interior design
Participating in a major project is sometimes like watching a child grow up through various developmental stages: Good things take time! Our own involvement in one of these endurance tests started when we were called out to a 25-year-old home in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: It was being updated from a dreary, dated style to something modern and contemporary for clients who were all about luxury, five-star amenities and state-of-the-art detailing. The architect and the home builder
It all started in the years following World War II, when large parcels of undeveloped suburban land were carved into tracts in which, all too often, as many homes as possible were included to accommodate huge population influxes. In a nutshell, this is why so many of the lots in places like southern California are relatively small. We do lots of our work in these "bedroom communities," and I wish I had a nickel for every time I've been asked to shoehorn full-featured pools and spas into tiny backyards with limited access. It can be done - we at Aqua-Link Pools & Spas (Carlsbad, Calif.) frequently tackle small-yard projects - but each of them carries
How do you define artistry? That’s a highly subjective question, of course, but I’ve always thought of it as a completed work that radiates impressions of insight, effort, skill and mastery – even in seemingly ordinary applications. Breaking it down further, materials are my personal passion – how they are selected and, far more important, how they are used. Indeed, while the presence of wonderful materials alone can make their impression no matter how banal a design, when the person wielding those wonderful materials has the
It has always bothered me a bit that designers tend to restrict their thinking to just the physical area that fits the definition of their design specialty. Landscape designers stick to outdoor spaces and interior designers work on interior ones - and seldom the twain shall meet. To my way of thinking, that's shortsighted - which is just one of the reasons I'm both a landscape designer and an interior designer. I would argue that, when it is appropriate, professionals on both sides of the divide need to open their eyes and work with the visual flow through and between clients' interior and exterior spaces to achieve optimal design results. As landscape professionals, we already accept the importance of the "borrowed view," a wonderful term used to describe the deliberate capturing of other properties' assets by creating living or artificial frameworks that make them an artistic component of our clients' landscapes. If we are good at capturing neighboring views for our landscapes, I'd suggest it's a short step to make certain that we achieve the same sorts of wonderful views between the
It often happens that the way people enter a space has everything to do with the way they experience it and come to regard its overall design. This was much on my mind as we concluded our work on the Long Beach Island project I've discussed in my last few "Details." By orchestrating access and movement toward the backyard/pool area, we developed a string of transitions that lend a sense of surprise and delight to those entering a beautifully designed and constructed space that literally seems like a world apart. As discussed in previous columns, the backyard features a
