Furniture design: lessons in style and practicality
The role of an interior design is to bring all the elements in your home into harmony. Colours, textures, fabrics, window dressing, floor coverings. It should all come together to create a feeling, an ambience, that suits your visual style and, more importantly, your lifestyle. One of the most important considerations, is of course, furniture design.
Defining Interior Spaces
If you’re renovating or updating your home, designating spaces for the different parts of your life is so important, and furniture design plays a huge role. The way you layout and design your furniture defines spaces, especially in open-plan interiors. It influences the way you move through your house. Creating flow between spaces can be as important as the functionality of the space itself. Having a sofa that is too big, or a coffee table that is the wrong shape, can create a roadblock, an annoying s-bend, that you have to negotiate day after day after day.
Furniture for life, not instagram
It’s easy to walk into a furniture design shop and see that gorgeous white chaise sofa and fall in love with it’s design appeal and instagramability. But if you have three kids and a German Shepard… hmmm… maybe not the couch for you. An interior designer can help you find that balance between style and practicality.
Feel the quality
With cost of living pressures at an all time high, we’re not all running out to buy the latest Gio Ponti table. But it is worth spending a little extra to get a piece of furniture that will stand the test of time and the rigours of your everyday life. Working with an interior designer or home designer with connections in the industry also helps. We can generally get some pretty decent trade discounts that aren’t available for walk-ins.
I like to work with like-minded businesses that have the customers best interests at heart, not the bottom line. I work often with companies like Soren Liv, in Kingsland, Auckland, who have some beautiful designs from bar stools to beds and everything in between.
Le Forge, in Penrose, Auckland, are another favourite of mine. They are a wholesale and trade only supplier who have a range of quality furniture, homewares and accessories catering to a wide audience at a reasonable price. As do Republic Home in Ponsonby & Newmarket.
Furtex, in Kingsland, Auckland, are another trade supplier I work with who have beautiful, quality soft furnshings & rugs, and Signature Rugs in Penrose, Auckland. If you’re looking for some quality paintings or prints, Start With Art is a supplier I also work with.
Get the right advice
You may or may not know your style, but a good interior designer can enhance your style, and help you make the right choices when it comes to matching your furniture with other elements of your home. We will ask you all the right questions, look at the bigger picture and guide you every step of the way. We’ll make sure that your furniture design choices create spaces that are both visually harmonious, and suited to everyday living. At the end of the day, it’s a fun process, and one with endless possibilities to play with colour, textures, shapes and styles.
