Home is the harbor of the soul, when you return home from a busy day, you want the whole environment to make yourself feel comfortable.
But what to do when you are not delighted with your ambiance? And it’s boring and sad, and the wall seems to infuriate… Why can you be uncomfortable in your own living space?
Consider the symptoms of an uncomfortable interior and treatment methods.
1. Boring
Our mentality is characterized by the desire to make repairs once and for a long time. The logical decisions contribute to the fulfillment of the dream: choose practical durable materials and neutral finishes: no bright colors or trendy prints that will go out of fashion next season. The approach, it would seem, is correct and will definitely help to avoid fashionable mistakes. Why, then, are practical neutral finishes and matching furniture depressing?
Sometimes, choosing classic and neutral, you risk becoming the owner of a living space that resembles a hotel room or a lobby in a business center.
If this happens, it is not necessary to immediately “dilute” the neutral palette with bright colors and expressive art objects, scattering “color spots” around the room. If moderation is closer to expression, use the Swedish approach: let the living space gradually acquire painstakingly selected accessories. If you do not chase brightness, but choose with your heart, your favorite things will surround you, and there is already a neutral base for them.
It is not necessary to dilute the neutral space with color at all, you can rely on textures. Choose cozy tactile things that are pleasant to interact with. For example, you can purchase some wood modern furniture online that will add a warm and pleasant texture to the common atmosphere.
Sometimes just one colorful detail can “rock” a boring room, for example, a large-format pouf, which will become not only an additional seat but also the visual center of the furniture composition. Option for the brave: add a wicker chair to the classic furniture group.
2. No longer fashionable
If an attempt to play it safe from fashion mistakes can cause a “hotel” interior, the desire to keep up with trends has a chance to result in another problem: a fashionable stylized interior will cease to be fashionable at some point.
Finally, you got a redbrick wall, to which you picked up those same lamps in the form of drainpipes, and the designers sent the loft-style interior to the list of anti-trends.
If the loft-style evokes positive emotions in you, you will simply ignore the trend charts. But if obsolete tendencies have become the cause of irritation, it is easy to correct the situation.
Stylistic mixing is in fashion, so it is not necessary to completely abandon the loft (or some other) style, it is enough to eliminate the most characteristic combinations, for example: remove “plumbing” lamps from a brick wall and replace them with something that is not loft at all. Popular styles such as loft, Provence, and Scandinavian have gone out of fashion in their pure form, but their recognizable features still appear in design projects next to elements of other styles.
3. Empty
An interior that the designer has not worked on is often easy to recognize by the arrangement of furniture. In such cases, the furniture group does not have an ideological center, but it itself is placed along the walls: the main thing is that the TV area is opposite the sofa. Such an arrangement can be convenient, but the empty central part of the room against the background of crowded walls seems “bare”.
There should definitely be free space in the room, but in the right dosage: if the furniture is modestly pressed against the walls, and the emptiness in the middle of the room immediately catches your eye, it will not be comfortable in such a room.
The cure is simple: engage the center with a coffee table or the large-format pouf. At the same time, sofas and armchairs do not have to be placed against the wall at all, they can be grouped around the center, and even turned “facing” each other, and not to the TV.
A long room can be zoned with furniture: open shelving or a corner sofa, which also does not have to stand in the corner. And it is easy to deal with emptiness in the corners of the room with the help of indoor plants and floor lamps.
4. Energy consuming
Let’s imagine a situation. You chose minimalism for practical and aesthetic reasons, but it turned out that maintaining order in such a space requires maximum attention from you, and aesthetics are an unsteady matter: any neglected children’s toy on the carpet spoils the whole picture. Such interiors look spectacular in glossy pictures but do not always work well with reality. Not everyone is ready to maintain perfect order non-stop.
If you have not provided enough space for storage, signs of everyday life, like mushrooms after rain, will come out here and there: the bathroom is already overgrown with multi-colored bottles, and toys have turned a minimalistic living room into a kindergarten.
This is not a cure, but prevention: be sensible about your strengths and avoid what brings stress, even if in theory it seems like a great idea. This applies not only to minimalist interiors but also to any elements of the living environment that require your resource: glossy facades in the kitchen, indoor plants, and light carpet.
5. Dark
The most common and obvious problem: your apartment is dark. Whatever the reason: an unfortunate arrangement of windows or curious neighbors from whom you have to hide behind curtains, a multi-layered light script will help. Do not save on light sources: sconces, floor lamps, table lamps, track lights, and LED lighting will be worthy helpers for overhead lighting.
Give yourself the freedom to change the light in the room according to your needs and mood, use dimmers to adjust the intensity of the overhead light, and try not to mix warm and cool shades of light in the same room.
