Read an Excerpt
The Interior Design Handbook
By Joanna Wissinger, Michael Jonah Altschuler Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 1995 Roundtable Press, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6753-6
CHAPTER 1
DEVELOPING AN OVERALL PLAN
Successful home decorating involves practicality and comfort as well as good looks and style. Of course you want your home to reflect your individual taste, but also you must discover exactly what you need, what you would like to improve, how you would decorate if money were not a consideration, and how much you can actually afford to do. Starting with the ideal, you can then work back to a realistic budget, sort out your priorities, and decide which steps to take. The problem is not to do too much or too little but to do the right things, the things that really make a difference.
TAKING A PERSONAL INVENTORY
Begin by interviewing yourself, your spouse or partner, and your kids about practical, aesthetic, and budgetary matters in order to get a firm grasp of what you have to work with. Ask yourself certain obvious questions: What sort of life do you lead? Do you entertain much? Do you prefer large parties or intimate gatherings, or do you have family over just for holiday dinners? What do you do in each room? Then answer the questions in the following exercises and discuss them with your family.
EXERCISES
1. How long do you plan to stay in your present home? This answer will help you decide the best areas in which to invest your decorating budget. See here for more on this topic.
2. Do you have children, or are you planning to start a family? How many? What are their ages? Will your children be leaving home soon?
3. Do other family members live with you? Is this a possibility in the future? For example, will you need to add hand rails, grab bars, and special door hardware to accommodate elderly relatives who will come to live with you or stay on long visits?
4. How much space (number of rooms) do you anticipate needing (for example, three family bedrooms, guest room, home office, kitchen, family room/TV room, formal dining room, living room)? Can you use existing space, including a remodeled attic or basement, or will you need to add on?
5. Do you have pets? Which rooms do they go into? Are they allowed on the furniture? You'll need to consider the needs and habits of your pets when choosing upholstery, floor coverings, and finishes for your home.
6. Where does your family like to eat — kitchen, family room, or dining room? How many meals do you cook each week? This will help you in the practical planning of cooking and eating areas.
7. To discover and avert any conflicts and plan for necessary double-duty areas, make a list of possible multiple uses for rooms. For example, kitchen: cooking, eating, paying bills, doing homework or hobbies, watching TV, visiting.
8. How often do you entertain, and in what style? For example, do you have large cocktail parties, intimate dinners, formal dinner parties, informal buffets? Which room do you use most? Are you pleased with it or do you want to change it? How?
9. Is there enough sleeping and private space for everyone in the family? What needs to be added?
10. Make a list of your family's regular leisure activities performed at home, such as reading, watching TV, exercising, sewing, woodworking, and piano playing.
11. Do you need a laundry room or a hobby room?
12. Do you have enough storage space? List what you need to store (books, out-of-season clothing, sports equipment, and so forth). Make a list of special areas where you might need to store large equipment (freezer, weight machine, loom, or other equipment).
13. Do you and those with whom you share your living space have the same taste or different tastes? If different, have you agreed on how to reconcile the differences? (Does one of you get one room, one the other? How have you compromised?) Can you blend your tastes and possessions? See here for a list of topics you should discuss with your family and here for a child's inventory of likes and dislikes.
14. Have you thought of a color scheme? Do you have a favorite color? Which colors make you happy? Which ones don't you like? For more on this subject see Chapter 2, "Creating a New Color Scheme."
15. Do you want a traditional, formal decor or something more modern and contemporary? Or do you prefer a casual country look?
16. What look would go best with the style of your house? Light and bright? Modern? A period style, such as Georgian or Victorian? See Chapter 3, "Choosing a Style," for more possibilities.
17. Do you own a standout piece — an heirloom or flea market or auction find — around which you could base a scheme? An antique textile, a family portrait, a Victorian sofa? Do you have a favorite fabric that might make a good start for developing a color scheme? List possibilities here.
18. Ignoring price, list ten luxuries that would improve your home and that you desire most.
19. What's the most you can (or want to) spend? (Keep in mind that to be safe you should build an extra 20 percent into your budget; things often end up costing more than you think they will.) In this chapter you will learn how to work out a budget. For now, state the total amount you have set aside to spend.
20. Is this total based on guesswork or have you actually priced what things will cost? If you have to cut your budget, what sort of compromises will be acceptable? Are you willing to find less expensive alternatives for some items? Rather than compromise, would you prefer to postpone some of the improvements you can't afford now?
