How Interior Design Can Change Your Life
Some tips and tricks that could improve your future…
Ok, I think I may have found my second calling in life: Interior Design.
I had the fortune of attending a talk by Leura Fine, the CEO & Founder of a fantastic Interior Design platform called Laurel & Wolf which connects talented designers with normal everyday people who are seeking advice on how to spruce up their home.
Having gone through engineering school, I have had little foray into the world of Interior Design beyond the artists I’ve worked with for my job. But interior design for theme parks is very different from interior design for your home, so this was a very eye-opening experience for me.
When asked, “Where does one even start? What are the first things you should think of when beginning to design your space?” She answered:
1. Start with Color Palette
This will define the look and feel of your room overall. Having just re-designed her house, she said that the two colors that she concentrated on for her new aesthetic were a lot of navy blues and dark hunter greens. She was a big fan of floral patterns so those really accented the colors she had chosen. For her dining room, she had this beautiful navy blue carpet which really enriched the space. When you walked in, you just felt so relaxed.
Good design for her meant that subconsciously you felt better, less stressed, more relaxed, simply because the environment had an ambiance that affected you in ways you didn’t realize.
She said, “Your body relaxes when you walk into a well designed room.”
2. What do you need to use?
If you’re moving into a new house and have some old furniture, you have to ask yourself, what pieces of furniture do I want to keep, and which ones can I donate or get rid of? If you’re a new couple moving into together, you have to compromise and keep the big lounge chair and/or coffee table that the other person is bringing into the relationship.
You can work with anything, but you just need to get your list together of things that you’ll need to use no matter what and things that you don’t necessarily need anymore.
The question when discarding or deciding what to throw away is always:
Does it bring you joy?
Even if you already have a room or space, you can still re-arrange things, or choose to remove things that you no longer enjoy and make it look new again. Thus you can add accessories and new colorful items to spruce it up!
3. How do you want to use that space everyday?
Also, it really depends on what you’re going to use that room for in the future. Will you be hosting a lot of parties? Or will it be just you using the space. If you rarely have people over, then you might want to design it so it’s more functional towards your needs. You can make it a workout room, or an office, or a studio rather than a living room or a dining room.
You should utilize the space in ways that fit your needs, not necessarily what you think you should use it for or what you see in magazines.
Those were great thoughts and questions to get you started.
The conversation then turned to the software platform that she had built and the company that she had founded called Laurel & Wolf which, again, allowed designers to interact with clients in a new way… online.
She said that being an “entrepreneur” was more than a full time job. You really have to love what you’re doing because you pour your blood/sweat/tears into it and it’s very long hours. It’s hard to find that life balance that everyone talks about because you’ll think you’re doing great, then all of a sudden something will come up and you’ll be like, “I had no idea this was coming… and I have no idea it was going to be this hard…”
She actually started her company rather quickly. Here’s a rough timeline:
- Oct 2013 — Thought of the idea of Laurel & Wolf
- Dec 2013 — Built Website and started to get people on waitlist. They recommended that what she wanted to do was going to cost a quarter of a million dollars. She didn’t have that kind of money but she decided to go for it anyway.
- Feb 2014 — Incorporated
- March-May 2014 — Went out and raised money from venture capitalists
- Late July/August 2014 — Officially launched the company with small team of 30 designers and friends.
Her vision is to make Laurel & Wolf a global company one day, but right now her consumer base is young millennials maybe in their late 20’s or early 30’s. There are a lot of young couples who are investing into their first home.
At the end of the day, every client is unique, so there are different interior design packages that her platform offers.
When asked, “What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned so far in building this company?” She said,
Failure is an important part of the process. Inevitably, things aren’t going to work. Stuff will happen. The best thing you can do is learn and don’t fail the same way twice.
She explained, “Building a business is very much like building a house. You wouldn’t want to pick out your wall papers before you had a good foundation.” Things were never going to be done, but you needed to start somewhere, just jump in, and start learning. “Failure leads to new ideas, you learn something that doesn’t work and the right thing to do at the right time.”
