Following Trends or Being the Leader -
Do you follow trends or create your own style?
I am sick an tired of seeing the same rooms or variations of, depicted in local interior design and decorating magazines.
Doesn't anyone have a personality anymore?
Where have our imaginations gone?
Where is our sense of originality, of wanting to express ourselves in our home environment?
I think many interior designers and decorators are just sheep, following behind each other and generally being lazy!
My idea of designing for the individual is just that, you take the brief, you find out what the client wants and needs, then you take a look at how they live, who lives there, what their current home is like and then you factor in popular products, looks etc but they shouldn't be the first place to start.
You need to cater for the clients entire needs and express their personality through your design.
Kitchens, they all look the same in the magazines!
Interior design and decorating is hard work, it takes great skill to get to know your client and extract what they like and how they live, and what their expectations are for you to design to.
There is no point in having stark sterile white painted lacquer kitchen cabinets combined with glass door fronts if you have young children banging or crashing around the room leaving their hand prints over the glass and lets face it you do spend most of your time with a young family in the kitchen! You still can't get away from the need for practical spaces when they grow up, you just amplify the problem by adding a few obnotcious teenage friends to fill up any extra room you though you may have had.
So in my view I think interior design and decorating magazines are fantastic, they inspire creativity and let you into the lives of wonderful people so that you can catch a glimse of how other people live and experience the journey they have made to create their "worthy of a photograph to share" room.
The designer who just follows what everyone else is doing in the magazines totally defeats the purpose of good design and should look for another job. It is like copying your neighbour in a maths test. Completely lacks orininality and is plain cheating. Good designers are like artists, they play around with a lot of materials, have an extensive knowledge of the history of their craft, posess good communication skills; visually and orally and make beautiful creations that make our lives a better place to live in.
You are better to have happy clients with practical (and can still look georgeous) interiors expressing their personalities than stunning (all the same) rooms that looked great for the photograph but never look the same again as there is nowhere to "live" in the space.
I think perhaps that clients often feel overwhelmed by the designer and think that they are the experts, so curb in to do what they want instead of speaking their own mind.
So I have a few words to say to those clients, stand up for yourself and stop being a sheep and following the leader, dare to be different and original and create your own designer home to suit just you and your family! Follow trends of colors and textures by all means but go on, have the confidence to express yourself and your family's style and personality!
Now, to all those designers who have to follow the trends, I have to say - start using your well trained skills and get out there and create something outside of the square and your comfort zone so that the next time I pick up an interior design or decorating magazine, it might have a variety of different styled rooms to look at!
