The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Interior Decorating
Scheme Of Decorating - Style And Design
THE styles and designs which you choose for the interior decoration of your home are personal matters, and this is only intended to be regarded as a general guide to advise and explain a few of the basic principles of colour and design. To be completely sensible, the interior decoration of the house should produce the overall effect of "home". The decorator should appreciate that it is not a theatre or a shop window that is being designed, but a home, and whether the selection is simple or ornate, contemporary or period, it should be the one most suitable for the house and the people living in that house.
It is a mistake to closely follow schemes or styles and designs built up by professional interior decorators, and the amateur should endeavour to take the best ideas from simple schemes and blend them into a complete scheme of deco-ration that pleases all the members of the family.
The decoration of a room can be modern in style or it can be a definite period. The decorative scheme may also be a mixture of period and modern styles and most people find that this combination type of setting suits them best. Very few people start from scratch when furnishing or decorating a home, and one of the factors to be considered when decorating a room is the effect of grouping the furniture into a harmonious whole and making a completeness by the addition of colour and pattern on walls, windows, floors and ceilings.
When thinking in terms of colour for interior decorating the chief consideration must be the lighting of that particular room, as colour is wholly dependent on light and it has no existence without light. The colours may broadly be divided in the receding and advancing groups. Those colours classed as receding can make a room appear to be larger than it is, whilst those colours in the advancing group would tend to make a room appear smaller if they are properly used. Generally speaking, colours with a predomination of green or blue in them may be regarded as receding colours whilst those containing red and yellow, also orange or purple, may be thought of as advancing colours. To give an illustration explaining this point, the use of pale blue for the ceiling of the room would make it appear higher than it really is. Alternatively, the use of pale pink for decorating the ceiling of a room will tend to make the ceiling look lower than it really is. Thus, rooms which have ceilings that arc considered too high or too low may be changed in this simple way. Brown as a colourcan belong to either of the two groups of colour, depending on the amount of red in the make-up of the brown.
