How often do you enter a room and find certain details or areas that you feel good about? Are there areas in your own home that you find nice or appealing? In interior design, these are good features of a room. There is a decorating philosophy that goes, "Accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative". By following this basic interior design philosophy you can highlight the positive or good features of the room and come up with a pleasing design scheme. Let's say you have a beautiful fire place in your living room. This is a good feature and often a fireplace is used as a focal point in interior design. The first thing you want to do is accentuate this good feature by making it the focus of attention and building a conversation area around it.
It is rather easy to notice the positive details of any given room, making the task of accentuating the positive features easier, but how do you deal with the problem areas? The interior design philosophy teaches us to eliminate the negative and when it is impossible to eliminate it, just camouflage it. Do you have any area in your home that you wish doesn't exist or is it in a particular architectural style that doesn't go with your own personal taste or does it have pillars or columns that are distracting?
How To Decorate And Live Well
Here are some possibilities of problem areas that you might have in your home and how to deal with these.
How would you deal with a wall containing a distracting column?
1. You can make it disappear by installing cabinets that will fill the spaces on either side of it. This will make the column appear as if it were part of the straight wall because it is already in line with the cabinet's face.
2. If your area is big enough and you can afford to lose some space, just simply build a new wall that runs across the face of the column.
3. The simplest and least expensive way is to paint the wall and column with one color, making the column blend into the wall and thus make it appear less obvious.
Have you come across a room with a pillar planted right in the middle? I bet you wanted to hack that pillar right off the floor. The problem with a pillar placed right in the middle of a room is that it cannot just be removed as much as we want to. This usually is essential in the structure's integrity and eliminating this is definitely not an option. How then will you deal with this kind of a problem? Although this is not a positive feature of a room, you might want to accentuate it and make it stand out. Instead of looking at it in a negative perspective, try to make it a positive feature by making it the focal point.
1. You can paint the pillar a brilliant color, especially if you are planning to have a high-tech or avant-garde room.
2. You can also use some eye-catching device or paint it in stripes to catch attention.
3. If you are planning to have a traditional room, try installing an intricately designed capital and make the pillar stand out.
4. If you have a large room, a mid-room pillar may actually give you the opportunity to divide one big room into two. The pillar could be used as a starting point of a wall that will convert one huge room into two different areas.
5. The easiest and least expensive way to camouflage a pillar is to paint it with the same color as the walls. Although this is not a very effective way to eliminate the irritating center pillar it can at least make it less obvious.
6. The best way to make a mid-room pillar disappear is to mirror it. This is very effective since the mirror will just merely reflect the rest of the room.
Having vivid mental pictures and good imaginations of how things should look like will enable you to solve your interior design dilemmas. And with some help from the interior designer's well followed philosophy, you can create the same harmonious room that often only designers can achieve.
Interior Design: How To Handle Problem Areas
Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to Interior Design