Crossing over to the White light- Planning the Lighting in a Room

Furniture isn’t the only thing you need to plan when you think of decorating a room. A lot of furniture depends on the amount and angle of light in a room to give the complete effect. Which is why when you plan to redecorate an entire room, you should always consider lighting as a factor. If you have a room that’s already arranged the way you want it and you’re thinking of improving the lighting then here are a few tips.

Who?
Always think of who’s going to be using that room and what they’re likely to need. If it’s a children’s bedroom for kids that are still young enough to knock over a lamp, you should go with overhead fixtures and/or track lighting. If it’s going to be used as a reading room make sure there’s at least one table lamp and plenty of over head light. Always keep in mind the different kinds of functions that are going to be performed in that room. The room’s usage will define your where you need the light.

What?
Always find out what different kinds of lightings are suggested for your usage. You may need a table lamp but there are all sorts of table lamps, some are meant for bedroom reading, keeping the light concentrated to a very small part of the room while others are meant for reading at the desk. They cast brighter and better light. Lamps for bedrooms are likely to have a lamp shade while desk lamps will not. Wall fixtures are best for areas that get little sunlight and places that you’d like to illuminate or set apart from the room like a wall with a special or unique decorating piece. If you’re choosing lighting for the living room, you should use a unique or eye catching wall fixture. Not only will it contribute to the room’s décor but also if you have a wall that you can’t get inspired enough to decorate, or one that you feel is too blank, a unique wall fixture will bring it out.

Where?
There are some general areas where you need light; by the bed, next to the comfy arm chair where your read ‘The night before Christmas’ to your kids, above or beside the mirror where you get ready in the morning, in the dining room. If you think you’re lighting needs for a room can change through the day then you need to use dimmer switches , not only do they help conserve energy but they’re also an easy way change the look of the room for special occasions or parties.

The Top 5 Interior Design Websites

My fascination with online interior design resources began when I realized that there was virtually tons and tons of ideas out there for the average home maker, just begging him/her to them a chance. I kind of always thought that people would be kind of secretive and copy right protective about their work but people, bloggers and companies are more than generous, just another reason to love the World Wide Web.

The only problem that I had was with finding a reliable source of constantly updated work. I don’t even rearrange the things on my dresser very often let alone my house, but for me looking at stunning rooms is eye candy.

The list I complied is based on how much information is available on the site, how well it’s arranged and the quality of the content. I didn’t go looking for the sites myself though, these are the top ten sites cited in some list on the internet and I’m taking them for a spin.

IKEA

The site and blog are excellent. The site categorizes the furniture you’re looking for into appropriate rooms like living room, bedroom, kitchen and a kids’ collection. The layout is excellent and the site features items that emphasis practicality and modern design. There’s another site worth mention IKEA hacker, a blog features IKEA furniture redesigned , with a before and after shop. This site has a lot of credibility of online users and several mark it as the number one site.

Apartment Therapy

This site is really great if you’re trying to turn small spaces into practical functional and chic rooms. This is a great site to explore if you’re stuck living in a ‘this is all I can afford’ apartment where the plaster is coming off the walls. The site can help transform ugly walls and ridiculously small claustrophobic spaces into open and easy to live in rooms. their solutions aren’t just practical but very very affordable.

DeZeen

Dezeen is definitely less practical and more modern design. The featured rooms and layouts are for those who’ve crossed over to the side where having weird shaped things poking out of your wall is considered gorgeous. The rooms they have can look good when they’re complete and you’d need a lot of imagination and ingenuity to take any one part that you like and add it to a room of your personal design. As far as the rooms in their modern charm are concerned, they’re excellent. Even someone like me, who hasn’t really crossed over to this kind of contemporary design can appreciate how great the rooms are.

Design Sponge

Design Sponge is the place to go if you’re looking for fresh and innovative products and tips on keeping your home décor looking modern and chic. The site features multiple posts about everyday design. The posts go into details for room accessories and even feature ‘Before and After’ shots of rooms redesigned. If nothing else, the site is fun to explore for the wide range of ideas they feature.

Inhabitat

This is the only credible site I found that promotes green living and eco friendly designed and is highly revered online. The site has everything from eco friendly home décor to energy conservation ideas and green fashion! The site has one too many ads but the ideas are good and worth the effort of finding them. The site features products reviews and fashion tips while keeping the mission to stay green in mind.

