Present2Sell - By The Dart April 2010
Getting a new look for Spring
Innovate
Innovation is a rather overused word so I'm delighted to have an opportunity to use it with justification when describing a clever little website I've come across that visualises your interior design ideas for you. It's part of Property Ladder hero Sarah Beeny's new online partnership and is called mydeco.com. You can create 3D rooms and download furniture and furnishings from all the leading brands. A virtual camera enables different views which gives a sense of scale of say, the furniture or the wallpaper you've just imported, there's a window with the price and product information and if you like what you see, there's a link to the supplier's website - marvellous!
Visualise
I spend as much time visualising ideas for my customers as I do creating schemes because people want to be sure that the latest look or colour is actually going to look alright in their 3 bed semi or Georgian terrace, amongst all their other objects and furniture: people want to buy with confidence. We know the routine - new season, new look, lots of promotion etc, and things look great in the shops and the room sets, but how do we mesh all that with our real life?
Identify
It's too easy to get carried away with all the clever merchandising and find that your purchases just don't work, you've got a "shop-bought" look or blown the whole budget on one big item. I know it's the least fun part of the process but its so important to have a fairly clear idea of how much you want to spend on your new look. Then you can decide on the areas of most and least importance and prioritise accordingly. Armed with knowing what you must keep, you can now choose, from the many looks on offer, the one that will blend most successfully with those objects.
Spring/summer colours
This season's hot colour combo's of teals and blues with bronze and greys, are relatively easy to blend with a range of colours. Magenta with limes and oranges - they're more of a challenge, but in the right environment can look amazing. Take a look at Habitat's spring/summer products - they sizzle! At the ethnic end of the spectrum are oranges teamed with chocolate, sage green and hessian.
Reassure
Using mydeco.com's moodboard tool, refine your colour preferences to a few key colours that work well for you, to create a basic pallette. Cut it out, mount it on card and keep it on you - not just when you go shopping because you never know when inspiration will strike! Also keep your camera and a tape measure on you so you can record details of potential products. It's also handy to have a bag of samples of those of your belongings that the new look must work around - if you can't use actual samples, take photos, plus a dimensioned sketch of the room.
If your passion is for wallpaper, there's a very good website called Wallpaperdirect.co.uk which acts as a portal for a vast range of suppliers. You can search for papers by colour, theme, designer etc. and can see the paper as it would appear in a room. They will send you a sample for a small fee and if you are very determined, you can photograph that and download it into mydeco.com to see it in your room with your things!
The 3d tool on mydeco.com will be useful to keep tabs on how everything will look together so that when you shop for your new look, it will be from an overall, informed strategy giving an end-result that is coherent and satisfying.
Future-proof
Interior design is a lifestyle investment really; you rarely get champagne for beer money! Whatever the season, you might want to consider how to make your investment last. A good rule is, the more expensive an item is to replace, the more it should be a neutral that will look good with a variety of other colours: cushions are cheaper than sofas so choose the former to express your love of strong or very vibrant colours! Curtains can be very expensive to replace so if you like the idea of changing these more frequently than every 5 years or so, I would always recommend having 2 tracks or poles. One for the lining and the other for the dress fabric. Or you can have them made so the lining detaches and can be used on both dress sets. Another future-proofing option is to keep tabs on what's happening in the industry through the newsletters like Mix from Global Colour - see www.globalcolor.co.uk. It's these peoples' business to figure out what the major producers have in their pipelines, and give us a heads up on it all.
To whatever extent you blend your current look with this season's trends, the important thing is to have fun with your creativity and a bit of planning upfront will enhance the chances of that!
