Contemporary Topics and Issues in Interior Design

Electronics in the Living Room

When most laypeople think of interior design, they mainly imagine pretty colours, fabulous furnishings, and plush fabrics. But in reality today's London interior design professional needs to be a multi-talented aesthetics enthusiast who always stays on top of the latest technology. I'd like to use this blog to strongly recommend the amazing new motorised sunshades by Conrad. They offer so many options in terms of textures, colours and fabrics to match almost any interior design scheme. The system also incorporates upper-down/lower-up technology that raises the shade from below to cover just the bottom half of the window while ensuring that natural light can spill through the upper half of the window - perfect for London where we only have a few months of summer sunshine in any case. The programmable timer-computer allows homeowners to automatically set the sunshades to self-lower or self-raise at certain hours of the day to shield exquisite textiles and antique painted sculptures from strong sunligh.



Downlighting, Uplighting and Sidelighting
The contemporary interior design professional knows that one ingredient essential for great lighting is flexibility - and indeed my own signature interior design philosophy is to light a room from multiple dimmer-controlled sources. Interior design trainees/interns at our London-based firm sometimes make the mistake of trying to light the whole room at the same level - thus reducing the impact and interest of the entire interior design concept. Personally, I adore using gentle lighting schemes to promote a relaxed mood and combining these with focused light to showcase artwork and accessories.


When to Use Lamps, Sconces and Torchieres
Lamps can be magnificent for what interior design professionals call "task illumination" - things like reading a magazine or having the home help take care of the ironing. A gentle pool of soft lamplight can promote relaxation, especially in some of the very grand London residences that are the focus of so many of our interior design projects. By contrast, sconces and torchieres are most suitable when there is a need to project light onto the ceiling and have that illumination glance off back down into the room. This type of reflected light is perfect for residential interior design schemes where the goal is to beautify the room and, most importantly, the people in it!


Enviro-Friendly Lighting Solutions
In this blog posting, I'd like to talk a little about how interior design professionals now use more environmentally friendly illumination options. Lighting continues to be a major electricity draw in most London residences, and the latest high-tech ultra-bright energy-efficient lightbulbs can be a great solution. However, when these bulbs first came out the London interior design community was initially horrified at the effect that these new colder lighting solutions were having on our incandescent-envisioned designs. My answer today is to use dimmers wherever possible. By controlling the levels of illumination for different dayparts, the interior design scheme can still look its best. Even so, we often encourage our exacting London clients to splurge on just one or two tungsten table lightbulbs to cast a healthy glow onto the faces of their after-dinner guests!


Finding the Perfect Television
For a recent interior design project in London, our firm was invited to completely re-envision the living room and home entertainment zone of a luxurious family residence. The target interior design concept needed to be sleek, elegant and beautiful. We ended up selecting the Samsung LED TV 9000, which combines the latest in light-emitting diode technology with a truly sophisticated look and feel. Astonishingly, the ultrathin casing measures just 7.6 millimetres in profile. Our interior design team combined the television with a high-end audio system by Bang & Olufsen and a remote-control home automation system for this high-tech London residence. Our client was absolutely delighted with the results and we will certainly choose Samsung televisions again in the future.

Learning Bathroom Design from the Experts in London

Automagical Bathroom Lighting
My good friend and fellow London bathroom designer Donna is a true "early adopter" in home automation technologies. Recently I had a chance to chat with her about how she finds the "touch-of-a-button" home automation scheme she is currently testing out. She reported to me that it can be extremely convenient, but it's not completely flawless quite yet. As a bathroom designer herself, she loves to be able to select different mood lighting schemes for the bathrooms in her London residence. We discovered that our respective bathroom design teams will both preferentially recommend Crestron systems because they are so flexible and offer many budget options. The Crestron lineup even comes with a special media plug-in that allows our clients to store music and video on the Internet and automagically pipe it into the audiovisual system that is part of their bathroom design!