She said she just concentrated on her Minimum Viable Product and got started that way. “Many women wait too long to launch a product because they want it to be perfect or done… but it’s too late by then, or it never launches!”
The Future and Beyond…
A lot of people are influenced by too many trends/influences/ideas, so their designed usually end up being a lot of things happening all at once. You just have to concentrate on a few key aesthetics and that’s all you need.
She talked a little about what she thought the Future of Interior Design was going to be.
A lot more color and bold wall papers with a lot more detail.
Usually if fashion is heading one way, then interior design will follow suit.
The Workshops
The 2nd half of the evening actually went into a hands-on design portion where we got to interact with 4 of the Laurel & Wolf designers and they actually taught us how to re-design a bookshelf and coffee table.
We split into groups of 10 where they first explained the design they had sitting on the table and/or shelf, and then we were asked to take everything off and use various “accessories” available at our disposal to try to make the bookshelf look nice and designed.
They gave us their thoughts and guidance and general rules of thumb:
For the Bookshelf
- Use the Rule of 3 — Try to only use roughly 3 “elements” in your design. So pick a color scheme, maybe an object that draws your eye, and lay the books flat instead of standing up, etc. That kind of stuff, but only limit yourself to 3 general ideas.
- Think Dimensionally — You can use items to help layer and give it some depth. You can add picture frames to give it more vertical height and lean them against the wall or in front of each other to bring it forward a little. You don’t necessarily need to hang them.
- You generally want to make the bottom shelf more heavy vs. the top shelf which you can keep more light. Or you can make the top and bottom heavy and keep the middle a little more light.
- Use an S or Z curve — your eye generally likes to follow lines, so if you intentionally put space in your bookshelf what leaves a negative space that’s kinda like an S curve or a Z, then it feels more designed rather than just a messy clutter.
- Your eye is naturally attracted to bright colors and high contrast, so try adding those things to your shelves.
- You can lay your books both sideways and upright on the same shelf, tilt them a little, and put objects on top of the flat books to give it character. Like a rock on top of heavy books (very symbolic!) or stone birds on top of light colored books.
- You can even pick the books that have colored bindings and organize them that way to give accent colors to the places you need them.
For the Coffee Table
- Heavy vs. Light — You can look at the thickness of your table and whether you want a heavy feel or a light feel which will dictate how many items you put on it
- Use container type of items — I noticed that there were a lot of trays and box like items that helped to “contain” various items and made things look more neat. You can put your controllers in there and other random things. It’s much better looking than if they were placed alone by themselves. That would look much more cluttered.
- Look at your color palette, your general shapes, accent colors, and materials used, those all play into the aesthetic and overall feel.
Some Recommended Stores
We asked where they got such ecclectic items and they gave the following recommendations of places that have really great items for more affordable prices:
- CB2 (it’s like the Crate & Barrel Jr. store)
- Target (Nate Berkus collection — he’s an interior designer but sells through Target at great prices)
- West Elm
- Home Goods
Those were good places to start if you wanted to get some neat accessories.
Call to Action
It was a fantastic evening and I got to talk to so many designers that really inspired me to go home and re-think about the environment I was living in.
Everything in life can be designed. You just have to see it from an artistic perspective and dedicate some thought to it. I found it so fascinating.
Go home and think about the Interior Design of your space. You might just see if in a whole new way! Who knows, it might just change the future of your health and well-being and bring you joy.
:) If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with others and scrolling down and recommending it with a heart. ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤
Jonathan Chew is a Disney Imagineer, multi-potentialite, writer, coach, inspirational speaker, and work-in-progress. He lives in Los Angeles with his newly-wedded wife. He’s on Twitter @jonathangchew, is the co-author of Secrets to Being a World Changer, and is on a mission to “Chews” Joy.
