Although it may have enjoyed occasional waves of pop culture fame over the years, interior design remains an overlooked art. That is, few people bother to appreciate or notice the similarities with other, more “serious” forms of human endeavor. Watch recent videos five by nine Watch the video above, and even if you’ve been reasonably happy with where you’ve placed your sofa, chairs, and table, you’ll soon find yourself thinking about the interior design principles you’ve always been unknowingly violating. Because our eyes “read” a room the same way we read a paragraph or a painting, instinctively sensing whether something is wrong or, worse, too right.
One common amateur mistake is arranging the room so that “everything falls on one horizontal strip that starts at the floor and ends at a height of about 2.5 feet.” With all the furniture more or less on one level, the eye “has no reason to look upwards or towards the corners” and perceives an oddly flat space.
“Having visual attention at different heights” creates more complex visual pathways, and the brain perceives itself to be in a more expansive (and actually more expensive) space. Installing curtain rods well above the window frame also goes a long way in creating a similar overall effect. Using vertical lines on bookshelves, wall textures, and everything else creates a more “visible runway.”
On a horizontal plane, there are few mistakes as widespread as pushing the sofa against the wall. Professional designers like to make furniture ‘float’ and leave ‘gaps that suggest hidden depth’. To better understand this phenomenon, consider how landscape painters tend to clearly separate foreground, midground, and background. When the middle ground of the sofa is flush with the wall background, “the brain learns to read them as a single plane.” Separation introduces distinct shadows, a medium that can produce greater results when operated with lamps and other forms of directional lighting, as opposed to overhead light fixtures that fill a space with even light. Given that wall-hugging couches and fluorescent lights turned on to the max are near-universal in Seoul, where I live, a Korean version of this video wasn’t supposed to be released anytime soon.
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Edgar Allan Poe offers interior design advice and criticizes American aristocracy in The Philosophy of Furniture (1840)
Once you visit Slavoj Žižek’s pad, you’ll never look at interior design the same way
Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
