Isn’t it a blessing to live in the 21st century? 20 or so years ago you’d have been left with nothing more than a couple of magazines and a re-run of Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen’s Changing Rooms to help you decorate your home. Now, thankfully, all that has changed.
For the aesthetically minded, the idea of decorating a home can bring a sense of excitement about a space yet to be created and of unlimited options, from textures and colours, to flooring, curtains and all those lovely cushions! For those of us without such a visually creative bent, it brings a seemingly impossible array of questions that we are hopelessly unequipped to answer. Does that mauve rug go with the natural oak floor? Should we have a statement wall? What actually is a statement wall?
Here to help you out of a tight hole are 3 of the latest interior design tools that can give even the most colour blind lost cause the design inspiration they need.
- Find Your Dream Floor
Let’s work from the bottom up. Choosing flooring can be tricky, and a flooring sample laid on the floor is unlikely to give you a real sense of how the whole room is actually going to look. A flooring company called Quick-Step have gone to the trouble of creating an app, called ‘Find Your Dream Floor’ that lets you upload a picture of your room, and ‘try on’ a whole a range of different flooring options until you find something you like.
Of course, the floors you can try are those sold by Quick-Step, but with everything from laminate and timber, to classic and contemporary, there’s sure to be something you like. You can then go off and find the best priced flooring product elsewhere.
- The Cushion Arranger
You may think this is small fry, but for those without an eye for interior design, finding the right accessories to finish off a room can be like pulling teeth. How do you know which size lamp to buy? Or whether you need a statement piece in that empty space in the corner? Ironically, one of the biggest headaches is caused by the softest accessory of them all: cushions!
Thankfully, the furniture and accessories firm Oka, have kindly put together a cushion arranger tool to help you find your perfect cushion combination. You start with a completely naked sofa, and are given hundreds of cushion options, all sold by the retailer, to create your dream cushion combination. You can rotate the cushions, place them where you like, and then add your favourites to your basket. It’s cushion shopping, but not as you know it.
- Planner 5D – Virtual Reality
If you’re going to the trouble of decoratingyour home then you’ll want to get it right. Planner 5D is just about the best app out there at the moment for designing your room, apartment or even entire home completely from scratch.
With this app you can do everything from setting the exact floor plan and choosing furniture from integrated, constantly updated catalogues. You can see the design you have created in 2D and 3D, play around with colours and materials, and then print the whole thing out so you can traipse into your local interior design store, hand them the printout and say: “I want this one please.”
What are the best interior design tools you have used? Please leave your recommendations in the comments section below.