Interior. Spacious home
- Don’t do it
- Lowered furniture
- Hanging furniture
- Shelves from floor to ceiling
- Light color of a floor
- Floor countering is the same all over the floor
- Wide mirrors from the floor to ceiling
- Total minimalism
- Optimisation of a storage
- Use transparent furniture
- Transparent zoning
- Elements
- Panoramic Windows
- Lights out from a ceiling
Don’t do it
We want to live in a spacious house. To make a home larger, we can do two things: (obviously) make more square meters or improve any interior. To make more square meters, we spend more money on construction or save money on some details.
I lived in Russia, where everyone wanted more space with a lower price per square meter. So people don’t hire an architect; instead, they buy the readymade blueprints for 500-2000$. They save money on materials, make cheaper windows and doors, and save money on an interior. Many houses in Russia look like a square (because you get more space and spend less money on walls) with small windows and a thin metallic door with a height of 2 meters.
Most of the time, there are a lot of rooms that you don’t need to use. Inside of a house, the furniture will be cheap.
Usually, people argue: “in the future, we will make a good interior design, buy new furniture, etc.” Most of the time, everything will stay the same until the cheap furniture is not destroyed.
Is it your dream house? No. If you want to make a dream house, you should understand what you need inside a home what functions you do there. You don’t follow the will of making more square meters. Instead, you spend more money on suitable materials that will last longer and be nice to touch or look at. You spend money on an architect who plans the house for your family’s needs and builders who do the high-quality job.
To compensate for the lost square meters, we may expand an interior using 14 methods:
Lowered furniture
The most comfortable furniture is a small one, making the room look spacious.
Use the good furniture—for example, the chair of Charles Eames. The designer spent eight years finding the correct form and size of an armchair. I am sure that you have seen his chairs. It costs 8k$ for the original version and 1k$ for a replica. This chair is also low.
Use white or one-color furniture to expand the room. Your eyes slide around the house so that you will feel calm. The low contrasting furniture (e. g., black with white) also will expand the room, but not as good as one-color furniture.
Hanging furniture
The more floor you see, the more space you feel. If you place a wardrobe, dresser, bedside table, toilet, sink on a floor, it will feel like a wall, like the end of space. When the furniture is hung on a wall and is hovered by 25-40 cm, you may see the real end of a room and feel more spacious.
Shelves from floor to ceiling
In a previous tip, I said that the furniture should hang on the wall without being attached to the floor. There is another variant with wardrobes and a kitchen. The closet is a huge element, and the closet will focus a lot of attention on it. We should make this element less attentive. Therefore, we make a wardrobe look like a part of a wall.
Light color of a floor
Use wooden floor made of ash, whitened ash, or whitened oak (but not the oak with natural color, it is too yellow). Don’t use the parquet (wooden floor) with many knots, and it clogs (litter) the view and makes space look smaller.
Use a wide parquet with a chamfer – it is costly but looks excellent.
Floor countering is the same all over the floor
You should use the same wood in every room, without any separators between rooms.
If you use a different kitchen material, choose the light porcelain stoneware that does not have high contrast with the wooden floor. Don’t use any separators between the different materials. The floor should be on one level, without elevation (height difference).
Dont use a skirting board. Usually, it is a signal of a bad job of a builder. Professionals make the wooden floor so close to the wall that you don’t see the ending of a wood. (rephrase)
Skirting boards make ceilings look lower.
The walls should be done out of white color or whitened ash, and white expands the space.
Wide mirrors from the floor to ceiling
Never use glossy floors and ceilings – they will also mirror every object, but they will overwhelm the space so that gloss will always stress your eyes.
Total minimalism
Hide everything: wires, toys, clothes, photos, and even books.
All the gadgets: acoustics, projectors, TVs should have a minimalistic design.
It would be best if you always kept everything clean, and this is a massive problem if you are not decent. In Sweden and other Nordic countries, people live with one principle – if you pass out now, the house should look new. All the minimalistic design lives on this principle.
Optimisation of a storage
The storage in any interior should be everywhere: under the bed, in the walls, under the stairs, etc. There is always insufficient space to store things. One of the ways to increase storage without losing space is to use a cabinet (shelves) instead of interior partitions (walls). It will not make your sound isolation lower.
Another method is to use cabinets (wardrobe) all over the wall but make them thin (40cm in width). You may hang the coats shirts in parallel with a wall. To do it, you should turn the pipe for hangers perpendicularly to a wall.
Use transparent furniture
It is hard to find nice transparent furniture. However, the space looks bigger with the transparent table or chair, and your eye does not focus on such furniture. But in the long run, the transparent furniture will gain scratches and look bad. That is why the idea of working or dining table is not the best one.
Transparent zoning
If you have a toilet in a bedroom, you don’t need the opaque (non-transparent) walls because only you or your spouse will use it, but the room size will increase significantly. For privacy reasons, you may use roller blinds (curtains).
The walls made of glass cancel the noise only if the glass is well attached to the normal wall. Otherwise, the sound and the smell will go through small holes on the edges. That is why you should not save money on specialists.
You may make the transparent glass on the higher part of a wall, which will make the place more spacious without losing privacy.
If your house is too small, you may combine some rooms without making a wall. You may combine a living room, dining room, and a bedroom. Just think about ventilation and keep your room clean. Your house will look much more spacious, and you can invite many friends.
Elements
You may also make wide double doors (from floor to ceiling).
You may use only tulle or tulle with grey curtains.
Use transparent wardrobe rooms.
Panoramic Windows
Panoramic windows make nature the part of your house, increasing the space significantly. Your windows should be made from floor to ceiling. Also, it is important to hire professionals to make the right isolation, or your windows will become wet every winter, the mold will appear, and you will have to reinstall the new windows, which can cost thousands of dollars.
But don’t forget: the location is essential. Choose the picturesque places close to infrastructure. Don’t build such a house in a village with awful houses, and don’t have high fences on your territory. You will destroy harmony.
The good thing is to place a house close to a picturesque place, but outside of it – in a moderate place – you will make the average place beautiful, and the home would not touch the scenic landscape.
Lights out from a ceiling
Have you ever thought, why do we need light in our house? Of course, to move around a house, cook, and take a shower. But what exactly do we need to light? Imagine you are in a living room. You are sitting on the sofa and, e. g., read a book or watch tv. What should be lighted? When you read a book, the only thing you want to see is the text in a book. You don’t want to see a sofa or walls, a floor to be lighted because it will distract you. Imagine coming to a fashionable restaurant for dinner. The lights are usually dimmed so that you see your partner and food. Does anyone light the sofa or a floor? not really.
Our eyes don’t like direct light, which comes from one point. In old times people used the chandelier in the middle of a room. The problem with this method is that you can’t control the light – the closer to center elements get more light than the further elements. Later, people decided to place lights in different parts of the room to control the lighting zones. Now, we got to a new level.
The indirect lights have become popular. The lights can be hidden anywhere so that you don’t see the origin of light. Light is scattered over the surface: mostly over the ceiling and walls. In the new minimalist architecture, you will not see any light sources, and there will be nothing on the ceiling. In the further articles, I will tell more about each aspect I told here.
I hope these tips have helped you. The recommendations were told by Sergei Domogatsky, a Russian architect who produces efficient fachwerk houses for the mass market.
Critics
If you plan a house or change the interior, a second opinion is essential. I explain the disadvantages of a home and give tips on improvements. I don’t just say that something is terrible. I give broad explanations based on hundred books that I have read about architecture, urban planning, design. I do it for free. Just write me an email: daniil@koveh.com.