Kelly Hoppen reveals the mistake to avoid during the design process for a room that can ultimately spell disaster for your home: simply buying randomly without thought for the room’s measurements or scale.
Amidst the latest new and up-and-coming home decor trends, interior designer, Kelly Hoppen, will be amongst the first to ensure we’re properly clued up before buying just anything for our homes – that’s why we’ve turned to her for our outdoor living room tips.
It can be tempting to be drawn in by the next big trend to take social media by storm, however, without proper thought or consideration of how the purchase will fit into your existing space, it can easily make or break the look and feel you’re going for.
‘The one purchase that can screw up your whole room’ as warned by Kelly Hoppen
During an instalment of the interior designer’s Q&A segment #AskKelly featured on an Instagram reel, she was asked, ‘There’s a piece of furniture I love and want to include in my design. How can I backtrack and think about the entire room?’
The ‘not so fun’ things such as knowing how to measure for a sofa are often-forgotten factors to consider when designing a living room, for example, and the interior designer shares the importance of dealing with these technicalities before going spend-crazy.
Kelly starts, ‘It’s about measuring and doing a floorplan. Again, if you’re not an architect or designer, use masking tape if you’ve got an existing room – I still use that. I like to be able to walk around, I’m very old-fashioned like that.’
‘Try and work out where you’d position the things and mark them up. You can use post-its and measure them to scale and put them on a piece of paper so that you can move them around. The most thing done that wastes money is buying randomly.’
Kelly continues, ‘This is a big spend so you need to think about your furniture: what are the most important pieces? Could you live with a sofa and not have a dining table, would you rather have a dining table and not have a sofa? Plan it and cost it.’
‘It’s better to have everything laid out and really think about it so you’re sure about it than to buy random pieces because that random piece is the one thing that will determine the rest of your space and it could be the wrong one,’ warns Kelly.
‘And then you’ve screwed up the entire look and feel because you then feel you can’t throw it away because you’ve spent the money on it. Everything should be planned, then you can do your budget, and then you can go look for the items.’
