San-Marié Vogel - News #Interior Design

Showhouse and Home Interiors: tips and tricks to be the most impressive

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 19:43:40 +0200

Bringing any house into the light in order to present it at its best may not necessarily prove to be an expensive exercise. What you really need is vision and imagination – and a canny knowledge of light and perspective. Here are some tips and tricks to assure that any house on display will show its best features and highlight every advantage:

A range of tips

Airy, open space
Making the interior of the house appear larger is key. And one of the biggest factors affecting space can be doors. They take up a large amount of space without us realising it. Put in sliding doors if you must have a door – but where you can, take the doors away entirely. Archways are a good way to go to create division, yet leave space.

The furniture fix
Keeping the rooms minimally decorated is the best way to show off the potential of a showhouse. With less furniture in each room, you again create a feeling of space and calm. It also makes it easier for buyers to mentally envision their own furniture in those spaces, immediately giving a powerful sense of home creation.

Multi-function space
It is becoming more common to have a kitchen, dining and living all in one open plan. This may be costly to effect in a home that does not have this feature, but sometimes it can be more easily effected that one realises. Open plan does tend to enhance the home because it saves space that would normally be taken up by walls and doors. It gives the viewer a sweeping, quick overview of a home’s potential, which is always more easily represented in the living areas.

Keep to the light
There’s nothing worse than walking into a dimly lit house. One gets the impression of pokiness and dusty shadows. So, light up the house – pale walls, light curtains or shutters. In any well-designed house, windows should be strategically placed so that light shines through and is reflected off the walls. Even if the house is compact, there will be an illusion of space.

Glass and chrome
Whatever the fashion, the use of glass and chrome does add the light in a room and also gives greater sense of space. A glass-topped dining table looks as though it is hardly there and there is no ‘broken’ view of the room. With the shine of chrome there is always the feeling that the furniture is brand new.

Carpet uniformity
The flooring is as crucial as the wall for ensuring light and spaciousness. It’s best to use the same plain, light coloured carpets or tiles throughout the house to give the impression of space. Patterns should preferably be muted or avoided.

Quality of finish
Show houses have to display the best in finishes. There are many people examining a showhouse at any one time, and you will have to appeal to the most discerning. Finishes should give the impression of the latest fashion, style and of durability. Good finishes give a house a look of elegance and sophistication.

Landscaping
Paying attention to opening up space in the garden is just as important as creating space in the house. Landscaping is a good way to set up flower beds, lawns and features that enhance a feeling of openness and orderliness. This can be done over a few months and need not cost a fortune, but can hugely improve the look of the house.

A range of tricks

Declutter: Get rid of junk. Once you start clearing out, you will be amazed at the space you will open up – not to mention discovering a vast amount of things you don’t really need!

Mirrors: Capture the light. A mirror will immediately add space by reflecting light and volume, making the room appear larger.

Lamps and candles: Adding warmth. Lamps add a comforting glow to any room. Strategically spaced, they highlight special nooks and provide a homely feel. Candles give the effect of an occasion, a sense of cosy warmth on long evenings, whether used indoors or outdoors. Like a fire, they provide a sense of intimacy and invite conversation.

Wires: Find a way to hide unsightly wires. There’s nothing worse than unruly webs of wires lying around any technical equipment. Try your hardware store for neat wire holders, get extra plugs, get in a professional to help you reorganise your wiring for tidiness.

Door and drawer handles: There’s nothing worse than old, worn or even broken handles. And they are so easy to fix. Give your doors a new look, facelift an old chest of drawers, and even give your kitchen a flashy new look, simply by changing the handles.

The look of class and care: Simple things like the change of cushion covers, the addition of flowers or a throw, will lift the whole look of a room. Even reframing old pictures can introduce a modern, fresh look.

Restoration: Why not take something with value as a good inheritance piece and have it restored to its former glory? Or browse bric-a-brac stores, house clearance warehouses and charity shops where you can pick up something amazing and perfect for your house; an item of joy which, once painstakingly re-crafted to its original design, will add an attractive point of pride and conversation to your home. For our latest showhouse interior design project here.

Udumo’s Mission: The combined energy of empowerment and aesthetic design

Udumo Group delivers interior décor and design services by empowering unemployed people with skills development initiatives. We believe in investing in the individual, nurturing inherent skills, and uplifting communities. Our interior design philosophy is to design beautiful spaces that are both functional and timelessly pleasing. We believe that through promoting the values of creative excellence, discipline and commitment, we are able to bring out the best in people, motivating positive surroundings and the value of living and working in such spaces.

