Dining Rooms: Designing for Your Emotional Well-Being
I read an interior design book last night. Since I can’t recommend it to you, I won’t reveal the name. What I saw was a group of photographs asking the reader to choose her favorite dining room. After studying the rooms carefully, I decided that not one room presented good design for eating and conversing!
Several of the dining rooms used wallpaper in bold patterns that compete with nonexistent diners. Most of these rooms offered uncomfortable seating, either too big for intimate conversation or too little for personal comfort. The “cozy” dining rooms were cluttered with too many accessories; the “formal” and “elegant” rooms were too stiff and cold. This is how I labeled the dining rooms:
1. Cluttered Country
2. Bleak Stiff Modern
3. Wallpaper Madness Traditional
4. Cold Contemporary
5. Stark Shaker
6. Bland Eclectic
7. Pretty for Parties with Misguided Colors
8. Governor’s Mansion for Once a Year
If you want to makeover your dining room for good conversations and dining pleasure, here are a few new interior design tips from Design Psychology strategies:
1. Focus on how you and your dining partners will look in the space. Don’t overdo the accessories.
2. Use colors to enhance the appearance of people and fabrics to soften the space.
3. Choose wallpaper with patterns smaller than your palm so the pattern doesn’t compete with faces.
4. Add flowers and soft — not spiky — houseplants to bring nature indoors.
5. Provide cushioned chairs for relaxed and extended conversations.
6. Establish a theme or style that reinforces your personal design statement.
7. Color your walls to complement food and enhance taste.
8. Relax formal dining rooms with rough textures and houseplants.
Make your guests and family feel honored with a dining room designed to support conversations and enjoy eating your shared dinners.
Copyright (c) 2004 by Jeanette J. Fisher
Locker Room, Designer Style – The Hall Tree Bench
For many of us, the entryways of our homes are places that collect the essentials in our lives. Shoes and slippers, jackets and sweaters, backpacks and briefcases-they are slipped off, dropped where they land, and kicked to the corner when we get home at the end of the day. While we want to make the transition between work and home as quick as possible, we sometimes pay the price the next morning, when we are searching for those essentials to carry off to school or work.
You can add some efficiency to your days with a place for everything, and everything in its place. A locker room would give each member of the family a place to store those essentials, but really–a locker room in our house? Instead, a hall tree bench provides a stylish alternative to this everyday problem.
Check out furniture websites and catalogs and you are bound to find a hall tree bench in just the style and size you need. Like a storage locker, they are typically tall, meant to be placed against a wall in the mud room, foyer, or hallway. It packs a lot of storage punch in just a couple of feet. A hall tree bench is usually designed with a storage shelf on top, perfect for those things that you don’t want little hands to reach (your laptop, for example), or as a plant shelf to add to your décor. The back of the hall tree bench typically has multiple hooks, so it’s easy to hang your overcoat, messenger bag, baseball cap, or purse in a convenient place. Many of them come with a mirror installed on the back, so you can check your look just as you head out the door.
Storage options don’t end there. A bench with a hinged lid, upholstered or not, provides a deep space to store those bulky items that take up precious floor space-backpacks, tool boxes, catchers’ mitts, tennis rackets, and hockey pads. Give those important things a permanent home inside the storage bench, and you won’t be tripping over them in the dark or dripping melted snow on them.
If you look for a hall tree bench that sits off the floor, you’ve got space beneath the bench–the perfect place to stow athletic footwear, garden clogs, and house slippers. You’ll have a convenient but out-of-the-way place to store these things right inside the door, just where you need them.
Look around, and you can find a hall tree bench with features you might not have thought about. While including an umbrella stand might be obvious, what about one with a charging station for your cell phone, laptop, or MP3 player? Some elaborate designs integrate storage cabinets and give you enough space to create a small home office in your hall tree bench-bulletin boards, bins for file folders and mail, white boards, or a drop-leaf work surface.
For a single person or a working couple in a small home or apartment, you can find a hall tree bench that can fit in just a few feet of wall space. But for a home for a big family, you can select a modular hall tree bench. If you have the space, you can install a furniture-grade “locker” for each member of the family. That way, everyone has there a personal space for his or her own things. Hooks, seats, drawers, cubbies-it makes organizing easy. With a hall tree bench storage system, there’s no excuse for creating the confusion of an all-out search for backpacks to the morning routine.
DIY Laundry Room Design
The laundry room probably isn’t a place that you love to go into. But, you can make it more user-friendly. By doing so, you can keep it organized, useful, and maybe even a section of the house that you actually look forward to going into.
If you ask most people what they don’t like about their laundry room, they will say that it is too cramped, cluttered or doesn’t have enough space. But, the truth of the matter is, that most laundry rooms have a lot of space and it is very rarely utilized. Realizing the potential for usable space in the laundry room can give you even more storage than you thought you had before.
The wall behind the washer and dryer usually has about sixty four square feet of available storage space. But, with just a shelf above the washer and dryer, we are usually only utilizing about eight feet of that space. No wonder we all feel like we don’t have room to put anything!
Use that space to its fullest potential. Pull down that shelf and start from scratch. You may decide to build a platform with a rubber coating to go underneath your washer and dryer. This significantly cuts down on washer and dryer noise and also gives you a usable space underneath for storing linens, out of season clothing, whatever will fit. Plus, if you have a front-loader washer and dryer, raising them up puts them at a more ergonomic height, saving you back strain and pain.
Next, consider a workspace. One thing to consider is a countertop for folding. This can be just a small space next to the washer and dryer, or a long counter down one side of the room if you have the space. Underneath is a good area for stashing dirty clothes baskets and hampers.
You may decide to place a cabinet underneath your countertop for your heavy laundry detergent boxes or bottles. A sliding trash can is also a handy thing to put in a lower cabinet. You may even decide to put two trash cans inside of cabinets; One with a self closing lid for dryer sheets and lint and the other for recyclables, like laundry detergent and fabric softener bottles.
Deep cabinets are useful in a laundry room. Install them up higher than you normally would and place a hanging bar below them. Designate certain hangers, like metal hangers, for drying delicate items.
You can also install small buckets or shelves with bins on one wall of the laundry room. Designate a bucket or bin for each family member and one for money. As you run across things in the wash that shouldn’t be there, you can simply toss them in a bucket for later.