Interior design isn't only about creating beautiful spaces. It's about touching the lives of the people who live, breathe and walk through those spaces. Interior design is not about arranging furniture. Interior design is about creating comfort and pleasure in an environment sheltered from the outside world. It's about summoning the power of the senses to communicate specific feelings.
Think about the most amazing experience you've ever encountered in an interior, not necessarily the most expensive or the most expansive, but the most serene and welcoming, or the most uplifting. Perhaps it smelled particularly pleasant or was filled with the most inspiring music, or maybe the furniture was inviting and soft and perhaps the lighting was just perfect. Whatever the force, in that moment, you felt the energy of your surroundings. That is the power of design.
Here in Philadelphia, we interior designers do our own investigation of this concept with a walk through the senses. In this first installment, we tackle Sight and Sound.
SIGHT
In the phenomenon of light and visual perception, colors signal a language of their own. Color can bring amazing joy to our lives and environments. It can make a space more engaging, embracing, warmer, more open or more closed.
Like trigonometry, the color wheel is probably one of those things that you learned about as a young child and haven’t thought of since. However, to really understand color, you may have to dust off some of that knowledge.
Simply put, the color wheel provides a visual representation of which colors blend nicely together. It removes all the guesswork, essentially. Most models are comprised of 12 colors. However, in theory, the color wheel could be expanded to include an infinite number of shades.
You don't have to be an interior designer to design with color. We found this color chart that shows the emotional triggers of colors. So, we recommend that you start with what "feeling" you would like evoke in your space.
SOUND
From an alarm to a symphony, audio frequencies hold the power to elicit an emotional call and response.
Not only are interior designers looking to elicit an emotional response through music, but we are also looking to cancel out noise through the use of acoustics. This is something that is just beginning to be looked at in healthcare because of HIPAA speech-privacy regulations that went into effect in mid-2003. People are just now starting to understand what patient confidentiality is all about in design.
During research for this Blog, I found this article published in the New York Times titile "Dear Architects: Sound Matters". We couldn't agree more and couldn't resist sharing the article with you. Click here to experience the sounds of our interiors.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/29/arts/design/sound-architecture.html
Come back and visit us again soon as we tackle smell, taste and touch.
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