Designing Interiors: Making Room for Space Hogs
by Dawn Westdawn.west@interiordesignschoolreview.com
Interior Design School Review Columnist
Your new client is remodeling his home and wants you to design the interior…seems easy enough. Then you visit, and that's when you see it. The space hog! Maybe it's an overflowing garage full of power tools: saws, sanders, who knows. Maybe it’s a toy train collection bursting in the basement. Either way, you have to design a space that will accommodate it. Here are a few tricks for designing a cohesive home interior with room for space hogs, people, and a little class while you're at it.
Doing the design for a home whose interior has to hold space hogs -- hobby and craft areas, collections of all sorts, wood shops, you name it -- is a lot easier with these tips.
Know Your Client's Priorities
You may be tempted to build a little shed out back and shove your client's space hog in it, and that may be a great design solution for the home, if the interior space hog is something that's not a part of your client's every day life. But if you've got a serious woodworker, seamstress, musician, train collector, etc. on your hands, that won't do. They need their stuff. So…Showcase What You Can in the Design
If you can't banish the space hog to a far away corner of the home, you might be able to take the opposite approach, and put it right in the spotlight. Design a window-filled, centrally located place for the woodshop, the art studio, or the sewing supplies. Many classic space hogs can be lovely if they aren't jumbled up. Look at the shapes, look at the lines, and see how you can design around or with them.Think Flexible Interior Spaces
The biggest challenge of designing an interior that accommodates space hogs is that a home without space limitations is a rarity. For example, that the big space you could use to showcase the train collection actually needs to serve as the dining room. You've got to get creative as a result. Can an art table fold up into the wall when not in use? Can a train set be built into a table that can be covered when it's needed for other purposes?With a few tricks like these and others that you would learn at design school, you can design home interiors that will accommodate people and their space hogs.
About the Author
Dawn West is a freelance who holds a B.A. in English from Harvard University.
Previous: Interior Landscaping: A Green Interior Decorating Idea
Next: Meet AutoCAD, Your New Best Friend
Back to News Archive
Want to suggest interior design news or links?
