
Interpreting the inspiration given to you by a client can be one of the more challenging areas of design. You have to be part mindreader, part psychologist and part lion tamer. But it’s also the really fun and rewarding part where you start pulling pieces together and it all starts to make sense, look beautiful and fall into place.
Recent clients of ours, owners of a 2 bedroom new build flat in Wimbledon, sent us the following images as inspiration and a guide to their style and product choices:
The brief was to make the flat feel more like home, make it an interesting space for guests and provide more storage (that old chestnut). Their flat had an overly generous hallway which was a terrible waste of space. Rather than placing a large bank of wardrobes along it, which would have more than solved any storage issues but been an eyesore, we decided to make it a welcoming entranceway with selected storage for key pieces.
New build flats tend to lack character, so it’s important to gain a sense of it history and personality. We initially added art work related to their travels and contemporary pieces with a vintage feel in amongst the slicker, newer pieces they already owned to stop it looking like a show home.
Inspired by the Dulux Paint of the Year presentation we attended, we decided to go with creative use of paint, rather than wallpaper, allowing us to zone off smaller areas more effectively, and making it an easily changeable, durable, budget friendly way to introduce lots of colour (which the clients aren’t scare of, but the flat was lacking).
The clients liked it overall, but as their tastes were strictly modern, had a hard time imagining themselves owning several of the pieces. We hear ‘I would never have chosen that’ quite a lot (which is why you have hired us, no? If we only bought what you bought you could do it yourself). We toned down a few of the pieces and introduced some industrial flare to keep the design interesting but less ‘vintage’.