Evolving a Design: Client Led Changes

After presenting a design to a client, there are often tweaks that need to be made. Here is the evolution of a small portion of a living room in a recent project of ours.

The initial brief:

To transform a new build 2 bedroom flat in Wimbledon into a contemporary, interesting, warm and characterful home. The modern apartment needs to feel grounded and lived in, with up-to-date furniture and styling. The young clients are not afraid of bold colour, but we’ll focus on lighter colours for the bulk of the rooms with dark trims and features. 

Our initial suggestion:

Our initial design

We blended some contemporary lighting with some updated takes on retro items, and older more personal looking art to give the apartment a sense of history. Whilst everything is new, it doesn’t look it and so won’t all age at the same rate or resemble a show home. It’s a large room with some big solid pieces, so we’ve gone for some more bitty wall art to break up the space. As block colours are being used on the walls, we’ve introduced some busy patterns to stop the room looking flat.

Feedback: The clients weren’t too keen on the idea of vintage or retro pieces. They’d like some slightly more industrial items and modern lighting. They loved the chairs, colour scheme and the mirror display.

So we updated it to this:

Our updated plan

Some slightly more contemporary art has been used, and the cocktail cabinet is now polished steel. The 70s style clock has been replaced with a modern digital brick and the pendant lighting is very now and sleek. The overall feel is still the same but many of the individual pieces have changed.

Feedback: After reviewing the two designs they decided they wanted to go back to a few of the originally suggested pieces. They kept most of the styling but returned to the original cabinet. The outcome:

Final Design