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Corporate Interior Design: pinning the flag to the mast

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 05:51:50 +0200

Designing a business space can be both challenging and intriguing because there is so much more to this type of project than residential interior. A commercial structure will demand far more in impact and functionality and thus far more to explore before a designer can put creative ideas to paper.

The art of the business interior

Corporate interior design is the art of balancing aesthetic principles with the functional needs of the company – after all, a business is more defined by its interior than the exterior of the building. Broadly put, the entire purpose of a business is to make money, but sometimes a busy team may overlook the most important aspect of that purpose – and that is the environment in which the business operates.

The art of corporate interior design is much more than just colour, logos, matching elements or pictures on the wall. In fact, some businesses are satisfied with even less than that. Poor lighting, a dowdy appearance, shabby carpets can give a drab look to a business – and if people should sense that upon entering your premises, it may negatively affect the impression they gain of your services. Even if you’re top-notch at what you do, it doesn’t matter; how you appear visually to a client is often the way they judge your capability.

Function, fashion and business strategy

A good interior designer should reflect the business goals of their client. Space planning is prime with regard to general workings of the business, such as a boardroom, an accounting department, human resources, sales, etc. But intrinsic to the right look for the company is the way interior designer incorporates their goals, vision and principles.

In order to design how a desk should fit a space, or computer equipment be neatly accommodated, or where a set of files should be placed for convenience, it’s important to know the detailed functionalities of the various departments; design should cater for the way people interact through meetings, presentations, interviews and collaboration. However, entwined with these functionalities, there should also be clear message regarding the company’s values, purpose and identity.

Firstly, you’ll be flying the corporate colours. These can be weaved into anything from walls to pictures, to furniture, to carpets. But there’s more: there’s the design of the space itself from the ‘factory’ look to modern and streamlined, to an antique look that may be required by a law firm that wants to give the impression of tradition and responsibility in their décor. Each aspect of a design must complement others, while affirming and emphasizing mood, vision and the business strategy.

Employee productivity

It’s a good idea to remember that your corporate interior design is not only important to visitors but also extremely influential with regard to your employees.

Your design can ultimately affect the productivity of your staff.
Natural lighting has been shown to be highly beneficial to workers. So if you have the opportunity to enhance natural window light, then that would be a great way to go. If there’s a view out there, even better!
Employees who feel trapped in their environment will constantly seek reasons to escape on smoke breaks, coffee breaks, or by magically disappearing for long periods. All of this affects productivity.
Clever design that makes people feel better, calmer and more focused and motivated will contribute effectively to a better overall work ethic.

Key tips to changing your look

Lighting: The design of the lighting must provide good visibility, as well as blending with the design concept and furnishings. Use colour only where it might be at its most enhancing and inviting. Natural lighting wherever possible, remains your best choice to reduce the harsh effect of fluorescent lighting so beloved of modern offices.
Creating zones: It’s important to segment areas within your office – either using a plan of individual offices or cubicles, or attending to the problems of open plan. Reception areas, meeting rooms, workspaces focused on different types of work should be differentiated. Breaking away from traditional screens, you can use couches, bookcases and even rugs to create different areas within the wider office space. Zones create interest and engagement, and alleviate the boredom that open planning can produce.
Plants: These can act to break up space, contributing to you zone plans. Plants can create greater privacy between areas. They also make people more relaxed and add a more homely atmosphere to an office. They are proven contributors to better air quality and thus good for people’s health, concentration, creativity and alertness.
An accent wall: Using colour on one wall can be most effective in avoiding a bland look. While the wall can carry your logo, using it to make a statement about the company’s product or services, values or social responsibility is a good way to go. Using the walls in this way, can be valuable in promoting your business message – bringing your branding into the interior design with impact and flourish.

Udumo’s Mission: The combined energy of empowerment and aesthetic design

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Out with the old, in with the new: give your house a spring-clean look

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 21:32:52 +0200

No matter how many different designer websites and magazines you visit, you will find that all of them return to the same basic principles concerning ideas to help you turf out the old look and create an entirely new one without the cost of calling in a professional. With minor variations, here’s what your “spring clean” should focus on when deciding what must OUT and what must IN.

