity, there’s a fine line between an “eclectic” interior and an insane one.
The principle of balance is another biggie. This is one of the main problems I come across, and one of the easiest to fix. Balance refers to the visual weight of objects in a room. The visual mass on one side of the space should counterbalance that on the other. All sides of the room need to be counterbalanced visually.
Rhythm creates the “movement” in the room. The placement of objects and patterns causes your eye to dance around, and the eye resting on large solids provides control of this movement. Scale and proportion deal with the size of objects in relation to the size of the space and to each other, respectively. And emphasis means that nothing should detract from the focal point of the room.
Line, form, contrast, color, pattern, and texture are all design elements that occur in various combinations in every room. While each one has several discussion points, let me just say that one element should predominate in the space.