Gorgeous Day Beds from Home and Bedroom Furniture

Home and Bedroom furniture have just released some new daybeds in their already huge line of existing furniture. For me day beds have always been an excuse to sleep in the middle of the day for no apparent reason so the fact that there are beautiful and highly affordable daybeds out now is encouraging. I might throw out a one of my comfy relaxing chairs for one of these:

You can see more day bed designs by Home and Bedroom Furniture here.

A New Living Room for Every Season

Giving a new seasonal look to your living room is easy and not as expensive as you would think. I actually manage to follow the trendy season colors on a nifty budget

I have a fairly distant aunt who lives in Colorado and who I visit for a week once in summer and in fall. She has no kids and a seriously ridiculous amount of money to her name which she gets to spend on redecorating her house on and off. I must have seen at least five different couches and seven different curtains sets in the last two years. Needless to say, I’m more than envious of her. For me the decision to change the way any one room in my house looks takes a long time to make. It’s an ongoing battle with myself. Part of me is comfortable with the way everything’s set and has its own ‘proper place’ but the other part, (the one that I suspect has always led me to believe that I too can model homes and arrange furniture like a pro) is always calling my other half a ‘boring stooge’.

What settles this argument that I have with myself is the fact that I don’t have the money to redecorate a room whenever I get the whim to. When I think I can pull a few corners and fit it into my budget, I recall the horror movie that was buying my curtains. I’ve found an easier way to pacify these redecorating impulses; with cushions!

I get to keep my curtains and my couch and my carpet, I change the cushions to different hues that fit with the room. Luckily my sofa is a fun dirty brown so a lot of colors work with it. I don’t know what all the patterns are called or what ancient wisdom lies behind them but I can still mix and match colors. You can add the brightest of colors to a living room this way.
At Designers Guild there is a huge gallery dedicated to couches, sofas and cushions and it’s always helped me out. The patterns they recommend there are just wonderful and when I want to spoil myself I go for something by Jonathan Adler, just looking at these cushions make me happy enough to float.

The best part of this design is that I can find some nice textured fabric in different colors and sew it together (much like a patchwork quilt) and I have the whole thing for far less!

The Seed Cathedral Is Revealed

Architectural design isn’t exactly the same as interior design, but I saw this image of the seed cathedral and I couldn’t help but write about it. I don’t exactly have a degree in architecture so all I can really say is that it’s really pretty and darn neat.
According to the Daily Mail, the project cost £25million to build and is 60ft-high in a cube-like formation covered by 60,000 quivering, transparent acrylic rods. I hope they have small miniatures at their gift shop soon. From the little I know about interior design, it’s bound to give a room a nice ‘modern’ look. Each rod is filled with a vegetable seed and it’s going to be the center piece at the Shanghai millennium expo.
The concept behind the design is to make a modern and cutting edge country. I hope it works out to accomplish that, and even if it doesn’t, it’s still fun to look at. I can’t wait for the National Geographic channel to do a feature on it, (I’m hoping it does, the one on Beijing’s Bird’s nest was amazing).





The design is by Thomas Heatherwick and the following abstract rendering of the complete project is featured on his site.



Images Source

Home Decorating Blues… and Greens

I remember back when Top Design used to air and I’d go gaga over all those rooms they made, the office spaces that were renovated by the contestants took my breath away. I always thought that the bright colors they used could never fit in an ordinary home or an apartment, or should I say, my home/ my apartment. The main problem I had was with how bright the colors were. I love bright colors but when it comes to decorating a room, I think once the new feeling of a room wears off, it begins to look pretty much like a circus side show which is probably why I’ve been just a few steps away from buying floral grandma type furniture. The little color that I do add is always, as I learned on Top Design, a splash of color in an otherwise blandly decorated room. I have a coffee table that has a transparent glass top and as long as my sofas were a murky brown, I put some fake turquoise flowers under it. (I later learnt that Oprah frowns on fake flowers)
I’m slowly coming around now to the idea of using brighter colors and I owe it to some really great ideas that I’ve found online, ones that use two of my favorite colors ever, blue and green.

Like this image I found , it got me thinking that I could combine a bright color with a darker one. I think black gets a bit gloomy but I think brown and turquoise should work just as well. Maybe someday I really will have a brightly colored living room. A room like this would need to have a lot of lighting though so it’s still in the maybe pile. Redoing the fireplace to look like that is out of the question.




This other image that I found seems to me a bit more practical. It’s easy to do, if you have a sofa that you like and don’t want to lose. All you need to do is change the curtains and get cushions to match. It’s all in the colors!





(Pictures are linked to their original source)