A change of colour

Start with your entryway. After all, this is the first part of your home that gives you a greeting embrace as you open your front door. Consider how colours affect your mood and what mood you’d like homecoming to evoke. Most designers suggest opting for three colours or shades for different sections of the house: one for the walls, one for couches, chairs and other furniture, and one that dominates in accessories. Of course, you need not follow this rule at all, but it is a useful guide to ending up with an aesthetically pleasing end result.

There is no need to change the colour of all the walls, either. Simply one of the walls in a room can be in a daringly different colour or shade to match the furniture that dominates the room, whether this be your entryway, living room, dining room, or bedroom. You can even opt for wallpaper in a new shade just for certain sections of walls. Changing the colour on picture frames is an equally simple manner of introducing a fresh feel into a room. For the bathroom your IN with new colour can simply be a new shower curtain, a row of colourful tiles, or a splash of paint on that old bathroom cabinet. Just remember: if you want a gentle, calming effect, select softer hues; for a vibrant, energizing effect, bolder colours are best. Select colours that stir the required emotion in you.

Differing textures

Here we are talking linen, velvet, silk, cotton, brushed suede, leather, mohair, the weave on cushion covers, faux fur blankets, rattan chairs and woven baskets, differing grains of wood, and even of introducing hints of new texture into artwork frames, flower vases or place mats. Texture adds so much character to any room and encourages the creative artist in you to emerge as you play with varying combinations and arrange them in corners of rooms or on a table, as shown in the photograph below.

The kinds of OUT and IN here will depend on how much you want to spend, but every little change will be refreshing. Decide on what suits your pocket and your needs. Go big, and opt for texture change in curtains or upholstery? Go small, but with equal pleasure, and simply splash out on new cushion covers, new throws or blankets, new lamp shades, a sculpture or two, or interesting texture additions to picture or photo frames? Further ideas for texture effects will follow in the accessories section below.

New lighting effects

Overhead lighting is functional, but, let’s be frank, it is hardly ever flattering or interesting. If your budget allows it, invest in pendant lights. These are extremely effective when illuminating work spaces in kitchens, but are equally useful for creating special softening effects in a bedroom, dining room or living room. Also, adding them to your bathroom, near the sink, will provide the necessary, focused light for those who need to apply make-up or shave.

Other lighting changes can be reassuringly inexpensive. Bringing in a new table lamp or two, or simply replacing the old lampshades on existing ones, will “throw a different light” on almost any living space! The best idea by far is to install dimmers; the flexibility these afford, in terms of altering the mood or look in any room at any given moment, is worth the relatively tiny cost.

Naturally, new window treatments can also produce surprising changes to the light in every room. Decide to add or remove panes of frosted glass, or replace outdated blinds and heavy old curtains with linen or bamboo shades.

Additional Ins and Outs

A good choice of mirrors will enhance any room. For a small dining or living room, replacing your existing mirror with a large one will add depth and dimension. Smaller ones you already own can merely be framed differently to refresh that spot, or you can visit secondhand shops for inimitably lovely antique finds. The same applies to the enriching effect of rugs. These are available in so many different sizes, colours and immeasurably lovely designs. And for that overdue and vital spring-clean of messy clutter, there is an absurdly simple designer solution: containers. Any decorative bowls or woven baskets to your liking should suffice. For loose items like soaps and bath salts in the bathroom, or your dressing table items, placing them on a beautiful tray, or adding a small bowl of coloured stones to such surfaces, can prettify the space.

Accessories

As reflected in this photograph illustrating the use of varying textures, relatively inexpensive IN-items like candle holders, bowls, trays, flowers, books, pine cones, frosted glass ornaments, an antique, enamel-coated jug or kettle and the always enlivening addition of a pot plant can turn the old into the new. Nature offers an astonishing array of choices here: twigs or feathers, shells or rocks, or your own imaginative use of dried or pressed flowers, can turn into pieces of timeless creative expression. Better still, for when you feel the need for the next uplifting spring clean, these can simply be rearranged or shifted to a new part of the room or house.

And you will have proved that you yourself can turn your home into a constantly evolving work of art.

Udumo Designs deliver interior décor and design services by empowering unemployed people with skills development initiatives. We believe in investing in the individual, nurturing inherent skills, and uplifting communities. We hold as our mission making the future sustainable by mentoring meaningful change in the wider environment. Our interior design philosophy is to design beautiful spaces that are both functional and timelessly pleasing. We have proved that promoting the values of creative excellence, discipline and commitment can bring forth the beauty within each person and reflect it in both private and public living spaces around them.

