Even a cursory glance at the teeming magazine racks of high street stores will tell you something about interior design: there is a lot of advice out there. Turn on your t.v. and you will learn something a little scarier - there are many ways you can spend a great deal of money and still fail to transform your home into the living space you long for. Why is it then that when the designers do finally descend on your place and throw out that cherished shagpile, things start to make a little more visual sense? Training and expertise certainly help, but for those not in the market for a career change, there are some basic principles that anyone can apply, and which will create a home closer to your ideal.
Step One: Do your really know what you want?
Perhaps the most important question to ask yourself is "what do I like?". This may seem like stating the obvious, but in reality, getting to grips with this question is a lot tougher than many suspect. An ability to pick out the nuances in answers to this question often distinguishes the designer who provides the end result you dreamed of from those alarming DIY disappointments. The difficulty in answering this question comes from the fact that designs are statements of personal style, and as with most things personal, a little perspective often throws a lot of light on the issue. With television and magazine cameras poking their lenses ever further into peoples' houses, we have become accustomed to considering how a home style reflects a lifestyle. Homes, as much as bodies, have become public vehicles for personal expression. In this sense, asking yourself 'what do I like?', is a fairly loaded question, and answering it can go awry with insufficient probing of our design tastes.
In the quest to get an answer of some use, step one is beware of blanket statements. "I don't like retro", "I love traditional" and "I loathe pink" all convey something useful about the kind of environment you want for a home. If you simply can't stand pink, it is a fairly perverse designer who will try to crowbar you into an entirely pink living space. This is simple good sense, no tricks there. But, let's get to what you do like. You love black. You dream of a bed draped with a rich, velvety black bedspread, and surrounded by dark wood panelled walls. How do you make the wow factor in the room a 3-D reality?
Begin with a pretty simple task: go through design magazines and catalogues, and tear out black rooms that inspire you. Do this from as wide a range of magazines as possible, not just those that carry your favourite styles. If you can, try to include a wild card in there too (if contemporary chic is you big passion, choose one of those bastions of traditional English design as well). The point here is not to try and convert yourself to alternative styles; if you like black, you like black, that's nice and easy. No, the point is to try to understand your creative instincts, your intuitions. Rip away unrestrained over a day or two (this may seem like a long time span, but as your own moods and even the weather changes, so will the room styles that you select). Once you have your, hopefully substantial, pile of black rooms, spread them out across your floor and take a really good look at them.
What will become clear all too soon is that whilst there are many stunning black rooms, very few of the real gems are black and black alone. Often, that black bedspread and ebony furniture is offset with a glimpse of colour in a wall, in a swathe of material or a sculpture (perhaps even in that dreaded shade of pink). To see the blackness of a room, you need more than black in it. To really appreciate the blackness (or any chosen colour) the human eye needs rest space, no matter how small. This is the space that serves to accentuate just how black and velvety the rest of the place is and it does this by being neither black nor velvety. This is what successful designers and clever room stylists will do, and this is how they avoid overloading a space with all of their favourite things and as a consequence seeing none of them.
Look carefully at the detail of those pictures that you pulled out instinctively. You may describe yourself as someone who does not like ornament, but screen your shots. Any ornaments in them? If so, how did they find their way into your pile of favourites? Is it an exceptionally large modern vase, for instance? Asking yourself these questions begins the process of refining your concept of what it is that you actually like. In the case of the ornament, you have learned that when you say "I don't like ornaments" what you are really saying is "I don't like clutter" or "I don't like the ornate". Perhaps there are some ornamental objects, quite distinct from either clutter or ornateness, which you would accept, and importantly enjoy in your personal space. Including this "tear out and assess" tactic in your interior design process will bypass losses of potential design pleasures. So, rule number one for glorious design must be know thyself.
