What is the world coming to?

Under-floor heating: the warm truth

It is no secret that our energy use has to shrink by 2020, due to government concerns and strict construction issues now being enforced.

The rising cost of supply, combined with global warming, makes energy-efficient technologies essential today. Floor heating – which uses 30% less energy than warm water heating and over 10% less than ceiling radiation plates – is well placed to reduce energy consumption, cutting carbon emissions and slashing energy bills.

residentianl designs

Residential house  designs is becoming evermore popular as people are trying to have the best looking house, but very few people can say they have done it and done it well. The reason for this is that interior design is all ways changing; bring out new styles and colours out every year, and as you look back you can tell that interior designs is always improving in quality but with all the new styles and trends coming out every year to try and be better than the year before, it is very hard to keep up with the new designs. But there is one company that can provide the latest styles and trends to a very high level of quality and to make your house into the style that you want and make your home feel the way you want.

They can do this in two different way one of these ways is a full interior design which means they will take everything out of the room, or the house and redesign it with your ideas mixed in with their ideas and how you want the house to feel for example you could want to feel warm, modern or you could want it to look like a older house, and then they mix all the ideas together and incorporate them into desired room, and the finished product will be better than you would of expected.

The other way that they can make your house feel more like a home is by just adding a few other things like fireplaces and different styles of lamps and all the small things like this can add character and the desired feel to the house that you want. But in all interior design  is quite difficult to achieve the look that you want and there are lots of look to chose from for example there is the modern look, traditional look and the cabin look these are the main looks that people choose when they design there house. I am going to tell you how to pull that look off and what colours and styles you use but like every other design you will need to put 100% of your time and effort into the house or you could end up with a house that you might not like and it could end up costing you a lot of money.

The modern look: For each room of the house the style and look will be different so for this one I will be telling you how to make your kitchen look modern. This type of look consists of lots of big glass windows sometimes covering the whole wall to let as much light in as possible to make the room feel bigger and also the worktops in all of the modern kitchens I have seen all have floating worktops made out of black granite and have lots of secret storage spaces to keep all the kitchens essentials in.

The traditional look: To make your house look more traditional it doesn’t matter what type of house you are living in. To make house look older it is quite simple but it involves a lot time and patience. The first step to making your room look more traditional you could get some wooden beams to put on the ceiling to give it the traditional look, the next thing to get is a old metal fireplace that burns coal and you can gets these from most home designers but if you want a good one its going the cost a fair bit. Most old houses usually have their walls painted in a cream colour but some can be wall papered.

The cabin look: The cabin look is the easiest design to do as it is quite simple, all you have to do is have wooden floors, walls and ceilings and have spot lights. But the key bit in all cabin rooms is the wood-burning fireplace and this will also make the room have a warm feel to it.

Like I have said before, to design your house and build the room and to capture what you truly desire takes time and effort.

Interior design has come a long way

Interior design has come a long way since a meagre splash of colour and a strewing of vibrant material was interpreted to be a must have stylish attribute.

