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.