You are putting your Interior Design team together, and are ready to begin your Interior design project. Perhaps it’s a long-anticipated residential remodel or the build-out for a new home on that beautiful lot you purchased! Or, your project may be commercial space for a new retail business, professional services facility or a corporate complex.
Whatever your project, think of it as a series of layered accomplishments! Anyone knows how a new construction happens — kids like to line up and watch everything from the sub-excavation right up to the roofing. From foundation to rooftop Solar panels, layer-by-layer, it happens!
When it comes to the Interior design aspect, there is more in the strategies than might immediately be apparent. Your Interior designer works with a very specialized team — each player is key to the integrity of a specific layer of application. Remember the school days jingle about the head bone being connected to the neck bone, and down the whole skeleton? Same principle here!
Your construction team has installed and coordinated all the functional systems for electrical, plumbing, AC and possibly Solar; and then, neatly packaged it all behind the sheetrock, wood paneling or other wall closure. (… layers!)
As the external, Interior bases are laid — wall treatment, flooring, ceiling, lighting, etc. — the scene is being set for furnishings, equipment, surface utilities and amenities. More layers.
The finishing touches — the stuff on top — in some ways are the most important specialties! After all, when family, friends, customers or clients are in your newly designed Interior, it’s that top layer that wins the heart and mind — and speaks your message! (It would be a rare observer who comments on what’s behind the sheetrock or on the roof!)
Among the specialists that assist your Interior design team with the stuff on top, are professional merchandizers for retail and other business environments. Very likely you work directly with your Interior designer for your residential finishing accessories and appointments. As with the other specialists working on your Interior design project — large or small, refresh or brand new — those end choices must also cooperate and coordinate with your overall theme, concept and vision.
On that last layer of the installation — the “stuff” on top — everything from lighting impacts to complementary colors come into play. Your Interior design team should have that top layer in mind way at the beginning when the team is looking at the big picture. It seldom works when the left hand does not know what the right is doing!
Businesses: first impressions do count! Aunt Jean’s antique re-wired kerosene lamp table light might be great in the man cave — but would take a design nick out of your upscale business reception area. And that home decór scheme? Don’t inadvertently ruin your basic beautiful choices with hit-or-miss accessories!
Layers — the stuff on top? It’s everything you place on surfaces when all the principal elements are complete and installed. It counts!
Robert Boccabella, B.F.A. is principal and founder of Business Design Services and a certified interior designer (CID) in private practice for over 30 years. Boccabella provides Designing to Fit the Vision© in collaboration with writingservice@earthlink.net. To contact him call 707-263-7073; email him at rb@BusinessDesignServices.com or visit www.BusinessDesignServices.com or on Face Book at Business Design Services.