21. Do you or does anyone in your household have do-it-yourself skills, such as carpentry, painting, or woodworking? List them here.
GETTING IDEAS: SOURCES OF INSPIRATION
Decorating plans should be influenced by the architectural style and proportions of a house or apartment, where it's located (in a city or a small town; by a lake, in the woods, or set on a lawn), and how much natural light it receives.
Your home should be treated with respect, and all of its existing elements should be used to their best advantage, including the doors, windows, staircases, fireplaces, good views, decorative materials, the proportions of existing rooms, the moldings, and any other architectural details.
To absorb the character of a new house or apartment, you have to take your time. Top interior designers often tell their clients to live in a house or apartment for a while without doing anything. Put up blinds or shades for privacy but don't worry about new curtains. Get to know the space and its proportions, which features you want to emphasize, and which you want to disguise. Once you develop a feeling for the interior, you can begin to visualize the colors you want to use, what new pieces of furniture to buy, and how furniture might be arranged.
Of course, if you're redecorating a home you've lived in for a while, you probably have lots of ideas for changes. You may want to strip and refinish the painted woodwork in the dining room, buy a new sofa and install track lighting in the living room, replace the atomic-style 1950s overhead light fixture in the kitchen with something more modern and to your own taste, or take out the old linoleum and put in something brighter and fresher. The problem then is to sort out your ideas and decide which ones to implement.
Look through decorating magazines and style books to get an idea of the result you're aiming for. While it's unlikely that you'll see an interior exactly like the one you want to create, you will be exposed to a number of appealing possibilities. Visit local decorating shops and furniture showrooms for prospective materials — carpeting, wallcoverings, flooring, and fabrics — and collect samples and brochures. Catalogs also can be a good source, from Spiegel to Crate & Barrel. Cut out pictures from magazines and catalogs and gather together your samples of wallpaper, upholstery fabric, paint — whatever strikes your fancy. Don't worry whether or not things go together. That can wait for later.
Create a master file for all of your pictures, your collection of samples, and notes or lists of sources that you've made. Every time you make a change in the source of a piece, in your color scheme, or in your window treatment, for example, indicate the date and put the changed document in the file. It's a good idea to keep a record of everything so that you don't lose track of details or forget a good idea. You'll find that decisions are easier if you at least try to be organized. It will also enable you to see the path you have taken and old ideas that you might want to return to later. At some point, spread out your pictures and samples on a flat surface or pin them up on a large bulletin board so that you can view them all at once. That way you'll see what goes together and what you can eliminate right away, and you'll form some definite ideas about what you want to keep.
If you get in the habit of carrying around a small notebook, you can jot down notes or make little sketches of any ideas you have about furniture arrangement or window treatments or such. You don't have to be an artist — the sketches are simply to help jog your memory later. Otherwise you might have a brilliant inspiration on your way to work on the commuter train or waiting at a red light and not be able to remember it later. This might seem like a lot of work, but it will prove worthwhile in the long run. Even if you are working with a design professional who will be doing all of the legwork, you need to give him or her an idea of what to look for — and you're the only one who can tell the designer what you want.
Try to be flexible. Things that you have set your heart on may prove impossible to obtain or may not work out the way you thought they would. Remember that while good interior design will contribute to the comfort and ease of your life, it should not be an end in itself. Take comfort from these two decorating truths: too-perfect rooms are as boring as too-perfect people, and the most successful decorating is the result of careful editing.
MAKING A FLOOR PLAN
By accurately measuring the dimensions of your living space, you will get a clear idea of exactly what you have to work with. In order to decorate, you must know what you are decorating — how many rooms, how many square feet, how many windows, and so on. If you don't have a floor plan of your house or apartment, it will be worth your time to make one. In fact, drawing a plan of your living space is the foundation for a comprehensive interior design.
Most plans are drawn to scale (which means you will have to measure everything very accurately) and show rooms from above. They generally show things like window and door openings and electrical outlets, but they don't show anything on the ceiling, such as ceiling fixtures (although these can be indicated if you like). Architects use symbols for various details, and you may want to use some of them too (see illustration).
Field Measurements
A. Measurements at these points should be exact in anticipation of built-ins or furniture that will fit into the recess.
B. Careful measurement of the opening into the room as well as the path leading to it is critical in determining that furniture, such as a piano, will pass through openings. Other measurements are shown as ‡ (approximate).
