80% of Interior Design Basics in 10 minutes
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This one breaks down the three principles that account for about 80 percent of what I actually do as a certified interior designer: space planning, color palette cohesion, and scale and proportion. In that order, because function comes before form. I’ve spent close to 20 years designing homes for clients all over the world, and almost every room that needs help is failing on one of these three fundamentals.
For space planning, I walk through the four questions I ask every client before touching a floor plan, including how many people use the room, what activities happen there, what a good day looks like, and what you do the second you walk in. I share the story from the first chapter of my new book, The Functional Home, about a family of five with a closed-off galley kitchen and how opening it up with a peninsula and prep island changed how they lived together.
For color palette cohesion, I explain the five-to-six color approach, why honey oak trim, warm white, and cool grey floors all count as colors in your palette, and why you need light, dark, and mid-tone values to keep a room from feeling flat. There’s a real client example with honey oak trim that stopped reading as a problem once we treated it as part of the palette.
For scale and proportion, I cover positive versus negative space, my 70/30 ratio for walls, bottom-heavy rooms, visual weight, and a recent Facetime consult where a heavy stone fireplace was balanced out with a dropped chandelier, longer curtain panels, larger art, and heavier accent chairs. At the end I give you a quick way to audit your own room tonight using all three filters.
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