Expanding horizons

15/10/2009 by admin.

A year on…

I cannot believe that a year has passed since I began my professional interior design course at KLC! I’ve completed 3 projects, plus a mock exam and learnt lots of the history of style.

Have just spent a week learning to use Vectorworks and I am happily say its fabulous! I’m a bit of a techie anyway, so no surprise to me really, although I still like drawing plans from scratch too. Just need someone to download some sketching skills into my brain. I think the problem is that I like things to look finished. The idea of including something I thought up on the back of a beer mat is abhorrent to me. Still, looks like I need to get over that so I can help show my thought process more clearly.

Project 4

We’ve finally been given our first live project! Very excited indeed. Basic task is to design a living area (with incorporated home office bit), kitchen, utility room and WC. Lots to get my teeth into. This all seemed great until someone pointed out that it’s only 14 weekends until Christmas (you know who you are…). Aaah. As I have a full-time job, this could be a problem…

Oh well, I have ploughed on head first into ordering gazillions of books, raiding the local market for last month’s magazines (I love you!)  and ordering brochures by the bucket load.

One potential issue that may present itself is that fact that one half of the client (the man obviously) is a minimalist. The other half is clearly not. How on earth do I satisfy both?! One not a fan of pattern, other loves some elements of crazy Scandinavian designs.

[caption id=”attachment_203″ align=”alignnone” width=”270″ caption=”Art Pillows from Design House Stockholm”][/caption]

We were lucky enough to go and survey the house in question and also speak to the structural engineer working on extending the back and side of the house (so it’s full width and continues out into the garden a little more). Little difficult to do a survey when there’s 20-odd people in the way, but I think we got there in the end. 

As I started to order books to help with the concept stage of the design process, I suddenly remembered that I was member of the Shoe Lane Library close to my work. Turns out you can reserve books online, and if they haven’t got them, they’ll transport them from another library in their group. i.e. Shoe Lane is part of the City of London libraries and therefore has access to all their library catalogues. Plus, Kent libraries do exactly the same! Something tells me I’ve been missing out for years and could’ve saved myself loads of money. Some of the books were actually published in 2009 too, so they’re not all dusty 1970s nightmares either.

Speaking of vintage, the female half of the client loves 50s/60s Danish design. At last something we agree on! Will be interesting to see how it all turns out…

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