Your Personality in a Room
What does it mean when a space captures your personality?
You may have heard designers say that they aim to create unique spaces that reflect their clients personality.
What does that actually look like and how can a chair say something about me as a person?
Glad you asked!
Style Studies Essentials
Before I explain, I want to let you know that I’m offering a way to help you design your home so it can be the BEST it can be.
The Style Studies Essentials is an online course to help you feel confident in pulling together your renovation of home styling. It’s for the design enthusiast with all of the tools, knowledge and hard-won wisdom from my 20 year interior design career.
You’ll love it!
Our spaces have a huge impact on how we live. Our environment, which includes the spaces we inhabit, location, lifestyle, habits and even friends, collegues and family impacts us more that we realise. We can’t make changes to how we feel unless we make changes to our environment.
Let’s not break up any families or friendships right now, and let’s focus on those built environments because this is where I can help.
The truth is that we can’t alter our lifestyle to suit our environment. We must alter our environment to suit our lifestyle.
When you pay attention to the space that you’re in and how it makes you feel, you can start making changes for the better. Think about your day starting in the morning. Perhaps you have breakfast at home, catch the train to work and then grab a coffee from your regular cafe. How do each of those spaces leave you feeling - caffine aside? Do you feel drained and tired, or motivated and inspired?
How can we make each space in our homes be the very best they can be to support us in how we are feeling?
This is where I am so excited to help you in the Style Studies Essential course!
Ask Yourself…
In my work as an interior designer, I really try hard to understand who my clients are as people.
There are a few questions I ask them that might help you figure this out too.
You need to unpack:
Where You’ve Been
Where You’re Going
The Space That you Need
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Where you’ve been
Is there a hotel you stayed at and loved? What did you love about it? Lets’ think beyond the colour of the curtains.
Was it how you went down to the lobby there was always a cool vibe and friendly people? You love convivial spaces that facilitate easy entertaining
You loved the outdoor bathing experience in your villa and feeling the moonlight. Being connected to the outdoors is important.
Your Nan would serve tea in porcelain teacups and you miss her. Lets bring a sence of nostalgia into your space.
Tap into some places where you’ve had a really amazing or special experience and try to unpack just what it was about the space that spoke to you.
Where you want to go
Now, what kind of person do you want to be? How would you love to live in your home?
Do you love to be super organised where everything not only has it’s place, but a label on it too? Let’s explore the possibilites and design serious storage solutions.
Do you fantisize about meal prep? Your kitchen is going to have an adequate freezer and lots of bench space.
Your friends and family are all seated around a large dining table, kids are doing their thing and playing nicely. The wine flows and you laugh so hard you cry. Everyone is super relaxed and they can be themselves in your home.
Your living room always looks so tidy. Look, designers do not possess magic wands, but if we design with storage, stategic furniture positions, power outlets are considered for laptops etc and keeping robust materials in mind, we come close.
The Space That You Need
But sometimes it isn’t so much about who you are, it’s what you NEED from a space.
To design a space to match someone’s personality isn’t as simple as sourcing a brightly coloured armchair because they have a bright personality.
For instance, I have a client with an exuberant, lively personality. She always tells funny stories and I know that our meetings will leave me laughing and/ or blushing!
At first I presented her interiors with some lively colour combinations, but she told me that she actually needed her space to be a retreat from her busy life. She needed her home to be quieter and a calm space. I often don’t understand this about a client in the first meeting. Maybe they haven’t articulated it yet either.
So I designed a space that isn’t empty or bland. She said that she wanted white walls because she wanted the spaces to feel calm, but actually white walls didn’t suit the architecture of the house. So we went for grasscloth wallpapers in soft colours. This adds a gorgeous texture and pieces layer into the space so easily.
We can’t alter our lifestyle to suit our environment, instead we can design a space to suit our lifestyle.
When you really break down how you want to live, then the design opportunities become exciting. Your bed might be adjacent to a vanity, as in the image below. You love the ritual of getting ready. You want to apply your makeup with as much natural light as possible, so the walls between the bedroom and ensuite are entirely removed. This space reflects your personality and lifestyle.
Does Sharon next door think it’s ridiculous? Yes. But we didn’t design this space for Sharon. This is JUST for you. How special is that?
If you’d like to learn more about The Style Studies Essentials course, feel free to have a look here or drop me an email by replying to this.
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