Your professional interior design team may be making magic inside your business or home site, but they are also keeping an eye on perceptions from the outside looking in.
An important part of your interior design project involves the external setting, the condition of the outside environment, the configurations of the landscaping, and the neighborhood in general. Inside and outside should be comparable — and compatible.
Whether or not your facility has large windows revealing the interior, what’s outside influences the expectations of those entering. That reality can present some significant challenges, especially if the neighborhood is “in transition” with renovation and restoration underway. The facility may be a tired niche of the community (business or residential) that is waking up to conversion, refreshment, and cleanup.
It is important to know where the activity is leading. You may find your project to be the flagship of the transition; or, you may be somewhere in the middle of the process. Whichever it is, your professional team will research the direction and be sure that your project is in tune with the movement. It can be risky, in an evolving business district, to misread what appropriately “fits.”
Part of the investment you make in such areas is the leap of faith concerning the progress and the follow-through timelines. Your design team must consider all factors to provide relevant guidance for your decisions. To receive their market share of the local economy a business needs to both challenge and harmonize. Your product or service alone is just one piece of the challenge.
During your early planning, your design team brings important insights to the table. They will consider it basic to be knowledgeable concerning the immediate vicinity, its trends, its potential, its architecture and its style. Understanding what the general plan is for your location helps interior design professionals to anticipate factors that may have a bearing on your project. Some of the advice and guidance you should expect and receive will concern those insights.
Unfortunately, there are many examples of “misfit” facilities, inappropriately designed for their locations. There are overly ambitious projects that are light years ahead of what the local traffic can bear. There are still others that fall just far enough behind the contemporary trends that they are off-putting and no longer inviting.
Design trends — colors, styles, etc. — are wide-ranging patterns and distinctions that your design team has been watching months in advance throughout the industry. They know what’s happening. They can help you fit those insights into your project vision, and boost your competitive advantage.
“Outside looking in” is a perspective that is right on point to linking your design project results to your marketing success. Both aspects (interior and exterior) must enhance each other through linked treatment of grounds and interiors.
Your commercial interior design team has a network of relevant resources that can cooperatively coordinate the important linkage between your interior project and its exterior coordinates. Outside invites, and is the important preface to your interior environment.
Robert Boccabella, B.F.A. is principal and founder of Business Design Services and a certified interior designer 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.
