In Melbourne, many designers have had to become a little more creative with how they work with clients at the moment; adapting, pivoting, reimagining, evolving and all the other buzz words of 2020. While we currently can’t meet face to face, or join you for an onsite meeting, this isn’t necessarily a new state of play for My Beautiful Abode as we’ve provided remote and virtual designing services for many years now, particularly with our clients in regional Australia. In fact, one of our ongoing clients from the early days actually lives in Singapore! This means we have quite a few tricks and tips up our sleeve about how to design for a space that can’t really be accessed.
We thought now is a good time to share tips on designing a space off the plans that are useful beyond lockdown:
Know your scale and accurate sizes of spaces. Sophie, our founder and lead designer is a firm advocate for measuring twice (thrice, even bettter). Sophie worked in Lincraft many years ago, and a customer came into the store with the piece of elastic they had used to measure their window for new curtains. We love their enthusiasm and resourcefulness, not so much the accuracy of the measurements. If you have plans with dimensions, use them. If you are living in the space or can go on site, use a metal tape measure for confident measurements.
When you start placing furniture into your plan, also think about the space around the pieces. There are some rules of thumb to follow to make the space function well. You don’t want to feel you’re crammed into the space like squeezing into those work pants post lock down and those extra kilos. For example, you need about a metre between the table and wall or next piece of furniture for the dining chairs to fit comfortably. When placing your sofa in front of the tv, you need to consider how far away the sofa should be for comfortable viewing (as well as the size of the tv). It’s awesome you want a King size bed, but have you allowed room to fit bedside tables? Have you drawn the size of a standard bed, or guessed?
A tip we learned in design school was to grab a roll of cheap baking and use it to draw on to like it’s tracing paper instead of your master copy floor plan. It’s a tidy way of keeping track of your evolution of the design and maintain the correct room size, rather than sketching out the room over and over.
If you have selected a piece of furniture already, or a bringing it from another home, it’s fun to cut out scale drawings of the pieces of furniture and try moving them around the plans in the room to see what will work and what space is left for the other essential pieces to come. This is paper doll technique is really good when you have an awkward layout and need to move the pieces around like a fantastic puzzle.
All sound too hard for you? We love these jigsaw puzzles and after years of practice, we are really good at imagining a finished space. We would love to help you figure out the furniture layout for your new space.