Why These Everyday Household Items are Ruining Your Interior Design

I have heard myself repeating these things a lot lately, so it made me realize that it’s not something many people know about!

If you are choosing items for any space including your kitchen at home – keep in mind that the following items are not “neutral” or clear – they actually have a very strong presence in a room and they have a colour that you need to take into consideration.

GLASS

The thicker glass gets, the more you see the green tinge that it naturally has. On architectural projects, I will always ensure to specify low iron glass which will be more clear rather than green. If you like the green tinge, it can work beautifully on projects, but unless you take it into consideration, it could turn your pink beige bathroom tiles a dirty looking colour when you look through the glass. In architecture and interiors, its always important to know your materials and what you are working with.

ARTIFICIAL LIGHT

Artificial light has colour. This is usually referred to as the temperature of the light. Think back – can you remember that old incandescent lights used to be quite yellow, fluorescents used to appear a bit blue and cheap halogens used to appear a bit pink? The colour of the light fitting you are using in your room, will change the way your paint and all other items in the room look.
You must take into consideration the light temperature when designing your project, it might look perfect in daylight, but if you use a space mainly at night but designed it to feel right during the day you might get some tears.

Light is a huge topic and one of my favourites. If you would like to learn more about artificial light and colors my free interior design course goes more into depth about it. You can learn about it by clicking here

WHITE-GOODS, CABLES & ELECTRICAL ITEMS

As Michael Jackson once said, it doesn’t matter if they are black or white – cables, TV’s Computers, fridges, washing machines – these aren’t invisible. I wouldn’t consider designing my house around their colour unless they were literally an integral part of my scheme – so most of the time I would consider hiding them. This really needs some thought before you buy furniture and especially if you are considering colours for a kitchen or living area which could possibly have loads of electrical items clashing with your scheme.

METALS

I’m talking radiators and their copper pipes, door handles, window latches, sink and bathroom tapware, floor boxes, blind pull-chords, chair and stool legs, cupboard drawer handles, down to the back plates of electrical and light sockets. Usually, a coherent scheme will take all of these into consideration as light reflects off metal and a polished brass tap will look odd when everything else in the room is brushed stainless steel.

FLOORING

Honestly, natural timber is probably the only flooring I would classify as neutral. You can make it work with pretty much any scheme. But any other flooring will have a colour. Stone, cork, tile, concrete and resins will need to be considered as a surface – so they will need to be taken into consideration. To be honest, I think the hardest ones for people to use in a scheme is usually natural stone. This is because the variances in colour and undertones of each type can be so complex that an untrained eye will struggle to make the right colour choices for a scheme. If you are a newbie and you want something that will just work – solid or engineered timber will do the trick (not laminate that looks like timber – these end up in you need to work with the surface colour pot).

All of these things can affect the overall look of a room, so it is critical to take these into consideration if you are aiming for a very specific end result. No one likes surprises – and in design, we control as much as possible so that the surprises are nice ones, not ones that lead to expensive changes and tears.