C. If you plan to put something below the sill, be sure to measure the height of the sill.
D. Calculations of room areas are necessary when estimating costs for floor coverings or ordering paint. Use these equations:
ROOM (FLOOR) AREA:
Multiply the overall (O.A.) length by the overall width of the room.
21'0" × 15'0" = 315 square feet
WALL AREA:
Multiply the sum of all the lengths of the walls by the ceiling height (C.H.).
15'0" + 21'0" × 2 = 72'0" × 8'0" = 576 square feet
Measure the room using a tape measure or a carpenter's rule. If your tape measure isn't long enough, you can use a roll of string or twine. If you're going to do a lot of measuring, you might want to buy a heavy-duty tape measure, the kind that contractors and architects use. It will spare you a lot of aggravation.
It's important that measuring be done accurately because many decisions — furniture size and arrangement, wall-covering and fabric yardage, the amount of carpet you buy — are going to depend on it. Measuring works best with two people. The old craftsman's adage "Measure twice, cut once" is worth remembering. You can save yourself a lot of time and grief that way.
It's probably easiest to start with one room. First draw a rough sketch and mark all of the dimensions — length, width, and height — on it as you measure. Then draw a floor plan to scale on a sheet of graph paper. Decide on a scale; if you have a lot of details, you may want to use a one-inch to one-foot scale on a large sheet of paper in order to get everything in. Use a sharp pencil with fairly hard lead to draw your plan; this prevents smudging. Be sure to include more than just the dimensions of the room: also indicate the positions of windows, doors, electrical outlets, telephone jacks, radiators, pipes, and other permanent features, such as fireplaces, closets, air conditioners, and any built-in furniture.
Once you know the dimensions of your room, you can determine how much paint or wallpaper or flooring you will need to buy. To find the area of the floor (which is usually also the area of the ceiling, if it is parallel to the floor), multiply the length of the room by the width. To find the area of a wall, multiply the height by the length. A quick way to find the wall area for an entire room is to measure the perimeter and multiply it by the ceiling height. Subtract for windows and doors if there are a lot of them; otherwise don't bother.
The correct measurement of doors and windows is critical when it comes to moving large pieces of furniture in and out of a room. If you live in an apartment building, you should also measure the elevator. That way your new king-size bed or armoire won't have to go back where it came from because it can't fit through the door!
Next you can add your furniture, either drawing in each piece by hand or using cut-out silhouettes. You can make these yourself, cutting out pieces of a slightly heavier paper stock, or use a kit that supplies you with a variety of furniture silhouettes done to scale. (These come with their own graph paper and can be found at hardware and home do-it-yourself stores, such as Home Depot.) You can easily move the cutouts around, saving the backs and patience of everyone involved in the decorating scheme.
Make plenty of photocopies of the completed plan, as you will need them for various purposes. Take a copy of your plan and list of dimensions with you when you shop. Before you buy a piece of furniture or a rug, measure it and jot down its dimensions. Go home and make a cutout to scale of the piece and try it out on your plan. This may seem like a lot of bother, but it's better than bearing the cost of making a big mistake. If you need to make a quick decision (at a warehouse sale or an auction, for example), at least have a preliminary idea of the size and scale of the piece you think might fill your empty space. That way you'll be less likely to make mistakes. Improvisation can be an important part of decorating, but without a good plan you'll soon lose control.
It's also a good idea to take color photographs of your home with you while you shop. An on-staff decorator may spot an opportunity that you have overlooked.
INVOLVING FAMILY MEMBERS
If you live with other people, they should be consulted about decorating plans, for they have needs and preferences that must be considered. In the exercises at the beginning of this chapter, there is a question (number 13) about handling different tastes among people who live together. You might want to consult with your partner or spouse about color schemes as well. Use the space here to interview other household members for their thoughts about decorating.
EXERCISES
1. Favorite colors:
2. Favorite materials:
3. Favorite styles:
4. Decorating dislikes (in general):
5. What do they like best about the existing design or past decorating schemes?
6. How do they feel the current decor could be improved?
7. Ask them to look through decorating magazines or your collection of clippings and samples and make separate piles of things they like and dislike. It is important to define what they like about each picture in order to integrate it into your overall design.
8. What atmosphere do they want to create in each room? What activities do they imagine taking place in individual rooms? Ask them to make a room-by-room list.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Interior Design Handbook by Joanna Wissinger, Michael Jonah Altschuler. Copyright © 1995 Roundtable Press, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
