What is the difference between interior design and decoration? I don’t usually respond to my own questions with another question, but I feel in the mood to making people think. What is the difference between having a healthy lifestyle and wearing new clothes?
Both questions have the same basic answer: planning, commitment and knowledge vs. a nice covering.
Interior design is often mistaken with decoration. We don’t like this, but it happens. So let’s clear it up once and for all so the next time that you want to improve your space you know whether you need to hire a design firm or call your friend to watch HGTV together and go on a shopping spree to RH or… Target.
Interior Design is the professional planning activity which results in technical floor plans, elevations (front 2-dimensional views), specifications, renderings and computer generated graphics compiled into an executable design project. Sounds like a lot of work, and it is.
A complete interior design project will take a number of factors into consideration; natural light, artificial light, focal points and accents, colors, textures, shapes, flows, dimensions and so forth. All of these act as a puzzle that has to be solved.
As usual, we’ll use one of our ongoing projects to show you what we mean with all of this.
The client is a young man from NYC who recently acquired a condo in Downtown Clearwater. If you’ve been to NYC you know that interior design standards are very high and valued, and this client’s taste was no exception to this standard. Paraphrasing his request: “I want something simple, yet elegant and with a beachy vibe, but really simple and homey at the same time, I also want a contemporary space that won’t look bad in a couple of years, and I don’t want to spend more than… I don’t want to spend too much money”.
The challenge was on, and we started with our usual process, scanning the space and getting everything documented. Everything.
As the design meetings were happening the project started getting more and more shape, the details became more thorough, the images more complete, the creativity more aligned, until we arrived at the result: A complete set of design plans, showing everything that should be done in this project.
Decoration has its place and we respect professional decorators, it takes hard work to have a trained eye for what will look good, but for god’s sake! Don’t tell me that you like buying clothes after spending the whole summer eating like a polar bear before winter.