| Monday, December 4, 2006 |
| Texture--Considering Materials and Texture--Applying Your Thinking To Your Home |
Texture
Texture is a powerful tool in making your home your own. Novel textures stimulate, while the familiar soothe. When visiting someone else`s home, you may find that turning their doorknob, lifting their kettle, or settling down on their sofa actually feels strange; because the textures of their life differ from yours. But spend enough time in any home, and you will become accustomed to it. And in your own home, with objects you have chosen, the process of familiarization is even more subliminal. The texture of the armchair you bought so long ago has become so familiar you can recognize it in the dark : you reach out for it as a staging post on the way to turning on the light.
You can use this process to help make your home a more comforting place to be. Choose texture that answer something in you and let them become part of the fabric of your life ; just as a signature scent which comes to seems to seem less noticeable to the wearer, yet still announces its presence to others.
Considering Materials and Texture
Look at the materials in these six picture. Ignore the object and their colour, and focus on the basic qualities of the materials. Do not let yourself be put off if, for example, you prefer leather to be smooth, not buttoned as here, or Perspex when it is coloured. Perhaps your first reaction is that some of these materials are old-fashioned or even trendy clichés. Put these thoughts aside. Simply imagine touching each one and decide which you would most enjoy in your home. Record your choices and up to three qualities that explain why they appeal to you.
Applying Your Thinking To Your Home
Your goal is to create a home full of tecture to which you respond on first contact, and then which make you feel good as you live with them. You will want to combine texture that stimulate and soothe to the degree that suits you. If you think of your home as a sanctuary, which texture signify security and fastness to you? Do find acres of burnished steel reassuringly durable or off-puttingly clinical? Can you bear extreme contrasts, or absence, of texture in your home? Be honest with yourself as a ‘sensuous being’ when other factor, such as how easy something is to clean, may play a larger part in your choice of texture than you like to admit. Now look around you. How much of your chosen texture do you currently have in your home?  |
posted by Smithdeson @ 12:36 PM   |
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| Room--Identifying Your Favourite Room |
 RoomAlmost every room, every space in a home is loaded with meaning : the cellar filled with foreboding ; the kitchen that renews itself daily as the living, breathing hub of the household ; the parlour that presents an acceptable façade to disguise a home in turmoil ; the bathroom overflowing with associations from birth through sex and to death. As for the attic, the tower and the room with a view, they can be whatever you want them to be.  American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes that men and women prefer different areas of the house. Men often consider the basement is a retreat, a place for hobbies, a workshop, a bar, or a game room, but to a woman it means loading the washing machine or a problem with the boiler. In the bathroom, surrounded by the accoutrements that help her establish her identity, she feels safe. And while the kitchen is ussualy more important to women, it represents obligation as well as pleasure to them. Identifying Your Favourite RoomWhich room in a house is most important to you? When you come home, where do seek sanctuary? Do you feel drawn to ground level, or do you want to rise above everything, drawing up the ladder behind you? Perhaps you see yourself as a sentinel and like to be near the entrance. Or do you like the household to circulate around you, and gravitate to the main living area? What room does your home lack?  From these picture, choose the room in which you would feel most comfortable. Try to focus on the room and its uses and meaning rather than the style of the décor. Write down your choice and use up to three key words to describe it. Consider other rooms. Would you love a garden room? A turret room? In which rooms do you spend as little time as possible? The bathroom, perhaps, because washing is a bore, or the bedroom, because you want to get on with living rather than living around. Which room could you do without, or merge with another? A library-cum-kitchen, for instance? Think, too, about what elmts in a room are important to you. Would a simple, structuarally unfussy box with as few angles and features as possible satisfy you?   |
| posted by Smithdeson @ 11:03 AM |
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| Mood--Imagine an Ideal Mood--Creating Your Ideal mood |
Mood Mood is like odour, it will pervade a room before it can be traced to its source. But you usually recognize it as soon as you enter. At some point in our lives, most of us find that  the mood - the culture and atmosphere - of a particular time or place come to mean a lot of us for whatever reason. We immerse ourselves in books and films relating to our interest, or surround ourselves with item that emit some of it essence.
The minute you step into a holiday cottage you may feel a sense DEJA VU because in many small ways it reminds you of your grandfather house - something to do with the steepness of the staircase and the way the window open and the colour of the upholstery. Then you may realize that house of that era always excite you. Any mention of that period in books and magazine seems to leap out at you, you find yourself drawn to furniture in shops that seems somehow familiar. Very often re-creating such an atmosphere becomes the unspoken goal of your homemaking.
Even when you find yourself drawn to a particular period in time or a place that you have never experienced - the world of the early American settlers, or life in a Russian city during a winter - the feeling can be just as intense.
Imagine an Ideal Mood
Look at the picture of rooms from different countries and historical periods and choose the culture with which you feel most affinity. You may find the fabled life of Indian emperors immensely attractive and slip into a reverie just looking at the image on the page. Or perhaps  you simply enjoy the bracing spiritual order and practicality of the nineteenth-century Shaker communities. Is there another mood that captivates you? When and where would you like to have lived and why? Do you enjoy Egyptian art? Does the hand-to-mouth life of a Scottish crofter answer a need in you to pit yourself against the elements? Write down your choice, and up to three key words that describe the atmosphere with which you feel most kinship.
Creating Your Ideal mood
I`m not suggesting that you literally decorate your home as if it were an Egyptian palace, or log cabin or Indian shrine (although many people are happy to do just that). Rather, you should think about what the culture means to you in terms of its style and its value. The pace of live, the way interiors were illuminated, and the importance of food and nature, religion and hierarchy. What does it remind you of, or make you wish you had? Adventure,romance, security, novelty and authenticity are all common cravings. Of course, you could simply like Egyptian turquoise or Easter Island statue on a material level. But a cultural fondness that is ha   rd to dislodge can be well rooted in some deeper meaning. |
| posted by Smithdeson @ 10:33 AM |
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