From the Floors Up

Understanding Masculine and Feminine Design

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Designing your space can have many outlets and options to help to tailor your home to your style.  Generally, homes are designed neutral or genderless to help with resell value; however, your home is a personal escape and designing it to your needs comes first.  If you are looking to make a man cave or a female hangout area, there are several ways to go about it.  To help, we broke down some great options to incorporate in your own home to help design these spaces.  

Masculine Design

While both masculine and feminine designs generally accept many of these options, certain elements and colors are traditionally used in masculine design.  Leather sofas and chairs are great additions to help create your man cave.  Colors like blues, browns, and blacks can be affiliated with masculine characteristics. Darker palettes are also typically used. You can give homage to rough or distressed look with natural elements like stones, woods, even metals.  Masculine design can also be associated with geometrical patterns.  Whether used on curtains, paintings, or decor, geometrical patterns are great for forming the space.

Feminine Design

Colors and shades can typically alter a room’s feel.  Lighter shades and pastel tones can be associated with feminine characteristics.  Pinks, whites, and creamy greys can influence a space to feel more feminine. Where hard lines and geometrical patterns flourish in masculine design, soft curvy furniture can be appreciated in a feminine style designed space.  Consider floral and damasks patterns in your feminine themed spaces.  Feminine design can also appreciate good artwork with meaning and portraying an image rather than just shapes. 

Harmony

While both feminine and masculine design can appreciate each other’s styles and no element is distinguished particularly for one over the other, some of these elements can help enhance a style.  Try using these in your own home or mixing and matching to create balance. Both features can help the balance of the other to create a stunning space. Limiting your space to gender-specific décor can hurt your atmosphere.

Allow both designs can be used to help one another. While both masculine and feminine can enjoy both design styles, it can be most beneficial to mix and match. Masculine and Feminine design styles are slowly fading away as we move along in Modern Era. Incorporating both to your space can be truly beneficial.

Color Pallet: Ice Pastels – Cool Candy Pink, Lavender, Deep Blue Violet, Light Gray, Icy Iris

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Are you looking to create a room that evokes softness and femininity? Look no further than the photo below. While it’s often tempting to refer to the pages of a magazine or an online website to find an room you like and copy the design, you can often have better luck with decorating if you think outside of those sources.

Using a photo that you find beautiful is a great way to generate creative ideas for décor, even if the photo isn’t of an interior space. It requires a lot more imagination of course, but isn’t that the fun of home design? You don’t have to go it alone though. We make it easy by giving you easy reference points based on this photograph. Read on to learn how this image of winter’s wonderful pastels can be translated to a lovely space.

If you’re a newbie in the world of self-guided home design, this will make learning this inspirational technique a breeze! Just read the bullet points and extract what works best for your personal vision. Or go for it, and follow it all the way!

 

The color pallet: Cool Candy Pink, Lavender, Deep Blue Violet, Light Gray, Icy Iris

 

What makes the color scheme work?

  • All of the tones are light, cool and icy
  • It’s an analogous color scheme, which means that the pink, purple and blue are next to each other on the color wheel. This is the most harmonious color scheme on the color wheel.
  • The only neutral base is the color white, which allows the pastel tones to read crisp and clear.

What is the tone and vibe of a room with this color scheme?

 

  • Soft focus, nothing stark or garish
  • Soothing and peaceful
  • Quiet and reserved
  • Elegant and refined
  • Feminine
  •  

What rooms might be well suited to this color scheme?

  • Nursery
  • Powder room
  • Bedroom
  • Rooms with a shabby chic aesthetic

What sort of furnishings would work well?

  • Distressed wood painted white
  • Mirrored surfaces
  • Metallic surfaces
  • Floral arrangements
  • Sheer curtains
  • Fuzzy rugs
  • Cashmere throws

Room Design Inspiration: Butterfly Love – Mountain Cabin

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If you are searching for a way to design a room but you can’t seem to dream up anything exciting, you’ve possibly hit a creative block. The most likely culprit for your lack of inspiration is that you’ve run out of magazines and websites to search for ideas. Time to change it up! Instead, try decorating a room inspired by something other than a photo of a room. For our example we are going to reference the artwork below. We will use the image of the butterflies in the shape of a heart on a natural stone background to help guide the way we would design a room. Just follow our bullet point list to learn how this method works.