For information on Udumo Designs, visit: www.udumodesigns.org

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Our homes: an extension of our personalities

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 21:07:34 +0200

The word “home” is multi-layered: for most of us it envelopes every important and treasured memory reaching right back to our childhood. Home evokes comforting images and emotions related to family and loved ones, to where we’ve come from, and what we’ve since become. It is the place to which we always want and need to return, because it is where we feel we belong. It is where we can truly be ourselves and forget about the image others have of us. Simply put: home is an extension of our personalities.

How spaces speak

You need to be clear about what you want your home to say about you, so that it carries your signature with pride. It should be both a personal statement and a source of aesthetic satisfaction that pleases the senses. In the succinct words of Scott Adams:

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep.”

Spaces speak through the interplay of colour and light, a creative positioning of items, a combining of differing textures, and through appropriately placing things within those spaces. All these elements can combine to say something essential and eloquent about you.

Giving your home its unique voice

Redesigning your home need not be a costly affair. All the elements are probably already right there. They need only to be brought into fresh focus.

Light: The simple magic of light is available to us all, whether its effects are from the outside or created by placing a modest lamp in a strategic spot. Coloured glass or light filtered through fabric can instantaneously alter the atmosphere in a living space. And again: the mere choice of a particular lightbulb can set the required tone in any corner of a room.

Colour: Here is an equal magic wand. Whether it is on walls, doors, window frames or wainscoting, it will reflect any mood you desire. Carpets, rugs, throws, cushion covers, linen and pottery are just some of the readily available ways of making colour dance exuberantly, or flow gently, through your home. Colour can express brazen confidence, or be a soft, subtle invitation. It can express the sociable side of you that is energetic and communicative, or indicate that a certain room is where you prefer to be pensive, meditative, restful, and private.

Objects: Let’s turn to the most meaningful valuables we possess: our individual, treasured memories… and the objects that recall those defining moments from our past. They tell your story. These are, after all, the memorabilia or mementos you have chosen to carry with you through the years. They are evocative of the people and events that have shaped you. They hold meaning for you, so trust that they say something valid about you. Display them. Play with options. Arrange them together with newer items that complement them or create a striking contrast.

Textures: One has only to consider the vast array of different fabrics available to realise that an effective combination of textures can be a relatively easy achievement. Apart from the obvious elements, like the weave in rugs or cushion covers, or combining rough and smooth surfaces, you can draw on nature here to produce innovative and pleasing results. Nature’s innumerable and inimitably lovely designs have continued to inspire human ones throughout the ages. Invite it in, whether through plants, flowers, stones, or different grains of wood. Or do so simply by keeping a lookout for objects of natural beauty on your walks through a forest, along a nature trail, or on a beach.

Explore yourself

Most psychologists would agree that we never stop growing, and consequently never stop learning new things about ourselves. The interior design of your home can be an ongoing exploration of different facets of yourself. Whether you live alone and don’t really care about what others think of you or your home… whether you feel comfortable only in presenting a particular image of yourself… whether you and a partner need to combine tastes to create a jointly pleasing aesthetic… or whether you share your home with a family of colourful individuals, allowing your home to speak for you is an opportunity to discover new things about your tastes, your moods, your needs and what might be surprising, newfound abilities you never knew you possessed.

As a mirror image of who you are, designing a uniquely embracing home for yourself and loved ones allows you to explore the innate artistic side of yourself, and to claim your creative identity, so that your home reflects an inspired and inspiring you.

For inspiration is reciprocal. In the words of an unknown but inarguably insightful person:

“Our homes should inspire us to go out into the world to do great things and then welcome us back for refreshment.”

Udumo Group

Udumo Group deliver interior décor and design services by empowering unemployed people with skills development initiatives. We believe in investing in the individual, nurturing inherent skills, and uplifting communities. We hold as our mission making the future sustainable by mentoring meaningful change in the wider environment. Our interior design philosophy is to design beautiful spaces that are both functional and timelessly pleasing. We have proved that promoting the values of creative excellence, discipline and commitment can bring forth the beauty within each person and reflect it in both private and public living spaces around them.

For more information, visit Udumo Designs and Udumo Group.

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