Multi-function Bathrooms
Our most cutting-edge London bathroom design clients are always seeking out the latest and greatest innovations. In our opinion, the one thing that no bathroom design should be without is "attitude" - and that often means a multi-function approach! Bathroom designs are no longer simply about showering, makeup, shaving and luxuriating - our clients crave interesting wall treatments or paintwork, clever but practical storage zones, audiovisual services, and underfloor heating for long sessions in front of the makeup mirror. Some of our latest "green bathroom" design schemes in London even include built-in wastebaskets that are divided into different compartments for easy recycling! Otherwise it can be all too easy to forget to recycle the huge number of discarded containers that often comes from a busy family bathroom.


Bathroom Countertops
Just recently I read an article online about the best countertops for bathroom designs, and I thought I should write a quick blog post here to offer my perspective on this critical question. Personally, I adore Corian or CeasarStone bathroom countertops. These options are supremely workable, sophisticated and available in a wide range of colours. We have even suggested bathroom designs with these countertops in high-gloss white and they have looked stunning. For more adventurous clients, our London bathroom design team has been known to recommend stainless steel, natural stone, or plastic with metal edgework for a "retro" look. But as with so many bathroom design questions, it often comes down to beautiful versus workable. Natural stone requires so much care to avoid scratches and maintain the desired look that we often point our London bathroom design clients in the direction of synthetic alternatives.


Fabric in the Bathroom
In the earliest days of bathroom design, built-in fabrics in bathrooms used to be a huge "no-no." But in recent years that has changed with the emergence of shower curtains, window fabrics and comfort bathmats. But the bathroom design teams at our London-based firm always remind our clients that there are a few "caveats" to using fabrics in bathrooms. First and foremost, the fabric must be lined and interlined to protect it from fading and disintegration caused by repeated water or steam exposure. If we are covering a sunny window, silk is probably the very worst material to use, but even that can work if we specify a robust lining/interlining treatment in the bathroom design master plan. Similarly, textured fabric sunshades can look very classy beneath the primary curtain or Venetian blinds. My London bathroom design team reminded me just the other day of one last top tip: treating the window with an ultraviolet or one-way coating can further help protect bathroom fabrics from fading, while also enhancing homeowner privacy.

Learning Bathroom Design from the Experts

Bathroom Colour Schemes
Often our London firm will field questions from clients about bathroom design colour schemes. Sometimes clients have heard that certain colours tend to work best for larger rooms, while others tend to be preferable for smaller rooms. And certainly in some of London's more compact flats the bathroom can sometimes be a little space-constrained! I always respond that the most important question is what colours will make the client happy. For bathroom designs, we will often recommend a set of darker shades in order to emphasise the personal and sanctuary-like feel of the space.


Colours to Avoid
The other question that often comes up in bathroom design - although of course it applies to any room in the home - is whether there are any paint colours that should definitely be avoided. Personally, I have fallen in love with black bathroom designs, lilac bathroom designs and even steel blue bathroom designs - so really I tend to believe that no colour is strictly off-limits! But I often remind my London-based clients that context is critical. For example, don't choose a bathroom design colour for your main residence in London that is also going to be used in your Florida winter condo, where the sun's rays are completely different!


Gadgets and Gizmos

The other day our London-based interior design firm received an email from a regular client asking about the latest electronic appliances that our bathroom design teams are currently seeing on the market. Today, we are increasingly proposing bathroom designs that include some sort of home entertainment features. The latest Sony and Samsung ultra-bright TVs can be coupled with high-end audio systems, DVD players and cable hook-ups to allow our clients to luxuriate in the bathroom while catching up with the morning's business news on Bloomberg or CNN. In larger London residences we have recently been installing a lot of the Miele built-in espresso machines as part of our higher-end bathroom designs. These appliances are elegant, sophisticated and very stylish. They quickly become a hit with the whole household - it's like having a personal Costa Coffee branch built right into your London bathroom design!

Bathroom Automation Systems
The other day I was talking with one of my colleagues about the latest full-automation and touch-of-a-button home wizardry systems, and specifically their compatibility with our bathroom designs. The concept is that multiple services are grouped together so that homeowners can remotely activate lights, electronics, alarms, appliances, and - in bathroom designs - elements like towel rails and mood lighting. We are increasingly recommending these options to our most discerning London clients, and the effect can be amazing if the client is technology-interested. But our bathroom design team always makes sure to emphasise user simplicity. There's nothing worse than our client not knowing how to activate the underfloor heating in their luxury London bathroom design just because they can't figure out which remote control to use!