Tag Archives: interior re-design

Interior Design Tips For Beginners

465957387Think of your home filled with plenty of light and space with meals by an open garden window. The cascading drapes work well with the comfortable seating, and the rest of your furniture truly embellishes the wide open space. It isn’t quite as easy as it might seem to make such an ideal place a reality, leaving many to feel disappointed after attempting to decorate.

In this article, you will learn about key points that allow you to plan and create the most ideal design. You’ll read about the basic principles of good interior design to avoid beginner mistakes.

THREE FACTORS

A well-decorated room doesn’t just look good, but it has good function and effectively shows off a mood and personality of the family. These three ingredients will spell your ultimate success: function, mood and personality.  Click here to learn more about Sterling Home Styling’s process.

Before making any changes, think about your family and your means of living, or how you use the room in question. It’s also a good idea to get some ideas from magazines, especially if you’re not experienced with designing a room. Look around the house and find things that give you good feelings, things that trigger color cues and things that spark some inspiration on a design idea. This is the first step in a successful recipe. The rest of the formula begins with function.

FUNCTION

Aesthetics aren’t the only factor with interior design — it’s all about making the room work well. Achieving good function has various elements to focus on:

  • The focus: Some rooms have a natural point where the eyes immediately focus when entering the room, such as a huge window with a great view or a fireplace. If the room doesn’t have one, make one; you can lay a bright area rug or buy an extraordinary piece of art, for example.
  • The furniture: Of course, a room’s function rests heavily with its furniture; does it satisfy what you plan to do in the room? If something is the wrong size or doesn’t work well, swap it for something more appropriate or get rid of it altogether.
  • The arrangement: Just because you have the right furniture doesn’t mean it’s in the right spot. Use graph paper to plot out the room, measuring lengths and marking doors, windows, vents, switches and electrical outlets. Measure each piece of furniture and put it where it should go on the floor plan, remembering to keep traffic patterns open.
  • The lights: Lighting should be central to the room’s functions and for aesthetics. Each task will need illumination either directly from a light or indirectly from lights that illuminate the entire room for watching TV or conversing. Recessed spotlights or floor spots can serve as accent lighting to enhance details and textures.

MOOD

Your choice in color, the amount of texture permitted and the style of furnishings all affect a room’s mood. Because there are so many factors involved in developing a mood, creating a theme by finding an inspiring piece can make the process much more interesting and easier to achieve. These are the important factors for developing a room’s mood:

  • An inspiring piece: As said, it’s easiest to have a source of inspiration. Whether it’s your favorite scarf, a certain pillow or even a high quality magazine photo, anything that gives you an idea is a good place to start. This is the basis of which you will choose your theme and colors.
  • The theme: Come up with a name for a theme based on your inspirational piece. For example, if you have a silk pillow with black lace, you might have a theme title such as “flirty feminine” or “formal elegance.” Be descriptive and you’ll find all kinds of ideas stemming from this theme. For instance, a flirty feminine room might have pastel colors, contemporary tables or curvy furniture.
  • Color cues: Naturally, the colors should support the theme you have selected. Often, the colors that work best can be found right on the inspiration piece you have chosen. As a general rule of thumb, you should aim for three room colors: One to dominate with the walls, carpeting and fabrics; one for secondary use, such as on accessories and other fabrics; and the accent color, used sparingly to add a burst of energy.
  • Patterns: Plaids, stripes, checks and many others make up the patterns to think about when you develop your theme some more. You can mix pattern types as long as they all share the same colors and use the same background color. It’s also wise to change up the scale of the patterns for variety.
  • Texture: Having too many nubby or smooth objects gets boring to look at. Mix it up to give the room a more interesting variety. Even patterns can become textures as they appear dimensional, adding some more depth to your design.
  • Furniture: The furniture you choose has another role besides function; they may work well but clash aesthetically. You can try to use paint, tablecloths or slipcovers to mask the problem with better colors, but if it cannot be salvaged, it must leave the room.

PERSONALITY

With everything else in place, now is your chance to add more of your own personal touches to a room with great planning ahead of it.

