Awkward Spaces Transformed into Beautiful Places
Design Dilemmas - Awkward Spaces Transformed into Beautiful Places
How do you define an awkward space?
It’s a rarity to find a home with equal sized spacious rooms free from challenging corners or cumbersome crevices. Indeed, our homes, and therefore rooms, are all unique in their own shape and design. While we love the variation and the bespoke element which often makes our houses ‘our own’, awkward room design can often leave individuals feeling defeated and uninspired to decorate...
Whether you’re exposed to a dark room, an attic bedroom with sloped ceilings, a small space that leaves little-to-no-room for imagination and creativity - there’s a design dilemma in almost every home design.
In order to help you make the most out of your living space and ensure every room you possess is decorated to perfection, we have devised a list of common design dilemmas and how to overcome these interior faux-pas.
Designing Dark Room
Is one of your rooms dark, dismal and desolate - designed to deflect any luminosity?
Designing a light-starved or north-facing living room can pose some challenges. However, this can easily be resolved with some clever decorating know-how.There are a few simple solutions that you can take to transform those dark rooms into a space you will love.
Firstly, if brightening up your space is a priority of yours, then you may want to incorporate bright whites within your room. Brighter colors are renowned for their ability to act as major light reflectors and thus enhance any natural or artificial light within the room. Yellow based colours or whites will typically help to bounce as much light as possible around the room, opening up the space.
Another idea is of course, wallpaper.
Wallpaper is your friend when it comes to making a dark room brighter. Choose a bedroom, living room or dining room wallpaper that has a metallic finish and a pale background color to help maximise how much light it will reflect. We love the subtle print of our Pencil Peonies Wallpaper, which would perfectly suit both a traditional living room and a more contemporary living space. Pair this with Slimline, low slung pieces of furniture that will allow for as much light as possible to flow around the room.
Alternatively, those north-facing rooms can also be a blessing in disguise. No sunlight streaming through the blinds as you try to watch TV can be ideal for creating the perfect cosy respite when relaxing in your space.
Indeed, you could always of course embrace the darkness and accentuate it with deep, dramatic colours. Strong colours like our Cracked marble wall mural create intimacy in a room, making the lack of natural light seem cozy and inviting rather than dim and dingy. According to design magazine, design sponge, instead of reflecting more light, dark colors have been known to reflect light less. Though this difference may seem misleading, dark wallpapers or colors have been known to blur the edges of the room and create an illusion of more space.
Small Room
Almost every house has a small room that they wish looks bigger. Whether it’s a box bedroom that is utilised as a study, or just a small living space with an inherently awkward size. But fear not, there are plenty of interior tips and tricks that you can adhere to in order to make your room appear bigger than it truly is...
Tip 1: Scale it down
What do you mean by this you ask? Scaling down your furniture in small spaces is imperative to expand your room and create the illusion of a more open and airy environment. This means you will have to think consciously about the proportions and placement of furniture, avoiding heavy weight pieces that eat up too much of the usable space in the room.
For example, swapping a sleep, low-profile chair over an oversized sofa provides all the same benefits without encroaching your space. As interior design magazine ‘modernista’ stipulates, purchasing low-profile furniture that is lower to the ground and shows a little leg is desirable for creating a sense of openness and movement. Embrace your inner mad-men or take inspiration from those mid century modern pieces. The choices are endless...
Tip 2: Think Horizontally
As science says, light colours reflect light and patterns draw the eye in. Well you could say the same rules apply to wallpapers and interiors as a whole. Thin stripes give the appearance of stretching, vertical stripes will make a room appear taller and horizontal stripes will make a room look wider. Take our White Paint Strokes Wallpaper as inspiration - not only does it create a 3D illusion of more space, but it also creates a simplistic feature wall for your home.
Tip 3: Mirror Mirror on the Wall…
Of course choosing a mirror is always an affordable way of instantaneously opening up a small space and allowing light to reflect throughout the dimensions of the room. Incorporated creatively, mirrors have the capability of creating a fascinating optical illusion, expanding a cramped nook or endow into a larger space - keeping that claustrophobia at bay!
Awkward Sized Rooms
L-shaped or narrow and low hanging ceilings - each maintaining heir own interior faux-pas that can make it a nightmare for anyone who wants to make use of that space to the best of their ability.
Don’t you just wish the blueprints of our homes resembled our old childhood drawings of perfectly assembled square-shaped rooms - both spacious and practical in design. Unfortunately, the reality is not always as easy as simple as our childhood creations.
Instead, many homes are left with that one room which is extremely difficult and awkward to design and can often be tantamount to a tough game of tetric.
However, have you ever tried stepping back, drawing out the layout of your room complete with measurements and thinking carefully about how you want to use it. Strategies like this can yield surprisingly impressive results, often leaving you with more space than you initially thought possible. Here’s a few tips you can try...
Awkward Low Ceilings
While low ceilings may not be the focal point of every home you enter, they do have a subtle psychological impact on your sense of freedom and space.
A particularly low or awkward ceiling can seriously make you feel like you are living in a small bird cage. With this in mind, one of the best solutions to cure this claustrophobia would be to utilise your walls as much as possible. Wall lighting fixtures are a particularly fruitful way of creating a warm and cozy atmosphere, enabling you to enjoy your home to the best of your ability.
Obviously wallpaper is a great way of detracting attention away from the ceiling and instead emphasizing another element within the room - in this case the mesmerizing artwork on the walls. A statement piece such as our torn posters 5 wallpaper mural is the perfect splash of bold and bright prints to grab your attention and focus on the intricacy of the details in the design, as opposed to that annoying low ceiling!
L-Shaped Room
An L-shaped living room featuring a large picture window is commonly seen in a broad range of homes - and aren’t they annoying. They can be a consumer's worst nightmare. However, with a little interior tips - they can transform into a room you adore.
Firstly, it's always best to opt for one colour scheme on the walls in an L-shaped room, This will help your eye read the room as one fluid space. The colour scheme is entirely up to you, but make sure that it is uniform in style and textures to provide a polished and seamless finish. Something like our Hand Drawn Palm Leaves Wallpaper would be the perfect soft tones to pair nicely with wooden furnishings - for a clean and minimalist interior aesthetic.
In terms of furnishing, it would be advisable to place an area rug in each arm of the room. Center them where the main pieces of furniture will be arranged. Coordinate the rugs to reflect the similar styles, patterns and colors to your wallpaper.
To really work with the shape of the room, you should also create a focal point in one corner. Consider adding a corner fireplace, tall bookshelves or an attractive entertainment center. Place this feature at an angle so it will minimize the long, narrow proportions of the room and can be viewed from both sections.
Finally, you could arrange your L-shaped room to serve two functions. It could work as both a seating area on one side of your room, with sofas at right angles to the windows, whilst the remaining space could be used as a dining room. This will enable you to maximise the space and work with the correct dimensions of the L-shape. It really can be that simple!
Conclusion
No matter what design dilemma your home contains, there is a solution. Whether you have a dark room, a low ceiling or L-shaped room, or even a space which serves no purpose due to its small size - there is always a way of transforming every space into a comfortable and aesthetically pleasing place to live and breathe in. All you need is the right interiors and tips to succeed. To find out how we can help, shop our online store today for mesmerizing wall murals and wallpapers for your abode.
