Creating Functional Rooms

Design shows make it look so easy; the room of your dreams can be created in a few short hours, with a minimum budget and a bit of creativity. Home owners get caught up in the rush to create that perfect space. The final product, however, is often disappointing. The room looks less like the home owner imagined and more like an amateur effort. Even worse, the space is poorly planned and not conducive to everyday life. This is because design shows and articles focus on the finishing stages of interior design - they fail to teach the basics. No interior designer starts a job by thinking about the color scheme or the accessories. To design a room that is both beautiful and functional, a professional starts at the beginning. In good design, form always follows function. A beautiful space means nothing if a home owner cannot use it for daily living. So before you even think about how you want the room to look, you need to think about how you want to live in it. Make a list of all the activities you plan to do in the room. Take the living room, for example. This one room can be used for a dozen different activities, everything from watching television to entertaining friends to reading. Once you have finished the list, group together all the activities that will occupy the same space in the room. For instance, office work and homework will be completed in the desk area, while the sitting area can be used for both entertaining and watching television. Each area you have created is a zone; you will likely have more than one zone in a room. In a functional room, each zone is placed in the best possible spot. Draw a floor plan of your room without furniture, showing only the walls, windows and doorways. Next, highlight the areas of traffic flow, the path people take as they walk through a room. Maybe people walk straight through your living room to go from the dining room to the kitchen, or maybe they keep to one side of the space. These areas of traffic flow need to be kept clear for safety reasons. You should place your zones around these paths; use circles to represent each different zone as you pencil them onto the floor plan. Keep in mind that some zones have requirements that will dictate their placement in the room. Your office zone needs to be near an internet connection, and your television needs to be close to a cable hookup. If you want natural daylight in your reading area, place your sitting zone by the window. Zones are like puzzle pieces; in the right arrangement, they will create a functional and visually pleasing room. Once you have placed your zones, you need to create a furniture arrangement on the floor plan. Treat each zone as a separate room and place your furniture within the boundaries, avoiding the areas of traffic flow. If you have difficulties arranging your furniture, try using symmetry. A symmetrical arrangement is often the most pleasing to the eye. It is also the easiest arrangement to perfect. Draw a line through the center of the zone. Everything placed on one side of the zone needs to be mirrored on the other. For instance, a sofa can be mirrored with two chairs or a bench. Or two shelves can mirror each other on either side of a desk. Once you’ve finished the floor plan, try the arrangement in the room itself. You might find that the height of a chair blocks the television or the glare from a window reflects on the computer monitor. Continue to arrange the furniture until the room becomes a space that accommodates your way of living. Good design is not about changing the way you live to suit a room. At its core, design is about improving the lives of people in the spaces where they live. Once you have achieved this, once you have designed a functional room, you can exercise your creativity through decorating. Choose paint colors, fabrics, artwork and curtains. Decorating a room is like adding jewelry to an outfit; it improves upon the design. Paint and pillows cannot hide a flawed design. But the right colors and fabrics can accentuate a well-designed space, creating a beautiful sanctuary where a home owner can relax. And that is what design is all about.