One Room Challenge – Spring 2021, Week 3: Design Concept + Furniture Board
Hello....Week 3 of ORC. If you have no idea what ORC is and have not been following our progress, click here to read Week 1 blog post; you will learn all about our participation in ORC.
Onward and upward; we are moving along this challenge. For week 3, I have completed the furniture board for the revamp of our existing guest room into a cultural, warm, inviting and vibrant guest room. Last week, I found a gorgeous mid-century colorful wallpaper that I immediately fell in love with, and chose to design my room around this wallpaper. If you missed the details of this inspiring piece, and why it spoke to me, click here to read last week's blog post. So, looking at the characteristics of the wallpaper, I first found, a hanging rattan chair that I will be installing in the guest room as an accent piece. The overall structure of the rattan chair plays off the circular shapes existing in the wallpaper design. From there, I found a rug that picks up the colors appearing in the wallpaper. The colors in the rug are a pastel, sort of a desaturated version, of the vivid colors of the wallpaper. In the room, I am not installing the wallpaper, so I can save on cost; instead, I will be trying to emulate the wallpaper design by hand on a wall to be my focal point of the room. Therefore, I will pick the colors for this accent wall design based on the colors appearing in the rug, so all will be cohesive and continue the story of the guest room design. I fell in love, like love love, with both the rug and egg chair; so everything else that I have selected for the room, had to work with those pieces. Lastly, the item that took me the longest to find, is the light fixture. Finding lighting is a cumbersome task because there are so many choices, and also, I am working with a budget constraint. However, I located a chandelier that just like the rattan chair, plays off the circular shapes appearing in the wallpaper design. Both the material and design of the light fixture furthers drive the cohesiveness attributes of the guest room design project. Take a look at the furniture board to see what I have found, thus far. Let me know your thoughts... good or bad.
So, I don't know if you are anything like me...I like to visualize the end of things, and then go back, and start from the beginning. For example, when I buy a book, I read the last 2 to 3 pages to find out how the book ends, then go back and read from the introduction. Or when I am binging on a show, I will go to the last episode, watch that first, then go back to the first episode. Weird, I know!!!! But, it makes me feel so good.
With that said, that is exactly what I am doing with this week's post. The furniture board is the last thing that was completed for this week's progress. Before getting to the furniture board, I measured the guest room so I can create the floor plan for the room. Creating a floor plan, which is the same as space planning, is essential and a required step in the successful design of a room. You should not select any furniture pieces or purchase anything until you have completed a space plan for your room design. The development of a floor plan allows you to select furniture that is not too big or too small for your room, makes certain that you have enough room to move around in the room, and ensures that you are not overcrowding or underutilizing the available space of the room. When constructing your floor plan, you want to make certain that the plan is drawn to scale...this gives you a visual look as to the layout of the furniture pieces and their relationship to one another. To design my floor plan for this room, I use floorplanner.com. This is a online platform and easiest way to create floor plans. Just use their online editor you to make 2D blueprints and 3D (interior) images within minutes. When I created the floor plan, I could see, visually, that using a larger rug, bigger than 5'x8' will give the design of my room, a much profound and captivating look and feel. Also, I was super glad to see that the hanging rattan chair will definitely work in the space, and will serve, as another focal point of the room. Not to mention, this chair is going to be sooooooo much fun!!!
So, before I created the floor plan, the first thing I had to do was to develop the design concept board. The design concept board is a collection of images that is collected and placed together on a digital paper that showcases the look and feel of the room's design. Since, the inspiration for the design of this guest room makeover is based on my love and affinity for my home country, Panama, the images that I have collected and placed on this board are from my last travel to Panama in 2019. In Panama, I am inspired by the buildings, the colors of the buildings, and any posh hotel that we stay at during our vacation. The hotel that we stayed at, had the most beautiful, artistic, electrifying layers of color in the hotel's restaurant design, as well as, the guest rooms. I loved how the hotel put color on the walls, on the floor, and chose to keep their furnishings with natural materials such as wood, brass and gold. By observing the distinctive furnishing and material components of that hotel design, has exhilarated me to translate those same facets into the design of my guest room revamp. I hope you can how the images in my design concept board has led to my furniture selections in the furniture board presented at the beginning of this blog post.
Okey dokey...that's all for this week. Believe me or not, it took plenty of hours and has been a lot of work just getting to this point. Next week, I will be ordering the furniture pieces and cleaning up the room... to get it prepared for painting. Before painting the room, I will be revisiting the furniture board, and choosing a wall color that will complement the colors and design that I will use for the accent wall of the room, as well as, the selected furniture pieces of the room.
Hope you are enjoying our journey to the design of this room for ORC Spring 2021. ORC is so exciting and the community support of the other designers have been valuable and synergic. Don’t forget to look to see how all the designers, especially the featured designers, are progressing along with #oneroomchallenge hashtag or click the links below to follow their respective blogs or visit the ORC official blog at http://www.oneroomchallenge.com/orc-blog.
Until next time....
Un abrazo grande y muchas bendiciones (huge hug and much blessings)
--- Keesha
Ariene C. Bethea | At Home With Ashley | Banyan Bridges | Bari J. Ackerman | Brit Arnesen
Brownstone Boys| Cass Makes Home | Dominique Gebru | Gray Space Interiors| Haneen's Haven
Home Ec. | Nile Johnson Design | Pennies for a fortune | Prepford Wife | Rachel Moriarty Interiors
Sachi Lord | Susan Hill Interior Design | This Is Simplicite | Tiffany DeLangie | Victoria Lee Jones
