Trends & Inspiration

Interior Inspiration: Thinking Outside the Box

Interior design ideas and thinking outside of the box

Divine inspiration for your house can be both an exciting, enlightening experience and also an absolute, utter nightmare. With almost every possible experience providing the potential to inspire you and fill your (virtual or real) scrapbooks, we’ve decided to help you out by providing some starting points to help you find your inspiration.

  1. Break down what you want

    The first thing to do is to try to narrow down certain spheres of inspiration that a relevant to the area or room of your house that needs a little love. Changing up your bedroom? Then ask yourself what kind of experience you want out of it: do you want a calming, relaxing space – a place for just you and your thoughts – or are you looking instead to create an ambiance of excitement and passion? Alternatively, you may even just want a space to make sure you wake up, fresh, focused and ready for a new day.

  2. Utilise your memory

    If it’s the calm life you’re looking for, then search your memory for experiences, sights and locations that have made you feel most calm. It could a beach on the south of France, pulsating with faint breezes of invigorating salt air – and with the great mouth of the Mediterranean glittering, reflecting the sun in the guise of thousands of little waves.

    Think of ways you can bring not only the aesthetic of that memory into your room, and monopolise on all possible senses. Try to define in your head (or on paper!) the way that experience feels to touch, to smell, to taste.

     

    Driftwood benches and pebble flooring are great examples of how you can encapsulate a variety of sensory ranges with a simple, beautiful home accessory. Indeed, you can then accessorise beyond this theme by taking it as your starting point for colour palette, materials, and more. To accessorise your calm, beach-themed bedroom, you could add in one of our Beech Click Clock Lamps. This helps maintain the use of light wood and simple, minimalist aesthetics.

  3. Think outside of the box

    Be careful not to limit yourself, however, purely to experience. Make sure you engage with relevant cultural, historical and social traditions and movements as these represent a rich area for inspiration. Indeed, engaging with something as obtuse as say, contemporary art, may in fact lead you to some great ideas. Take this installation by Japanese artist Yayoi Kasuma, entitled Infinity Mirror Room: abstract work like this proves a perfect starting place for how you can mix mirrors and lighting in order to create stunning interiors.

    Likewise, you could look at the amazing work done by United Visual Artists, and how they manage to organically work between sensory experiences and explore the spaces in between vision and sound. Whilst it’s possible that you won’t have the budget or programming skills to create something like the below, artists like the UVA are an excellent example of how you can try to engage multiple senses at once in your goal to create the perfect room.

  4. Make the most of your life

    Make sure you are making the most of everything around you when looking to spruce up a room. The first step is to figure out the exact way you want that room to make you, your family, and your guests feel. Next is to utilise your memory to find places in times in your life where you felt it before, and then focus in on each particular sense to maximise your ability to recreate that feeling. Finally, don’t be afraid of engaging in spheres not directly linked to interior design – you need not look only at contemporary art – and look at how people within those fields deal with the feelings you too are looking to recreate. And of course, make sure you accessorise with exactly the same depth of thought! If you follow your steps it should be no problem at all to create your perfect room.

Image Source: iStock



Team IWOOT

Team IWOOT

Writer and expert

A hub for gifting and homeware ideas, committed to bringing you the quirkiest trends on the market.