Archive for the ‘Space management’ Category
Harmony of space in your home IV – Windows & Doors and Furniture
When your windows and doors are planned by the engineer, make sure you opt for bay window, which offer seating inside and extend out into the outdoors. Plan your doorways similarly, though look at the safety angle before using either doors, sliding or otherwise, between the outdoors and the indoors.
Furniture
Place a few furniture pieces, say a bark of wood that is polished and buffed, inside your living room, close to an open window, or keeping a coffee table that is embedded with elements like stone pebbles, colored or neutral mosaic pieces etc. This will create a synergy between the outdoors and the indoors. Planning garden furniture that fits in with the rest of your interior décor including furniture pieces would also help in creating this compact picture.
If you discuss this concept prior to construction and also with your interior designer, many niches in the walls as well as partitions can be planned to create this seamless interaction between the two. You can add to this ambience with the use of carefully selected home décor items.
Harmony of space in your home III – The green walls
Another technique is to have a small atrium created inside your home over which you fix a skylight, allowing that place to be well lit during the day. In the atrium, you can have a bunch of potted plants that you like a small rock garden, and if it’s a slightly larger space, even a bench where you can sit for sometime. One or more of the sides of the atrium can be covered with green partition screens, made of net or even transparent glass which still offers privacy to the one sitting inside. Green painted garden nets can be placed just below the skylight to cut direct light entering inside, or can be kept on one side of your entrance to your main door, allowing the garden creeper to hang on it along with other flowering trees planted close by.
Harmony of space in your home II – Creating niches and tips on décor items
Creating niches
Another way of bringing about a harmony between the two is when you partially cover the outdoors with long leafed trees, high hedges, or bring a few of these inside the living area in the form of large potted plants. Use a large open niche window, without the grills that faces the outdoors, while you set about a table and an option to dine indoors. You can also cover the niche with shield glass or have a green partition screen whenever it gets too sunny for comfort but during some seasons it might be a good way to spend the afternoon here. Plan to have a picket fence around your house and garden instead of a wall because a picket fence allows you to experience the outdoors.
Décor Items
Potted plants kept in the balcony and a few inside your living room is another way to bring nature indoors. For instance, hanging home accessories like large prints of different element of nature – leaves, flowers, twigs etc bring the idea home. Your kitchen window can still be done to hold a box of potted herbs that hang outside to get the sun, but are also accessible to you when cooking.
Harmony of space in your home I – Plan the space in your home
When you are planning the way your house would look, you rarely pay attention to the way the extremities of you house would end – an open balcony, a terraced garden, a raised portico, a landscape view, an atrium inside, large open niches close to the outdoors, and so on. Merging the outdoors with some areas of your interiors makes the experience fulfilling, filled with natural light, and a sort of comfort that you find in hugely sprawling mansions set on a farmhouse.
But the technique of merging the two ever so slightly with the use of décor, home accessories, and a little planning in the construction stage can make all the difference. The leitmotif to merging the two is Nature and its elements. Starting tomorrow we will in a series on articles we will see how we can create a harmony of spaces in our homes.