Interior Design Basics

Upcycling Furniture & Home Decor For Dummies

Whether you're redecorating one room or hiring a professional designer to revamp your entire living space, it helps you to understand the basics of interior design and what they encompass. A design is an orderly arrangement of five basic elements:

Color, the creator of illusion and maker of mood
Form, the overall shape of any object
Line, the implied direction or boundary of an object
Mass, the bulk of an object that occupies space
Texture, the touch me, feel me of matter

All artists, whether painters, sculptors, architects, or interior decorators work with these same basic elements to achieve certain effects, all of which must work together to form a unified whole.

But these five elements alone aren’t enough to generate a successful design. Five components of composition round out the list of designer’s terms:

Focal point: This is the point of visual reference to which the eye always returns — a “home base.”
Scale and proportion: Scale refers to overall size, while proportion relates the size of parts compared to the whole. Keep these two factors in mind when selecting furniture.
Harmony and unity: Harmony refers to the blending of similar elements, while unity refers to the overall sense of belonging together. This is a goal, so keep it in mind as you add each new piece of furniture or accessory.
Contrast: Contrast places opposites side by side, such as black and white or hard and soft. The challenge is to balance contrast, so as to maintain a sense of overall unity. Add contrast in small doses; be careful not to overdo it and thus upset a sense of harmony of parts and overall unity.
Variety: Variety is the spice of life and the spice of interiors. Include variety within a single room as well as within a whole-house design.

Without sufficient and distinct contrast (which can be subtle), a room can look deadly dull. If a room has too much contrast or too much variety, it looks confused. Your job as the decorator is to come up with a recipe that has just enough but never too much of the elements that make for a beautiful, functional room.

About This Article

About the book author:

Katharine Kaye McMillan, former senior editor of a New York City-based national magazine, is a writer whose work appears regularly in magazines and newspapers. She is a contributing writer to internationally circulated Florida Design Magazine. She is the co-author of several books on decorating and design, including Sun Country Style, which is the basis for licensed signature collections of furniture and accessories by three leading American manufacturers and importers. A graduate of the University of Texas in Austin, she holds a masters degree in psychology and is a doctoral student in psychology at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida.

Patricia Hart McMillan is a nationally known interior designer, whose interior design work for private clients, designer showcases, and corporations has appeared in publications worldwide, including the New York Times and USA Today. Known as a trend spotter and for clearly articulated views on design, she is quoted frequently and extensively in both trade and consumer publications. She a ppears on TV and talk radio. A prolific writer, she is coauthor and author of seven books on interior design and decoration, with Sun Country Style signature collections of furniture based on two books. She has taught decorating courses at several colleges and conducted numerous seminars across the U.S. She is decorating editor for Christian Woman Magazine and reports on design trends for The Sun-Sentinel, a Tribune newspaper based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. She has been editor-in-chief of two publications and was head of a New York City-based public relations firm representing some of the most prestigious names in home furnishing and building products. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, with a minor in art history (with an emphasis in architecture), from the State University of New York (New Paltz). She was awarded a certificate from The New York School of Interior Design.