The Facts You Need to Know When You Design Your Own Home

It is interesting even I am not in the interior design industry but my friends always like to ask my ideas for their new home. Of course, the main reason is I am graduated from Architectural Design. I am always being thrilled when I browsing interior/architecture magazines, and I am happy I am keeping my design brain working.

Here are few fun facts I found during these experiences, and also few tips I can easily follow when I proposed my ideas to my friend.

There are a lot of sources of home staging and interior inspirations, like AD Magazine, IKEA, Instagram… So if we only want a simple and easy touch, we can entirely design our own home. Of course, we can follow the magazine examples and design the same home. However, the truth is, you can not. First, we are only seeing the pictures instead of standing in the home, so we can not tell the ceiling height, the wall thickness, the depth of the opening, the light source position. Also, the photographer would take the best photoshoot so we may only be seeing the good look of the home and there may have inconvenient parts behind the scene.

Be prepare for the second reason, it may be heart attack: the furnishing in the “magazine home” may be premium, and we do not have the money to pay for these. The search for alternatives is always unsatisfying. So I would not recommend doing the exact same home because that would make us into a dead end. Each home should be unique designed by our own interests and aesthetics. The home would also grow with us, the furniture would move to the place we are most convenient with. So sometimes the struggle for the style at the beginning is time-wasting.

Minimalism style is really popular as most Japanese lifestyle brand like Muji has their own instruction for interior design and storage ideas. However, I do not recommend follow entirely, as if we do not do the full research, and buying the entire collection on impulse before think how to use it, people do not have time and ability for storage, this type of “grocery store” home is not for us. The only thing we need to do is make our home simple and clean.

Be simple is the most topic I was talking about because we have so many references. When it is hard to choose, we like them all, Scandinavian, Mediterranean style, Thai style, Muji Style, Korean Style… Some of them may be mixed together, but trust me, keep it simple so we can switch the style whenever we like by simply using the decoration, or just follow one style, which would make the design process much easier.