Interior Design: How important is the Furniture you choose?

Classic debates on interior design have largely been upended by the recent trends such as modern furniture, post modern interior design, zen, and deconstructivism. Engineering and material science have allowed for unique furniture design and shapes challenging the conventional and unlocking an entirely new wave of possibilities in the furniture and interior design landscape.

This article focuses on the role that furniture plays in improving your home and how this can be achieved.

Furniture brings the functionality to any space and aesthetic. It creates a fixed structure in any space and formulates specific purposes in the minds of the users of that space, not only guiding but sometimes assisting the users. Imagine a bare room with fancy moulded plasters for skirting and posh looking flooring. Yet with no furniture inside the room is but a shell of a space with nothing much that can be done inside.

Thus what is the balance between form and function that any piece of furniture must take? From the times of Plato there has been significance given to a bed and table: a place for man to rest, and a place for man to work. Furniture must be purpose driven, whether it is something like a bookshelf or a bean bag.

Now coming to texture, colour and materials, the designers choice could sometimes reflect the locality, dimensions and nature of the space itself. However, natural constrains aside the choices should rather reflect the inhabitants and take into consideration other factors such as sustainability, longevity and usability.

Lastly we come to positioning of the furniture. Open layouts have a certain allure but where space constraint is the decisive factor, there is a lot of thoughtful and ingenuity that can go into multi- functional furniture like collapsible beds and tables, cabinets that double up as surfaces or even entirely adjustable furniture that is designed as if it were modules of a Rubik’s cube.