Tips

15 Interior Design Tips For The Best First Impression

14 hours ago

impressive interior design

Creating inspiring interior design that makes a good first impression on guests is something that every homeowner wants as it’s a nice feeling to hear the oohs and aahs of your guests as they admire your home’s impressive interior design.

To help you make a killer interior design impression, here are 13 ways you can impress guests with brilliant interior design, including tips from Décor Aid interior designers.

Hang Interesting Pendant Lights

interior design lighting trends

Lighting can make or break even the best interior design. If you want to impress guests with thrilling home interior design, be sure to get lighting right. Pendant lamps are the best choice of lighting for a modern home interior. But when it comes to pendant lights, make sure you choose something that has an extraordinary, unusual design – one that calls attention and can trigger visual focus upward.

Adopt An Open Plan Design

modern interior design open floor plan

If you want to

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18 Great Room Ideas – Open Floor Plan Decorating Tips

1 month ago

great room ideas

Studio Life/Style

The great room is easily the hardest working room in the house, as its entire purpose to serve multiple key functions all in one shared space. The goal is to make everyday living just a little easier, and to make a communal space a little more enticing. As a result, they can present some extra design challenges. With more moving parts and pieces to the puzzle, great rooms are that much harder to decorate. Layout, color schemes, and scale… So if you’re looking for some inspiration, keep reading for eighteen great rooms design ideas and decorating tips.

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Pack It All In

In this beach house, designer Alexander Design made the family room feel upscale and sophisticated yet down to earth, livable, and coastal. This great room truly has it all, from a dining area to a formal hang out spot and

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Recessed Lighting Layout Tips You Need to Know Now

2 months ago

Recessed lighting layout tips can help your style your living room like this one.

Sure, it will illuminate your home. But there’s so much more to it than that. To take full advantage of what recessed lighting has to offer in terms of both functionality and aesthetic charm, it’s essential to get the layout just right. And we have some lighting layout tips you should know before you begin.

Recessed lighting is a light fixture that’s installed into the hollow area of a ceiling. And to be completely forthright, getting the layout of your lighting just right will take a bit of research and simple calculation on your part. Never fear, though, we’re going to help walk you through exactly what you’ll need to know and how to get that information so that your lights shine perfectly!

Start By Defining Your Goal

Before you start, you need to define what goal you have in mind for your recessed lighting. For example, you will need

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Sustainable Interior Design | Six Tips for Green Design

2 months ago

Get tips for making your interior design career greener.
Two interior designers look at sustainable options

Sustainability Is Hot

Like other design fields, interior design is inextricably tied to changing styles—what’s hot and what’s not.

Whether the ultimate design goal is decoration, renovation or architectural detailing, all interior designers must stay abreast of current trends in the field.

In the design industry, the fastest-growing segment is the incorporation of sustainable or “green” interior design. From the use of rain water collection to supplement waste water needs, to using sustainable materials such as bamboo, innovation is high when it comes to designing a sustainable space.

Focus on Sustainability

The American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) believes that sustainability should be an essential part of every designer’s approach, from energy efficiency to reducing environmental impact. Interior design schools now incorporate sustainable design into their curriculum to prepare tomorrow’s professionals.

Six Tips for Environmentally Friendly Interior Design

If you’re an

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Quarantine Home Office Design Tips

2 months ago

Ahh, home sweet…. office? For many of us, this is the new reality. But whether you have a permanent home office or just a temporary one for the COVID-19 quarantine, your work area should be a comfortable space that allows for optimal productivity. In today’s podcast, Gabe speaks with Donald M. Rattner, architect and author of My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation, 48 Science-based Techniques. Donald offers easy-to-apply tips for setting up a workspace with your mental health in mind.

Which way should your desk face? Does it have to be neat and tidy? Join us for a great discussion on how to set up a quarantine home office that allows for the flow of creative ideas.

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW

Guest information for ‘Donald Rattner- Quarantine Design’ Podcast Episode

Architect Donald M. Rattner helps individuals and organizations maximize creative performance by

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Tips to Illuminate the Exterior

2 months ago

Outdoor Lighting Design of your home is a major part of a good outdoor design. Though it may not seem important to some homeowners, you could achieve a greater looking home with proper management of exterior lights. If you need more inspiration for your landscape lighting design, catch Genevieve Gorder on her TV show “Dear Genevieve” for a lot of inspiring and classy ideas!

Why Should You Plan Your Outdoor Lighting Design

You might have mastered the art of illuminating your home’s interior but when the house is not lighted externally, due to a poor outdoor lighting design, a mirror effect is produced in the interior by the reflection of the light on the glass from the inside. In some cases, this could be a good idea but by cutting the relation between the interior and the exterior, the interior space would seem to shrink.

On the contrary, when the

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10 Top Kitchen Diner Design Tips

2 months ago

1. Give Thought to Size and Layout

One of the benefits of building a new house, or extending and/or remodelling an existing home, is that you have more flexibility to decide on the size and shape of your kitchen diner. Ideas include:

  • Large square or rectangular rooms work best when carefully zoned.
  • An L-shape arrangement is another option (and may be readily achieved by extending to the rear and knocking through to an existing reception room). This layout allows a degree of separation between the kitchen and dining space, and often means you’re not in sight of kitchen mess when sitting at the table.

2. Your Lighting Scheme Plays an Important Role

As multi-functional rooms, kitchen diners are arguably one of the most complex spaces to light in the house. A well-designed lighting scheme features layers of light:

  • ambient (general) lighting
  • task lighting (i.e. under-cabinet lighting, introduced to facilitate activities
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51 Images & Tips To Get It Right

2 months ago

Having a studio apartment or an open floor plan that blends together living and dining areas can feel like an interior challenge. You want to create separation while preserving the open flow of the space. To help, we’ve compiled over 50 examples of living and dining combinations, including some studios, that show how positioning furniture, using color, or playing with layout can make a space feel completely beautiful and functional. Even the tiniest of floorplans can benefit from these sources of inspiration.

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HGTV’s tips for turning a small space into a multipurpose room.

2 months ago

A 160-square-foot living space may seem like an average, decent size — until you realize it must function as a family room, lounge, dining room and home office. Creating a design that’s as functional as it is aesthetically pleasing can be a major challenge. In the case of a spatially-challenged, open concept great room, a few design elements are essential to maximize space: multi-purposing, playing with scale and proportion, installing proper lighting, defining the space plan, and delineating several zones within one area. When it comes to living large in cramped quarters, the vintage modern New York City great room of Matt and Jodi Arden showcases small space decorating at its best.

When the couple, both TV executives, relocated to New York’s East Village neighborhood from Atlanta, they decided to leave most of their living room and office furniture behind. Only their dining table and chairs made the trip. Jodi

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons house design tips

2 months ago

Having a beautiful house in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the dream. Every day I see pictures of other players’ homes, and I admire their wild furniture choices and elaborate rooms. How can I get on that level?

This has nothing to do with the “feng shui” game mechanic that Animal Crossing uses because that, in turn, has nothing to do with interior design, and more to do with maximizing invisible stats. This is practical advice that you could use in your own real-life home, as well as in New Horizons.

I reached out to Diana Budds, who has written about interior design for many publications, most recently our sister site Curbed, where she’s a senior story producer.

“I think what’s really interesting about the game when it comes to interior design is that you can be so creative,” Diana says. “You are thinking a lot like an interior

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