  • Accessories: The best decorating plans include area rugs, pillows, vases, pictures for the walls and tables and more. Of course, whatever you select should work with the theme, but you can be a little more lenient here; for example, adding some antiquity in a picture frame can spice up an otherwise contemporary room. Accessories can be pillows, paintings or photos and are generally found on the floor, furniture, mantelpieces and walls.
  • Something whimsy: While not mandatory, you might opt to counteract something in your room that seems sterile despite following all the rules. For instance, a fireplace may look nicer with a fabric cover.
  • Something unexpected: Alternatively, you can opt for something surprising, such as a bright and vivid ceiling.

As long as you focus your interior design around the three aforementioned factors, you are bound to have a room that is pleasant to the eyes and ideal for your family.

Jessica Kane is a professional writer who has an interest in interior design and home decor. She currently writes for Designer Drapery Hardware, a leading vendor of all types of drapery hardware such as rods, finials, and brackets.

About Sterling Home Styling

Sterling Home Styling combines image consulting with home staging, interior redesign and interior styling services to provide ‘sterling home styling’ services for residential spaces and new or vacant luxury condominiums, homes or real estate developments in Miami, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Dubai. The company offers a broad range of services enabling its clients to realize the true selling potential of their home, improve its marketability, and realize a maximum return on investment.

Contact Us:

info@sterlinghomestyling.com

USA: +1.888.868.8329

DUBAI: +971.4.313.2467

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Are you a Landlord or Real Estate Developer Having Trouble Renting New York Apartments? Home Style it to Rent it!

According to the New York Times, three-quarters of all homes in Manhattan are rental properties and the median income in New York to rent affordable property is $40,000.

 

Therefore perhaps the New Yorker real estate market should learn something from the booming property market in Dubai and offer furnished apartments to these individuals as a way for landlords to seal the rental deal in New York.  With rentals in New York being slashed all winter long, preserve the rental value of your property by offering it to be interior decorated and styled upon move in.

 

Let’s do the math here.  Furnishing a studio or one bedroom would be a $5000 or less investment if you purchased modern, contemporary furniture with wide buyer appeal in New York.  A kitchen and bathroom renovation would cost more than that.

 

According to Coldwell Banker in a February 14th New York Times article entitled Rent Check, Manhattan Rents Down, Incentives Are Up, “Take a typical one-bedroom walk-up, for example. In September, it rented for an average of $2,512 a month, the firm’s data show, but in October it fell to $2,326, or more than 7 percent. In November there was a further decline of nearly 2 percent, to $2,282, and in December yet another 2 percent slide, to $2,238. Last month, average rents slipped again, according to other firms’ data.”  The price differential is $300 and over 12 months equals $3600, which if you purchased $3600 worth of furniture, that does not have to be just Ikea, you could preserve the rental rate of $2500 for the unit and perhaps even rent out the unit for $2600 – $2750 as a furnished apartment to visitors who come to Manhattan during the winter months looking for better deals at prime location apartments than staying at hotels. Or landlords could rent the furnished apartment to an entry level professional moving to New York who would need to buy new furniture for the apartment anyway.

 

Let’s face it; students just out of college need new furniture for their apartments.  Or professionals going into there thirties would like to upgrade their post college lifestyle of living.  Of the millennials that live on their own and have a decent paying job, purchasing $3600 worth of furniture is an investment they would have to make anyway.  Paying $300 more a month just to have a New York apartment that is already furnished with contemporary furniture and wide renter appeal would be so much easier.  Copy and paste their college life into their new affordable interior styled New York apartment and they will pay the premium, which isn’t really a premium according to rental prices just 6 months prior.

 

Therefore home staging, home styling, and interior styling is the way for New York property developers and landlords to go to rent out affordable housing in Manhattan when rents are down and incentives are up.  Hire a home stager and interior re-designer today to mitigate your short-term incentives and turn them into long-term gains.

 

About Sterling Home Styling

 

Sterling Home Styling combines image consulting with home staging, interior redesign and interior styling services to provide ‘sterling home styling’ services for residential spaces and new or vacant luxury condominiums, homes or real estate developments in Miami, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Dubai. The company offers a broad range of services enabling its clients to realize the true selling potential of their home, improve its marketability, and realize a maximum return on investment.