The Art of Interior Design
The first, and key rule is this:
RULE ONE: WHAT NOT TO DO
DO NOT PAINT THE LIVING-ROOM WALLS NAVY BLUE
We once lived in a house in Splott, Cardiff where the previous tenant had done this. It was neither stylish nor cheery. It was dark, depressing and a hell of a job to turn white.
RULE TWO: CARPETS
Carpets should be either green-based (restful and soothing) or terracotta-based (warm and welcoming). If you have a particularly sunny room you can get away with a soft blue but otherwise don’t go down the blue route or you will always feel cold.
Wooden floors look great but are only good if you have very quiet people in the house.
RULE THREE: WALLS
Walls should be white. Or some kind of creamish kind of colour. That way you can put lots of interesting pictures on the walls.
If you go for any kind of bold colour or any kind of boldly-patterned wallpaper you will then find you are choosing pictures to match the walls and although a lot of people do just that, I think it’s deeply wrong.
RULE FOUR:
There is no Rule Four. I have told you everything there is. How that Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and his ilk make a living I really don’t know.
Here are two pictorial examples:
The sitting-room at Fron Dderw, which is the place where we stayed recently in Bala. They have gone for the Restful Country-House look (note the dominant colour is green) and it’s all a bit posher than I’d go for, but that’s because my house is full of people who are active importers of mud and clutter. Fron Dderw is delightful and I like the Gustav Klimt print too.
Here's the foyer at Park Hotel in Tenby, a lovely, friendly hotel where I have stayed very, very many times.
The décor follows none of my rules, nor anyone else’s as far as I know.
“Ah,”, said a coach driver once, “here’s a seaside hotel which looks like a seaside hotel.” The paint is fresh, the wallpaper new, the carpets clean. All I think when I look at it is Hurrah! Park Hotel! Couldn’t be anywhere else.
All rules were made to be broken.
posted by Daphne at 5:36 pm
4 Comments:
Wooden floors work well in cultures that don't trek dirty outdoor shoes all over their clean interiors. Carpets are mainly useful for not showing the dirt.
I would suggest the following amendments to these rules.
RULE ONE
Fine. I would add dark red too.
RULE TWO: CARPETS
Just don’t have them. Certainly not the wall-to-wall variety. Wood, tiles, concrete, beaten cow dung, whatever, but not carpets. They are frankly a bit naff and indeed indeed they disguise years of accumulated grime – yuck. And please (my message to the UK – this is really a British thing) no carpets in the kitchen (yuck!) or IN THE TOILET (YUCK!!!) It’s just weird.
RULE THREE
Walls indeed should be white or some kind of creamish colour. But then don’t put lots of interesting pictures on them. Perhaps one.
RULE FIVE
Paint the walls white if you want to live in it and Magnolia if you want to sell it.
The Postmod-ern kitchen designers at right have employed a number of tactics in breaking free of the sterile, pantone color guide
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