The View From Here

This week I thought it would be fun to talk about how the rooms in your house relate to one another. How does your house feel to you?  Does the flow between rooms seem seamless? Or do you feel like there are small, halting spaces that are disjointed and closed off from one another? When creating spaces in your home, it is important to remember that no room ever acts alone, but interacts and converses with the other areas around it. And what kind of dialog they have has a huge impact on how your house feels to you and everybody else.

For example, doorways can act as a kind of picture frame that creates a composition out of the view to an adjacent room...

This is important, since creating little vignettes inside of this "picture frame" makes you want to see what is around the corner.  It  invites you into the next room with its charm and sense of balance.

A small house can feel much larger if you create long interior sight lines, especially from the corner of one room to the adjacent room's far corner--a long diagonal line across the interior box of the house. Nothing has changed in the dimensions of the space, but your perception of the amount of space that there is, is very, very different. This is something that can be created by widening doorways, or opening portions of walls for interior "windows." Certainly this is more involved than just moving a few pieces of furniture, but if you are frustrated by what feels like a cramped abode, then this option is far less expensive than adding on. 

In addition, site lines that sweep through rooms and terminate with exterior views enhance the feeling of openness.

Your eye is tricked--with nothing to stop it--into including that outside space as somehow part of the interior.

Finally, having a unified palette of colors pulls things together in visual harmony and space perception. Rooms that relate closely to each other in color (rather than being great in contrast) can feel as though they are borrowing space from one another since they flow so well together.

Creating a cohesive whole out of disjointed rooms can completely change one's perception of a house, and greatly increase your feeling of satisfaction in living there. What could be better than that??

These beautiful interior photos and their sources can be found here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5