 

The color pallet: Sky Blue, Butter Yellow, Carnation Pink, Mahogany Brown, Kelly Green, Light Purple, Taupe

What vibe or central aesthetic is suggested by the artwork?

 

  • It’s an excellent reference for a space in which you want to create a sense of nature (especially woodland themes,) color, vibrancy, and femininity.

 

What spaces might it be well suited to?

 

  • This design idea is quite versatile because it would work well in many spaces. We especially like it for: bedroom, living room, den, or bathroom. It could also translate well into various climates and surrounding eco-systems, but we think it’s a great match for mountain homes, cabins, urban areas surrounded by the outdoors (such as Colorado) and even beach abodes.

 

What makes the colors work well together?

  • They are all medium to dark saturation which means none of them are near the lighter part of the color spectrum. Because the tones have similar vibrancy they have equal presence. Meaning, no one color dominates despite the fact that they’re all rather bold. 
  • The neutral browns serve as an excellent grounding color so that the various colors don’t look out of control or disorganized.  The browns are also very earthy colors, rather than designer synthetic hues, and this lends well to the theme of nature.

What finishes or textures would we suggest?

  • Brown wood – mix and match colors and species; floors, ceiling beams, furniture
  • Linen textiles – ex. curtains, table cloth
  • Hard surfaces – natural or traditional; stone tiles, concrete, granite, ceramic pots
  • Cashmere or cotton throws, brown leather furniture, textured throw pillows in various colors

What accessories would we suggest

 

  • Decorative balls in natural textures and stone
  • Butterfly and entomology artwork
  • Netted items
  • Plants and trees – indoor species or artificial

Take a Moment to Stop and Look

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22231427We can learn a lot about this particular scene from this photo. You can tell the street and buildings have been there for a long time, and are still regularly utilized. It’s also easy to appreciate how lovely the view is through the archway. For the people who live here, however, they probably just walk through without noticing the details.

How many times do you walk through your own doorways without looking? Let’s get inspiration from this photo to make sure we’re paying attention to the views our home provides.

First, notice the focal point of this photo – the doorway at the end of the street. Everything in this photo pulls us toward that door. The street, the sidewalks and the building lead our eyes to the back. In the same way, your flooring can draw the eye into a room, particularly when tile or wood provides a line for the eye to follow. Be sure the room has something worth looking at, a focal point.  It could be a piece of art or a fireplace.

Another reason this photo is inviting comes from the contrasts. A white building, a dark door with all of the shadows and textures along the way come to life as your eye ventures down the street. Are your rooms designed to be interesting to people as they walk in?  Consider having contrasting colors to give your room more character.

We may not have the cobble stone streets and old world buildings to garner attention, but our homes can take inspiration from this photo. If you pause in your own archways or doorways, you will see what kind of view your home provides.  We sometimes forget to stop and take a good look at our surroundings. Even the smallest details can make a big difference in your room’s appearance.

Make the Most of a Hallway

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People tend to treat a hallway as just the path from one room to another. There may be a picture or two, maybe a small mirror, but that’s it.

This hall is a definite exception. The modern track lighting has lights set to highlight the artwork and a selection of furniture chosen to work in this narrow space.

Let’s take a look at the other things that make this hallway out of the ordinary. Continuing the wood floors that show in other rooms through the hall keeps the space connected. Consistent flooring is one effective way to make the hall feel wider by linking it to the larger spaces on either side of it.

The molding that surrounds the home’s doors and openings give this space an architectural presence. Halls generally have little or no architectural detail, so this element – although once again related to the rooms surrounding it – makes the hall feel more important. The tall baseboards that run down the hall also help keep everything integrated.

This hall is furnished with the same thought that normally goes into a room. The bench by the outside door is positioned to hold yard tools or sit and take shoes off as the photo shows. Further down the hall, a wooden chair and narrow table provides an inviting place to pause. The table is narrow, but still holds accessories.

Are your hallways living up their full potential? How about borrowing some ideas from this hallway to add charm and interest to this narrow but appealing part of your home?

From the Floors Up

From the Floors Up blog was created with the goal of providing a destination for consumers, designers and those interested in the flooring, design, and kitchen and bath industries. Here you’ll find, current, accurate and informative information that is always just a click away!

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