Inspiration
Making your own interior design
Perhaps your interior lacks coherence, or you have bought a new house and want to get it right from the start. Either way, the sensible first step is an interior design: a plan in which all your ideas come together, so you can see whether they belong together before anything is bought. The question is how you make one.
Inspiration
First, find your style
Start by asking yourself which interior suits you. You find out by looking at many of them and writing down, each time, what you like about a style.
Which styles are there?
- Bohemian
- Botanical
- Design
- Industrial
- Country
- Luxury
- Classical
- Modern
- Retro
- Romantic
- Scandinavian
These styles combine well, and within them sit substyles of their own. Take luxury: Soothing Luxury, Roman Luxury and Modern Luxury all fall under it.
Inspiration
Choose the style that fits you as a person, and not the one that happens to be in fashion. A fashionable style that is not really yours wears out quickly. A style that makes you feel at home does not.
Make a mood board
With the style settled, start collecting inspiration and keeping hold of it. A mood board can be made the old way, cut from interiors magazines and pasted onto one large sheet. Or keep it online on Pinterest, where every image you save stays in one place: that particular sofa, that wallpaper, that rug.
Inspiration
Draw the floor plan to scale
For the design itself you need a floor plan of your home, so you know exactly how much room you are working with. On it, draw to scale where each piece of furniture goes. If there is no floor plan, measure the house and draw it at a scale of 1:50. Then draw the furniture at the same scale, cut the pieces out, and slide them across the plan until everything has found its place. It gives you a first picture of how the room will look.
Inspiration
Every room asks something different
A design for a kitchen is a different exercise from one for a bedroom or a bathroom, because every room has its own function, and every household uses it in its own way. In one house the kitchen is where everything happens and deserves generous seating; in another the living room is the heart, and what matters is a deep sofa to stretch out on for a film on the cinewall.
To make the rooms feel like one house, let an element return in several of them. In the interior design for a new-build villa we used three-dimensional bog oak wall panels in both the sitting area and the kitchen, and that repetition binds the two rooms together.
Inspiration
The seven points every design turns on
Any interior has to reckon with seven points:
- Space
- Light
- Lines
- Shapes
- Colours
- Textures
- Patterns
An interior design is more than gathering furniture and deciding on a wall colour. A good lighting plan is the point most often neglected, even though light decides much of the atmosphere in a house. The shapes in a house carry a great deal of its character too.
In an angular penthouse, for instance, we brought in round forms in the kitchen and the fireplace. The straight lines against the curved ones give the interior a pleasing balance, and a tension that keeps it interesting.
Inspiration
Working with an interior designer
You can do all of this yourself, or you can bring in an experienced interior designer. Interior designers know what goes together and what does not: how coherence is built, how a lighting plan is set up, and what a colour does to a room. It pays to choose an interior designer who listens properly, with whom the conversation flows, and whose style sits close to your own.
Inspiration
Designing it with Studio Reinder Veenstra
Do you want to:
Furnish your home comfortably, and with a sense of luxury?
- Avoid the mistakes you made last time?
- Keep it to a design only, for now?
- See your ideas worked out visually?
- Talk your ideas through with an interior designer?
Then an interior design journey with Studio Reinder Veenstra will suit you. You come to our studio and design your kitchen, bathroom or an entire floor together with us. By the end you have a clear picture of how your house is best laid out and furnished, and the choices of style, material and shape are made with your wishes leading. Afterwards the studio works the ideas up into a floor plan, a 3D visualisation and a reference image, so complete that it feels as if the interior already exists. Together we make your house the place where you feel at home.
Start your project
Book an introduction
Curious what we could do for your home? We are glad to meet, with no obligation.
STUDIO REINDER VEENSTRA