Brian Messana declares a hate for the word contemporary. When asked to describe the architectural style of Messana O’Rorke, he doesn’t care for minimalist either. “It’s too Zen,” he says. “We’re much more pragmatic.” Clearly, he and Toby O’Rorke found their ideal client in an Irish banker who’d purchased a four-bay redbrick 1853 town house in New York shortly before being transferred to Hong Kong. For the ensuing 12 years, he rented the house to a series of tenants-the last being TV personality Charlie Rose-and time, alas, took its toll. A renovation, the first since 1981, would be essential.
The owner, who’d meanwhile returned to Ireland, wasn’t sure if he would sell the renovated property, rent it out again, or keep it as a second home. But he harboured no ambivalence about the desired aesthetic. “There’s a Spartan-ness about how he lives,” O’Rorke says. Achieving simplicity, however, would be complicated. Though the house is 2,800 square feet, that generous amount of space is divided between three upper stories and a basement, and each of those was subdivided into four little rooms, a claustrophobic condition intensified by a trapezoidal footprint narrowing a full 8 feet from front to back. “Out of this hodgepodge, how can we create a sense of spaciousness?” Messana and O’Rorke wondered.
Their approach was to capture as much usable square footage as possible, to rigorously limit the number of interior elements, and to extract maximum impact from the chosen interventions. After gutting and restoring the rundown structure, Messana O’Rorke was ruthless in the pursuit of optimal functionality and clarity. The house used to have two desirable fireplaces per level, but one of each pair came out to make way for the closets so essential for clothing, audio-visual equipment, and mechanical systems. Not least of all, the closets also conceal the house’s distracting diagonal sidewall. With essentially rectangular volumes now established, Messana O’Rorke left the basement, the parlour floor, and the second story largely open-dominated, respectively, by the dining room, the living room, and the master bedroom. These primary rooms are street-front. Supporting spaces, such as the kitchen, study and bathrooms, are at the narrow rear, on either side of the stair hall. The top story, by contrast, is divided into two front-to-back guest suites.
Resulting rooms appear, at first glance, to be vanilla-plain. On closer inspection, an array of details heightens one’s perception and appreciation-of the angles and surfaces that give the interior a surprisingly vital, tectonic presence.

Walls, ceilings, and floors, separated from one another by narrow coves, become discrete elements with dynamic interrelationships. In the bathrooms, rectangular sinks float inches from the walls behind, adding architectural definition and making the small spaces feel larger. When possible, Messana O’Rorke eliminated the doors to closets and fitted them with concealed vertical fluorescent bars that cast a glow into adjoining rooms. “It creates the illusion that the space goes farther back than it actually does,” Messana observes.
Such a pristine environment requires a judicious selection of materials. As a contrast to the white walls, Messana O’Rorke chose oak flooring wire-brushed and lightly limed to bring out its vivid grain, simultaneously conveying the woodworker’s craft and the rawness of nature. Elsewhere, materials deliver surprises.

White-painted doors open to reveal closets lined in tactile walnut; statuary marble in the kitchen and the master bath was chosen for the painterly quality of the veining. Furnishings, selected with the same care, acquire the authority of sculpture-the Shaker-like table in the centre of the dining room, the vintage black leather-covered swivel chairs on the hair-on hide rug in the living room, the Hans Wegner chair in the monastic master bedroom. Architectural photography and ceramic objects add to the sophisticated drama.

The residential house refurbishment taken together, express Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s suitably terse description of his visual ideal: beinahe nichts, i.e. almost nothing. Or, as Spencer Tracy said of Katharine Hepburn in Pat and Mike, “Not much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce.” Messana O’Rorke’s client certainly seems to think so. As renderings became reality, his notions of selling or renting evaporated. He kept the house for himself.

Children’s bedrooms decorating- Never again

Decorating a child’s bedroom could quite possibly be the most demanding room within the whole house, not only do you have to find a theme they are into, it is crucial to find a design that they will still like a couple of years later.

Children fall in love with television shows and funny little cartoon characters which gives you inspiration for their bedroom theme, but just a few months down the line they seem to find some other obsession, which is particularly frustrating as not only have you bought them all the figures, and cuddly toys but you have also painted their room for that particular TV show.

Painting the truth about interior design

Every culture develops distinct ways of living and homemaking in harmony with their natural environment and belief systems. Even the most humble homes have a character and beauty that’s special – and that sets them apart from similar home designs a few hundred miles away.

Know your interior design

Interior design like clothing can either fit you and your personality enough to feel comfortable or it comes up short.

Interior design style can improve quality of life in addition to work surroundings. When businesses start-up, the majority hire in an interior designer: to ensure their business is aesthetically pleasing to both employees as well as clients.

Working from home meets todays architecture

Working at home is becoming so common that people are starting to talk about something called a ‘work home’. One of the commonest types of work home is the suburban house with a shed at the bottom of the garden fitted out as an office, its perfect for the small business that needs to be flexible and limit overheads- an architectural practice for example.

But what about when clients visit? They’re not going to be overly impressed by a garden shed that limits light and space: Its needs to be made into a piece of architecture, a true demonstration of its occupants ’skills.