Room of the Month

At Sheffield we teach our students a simple Three-Step Method for designing every room they create:

1. A successful room is functional.
2. A successful room expresses a mood.
3. A successful room exhibits a sense of harmony.

This simple Three-Step Method is the secret of every interior ever designed. We teach our interior design students to consider these three steps every time they look at a room. You'll find the great home decorating ideas in our Room of the Month series as well as in the design tips on this site helpful in creating outstanding room designs.

When our students mail in their interior design project for analysis by their instructor, the instructor starts by commenting on these three Guidelines. Of course, the instructor analyzes other elements of the project too – decor, layout, furniture, style etc. But the key to good decor – and the essential element of every great interior design – is adherence to these three Sheffield Guidelines.

How do they work? How can you apply them? It's beyond the scope of this Web site to teach you every nuance, but you will get an inkling from the Room of the Month Analysis that follows.

Halo Air Salt Rooms

For this special issue of Designer Monthly on The Ocean Blue, we’ll look at a special kind of room: a salt room. New York City’s first salt room opened in February, and we thought this would be a terrific room to look at for our beach issue.

What is a salt room? It’s exactly what it sounds like: a room in which nearly all surfaces are covered with salt. It’s touted as being excellent for respiratory problems, restoring the natural glow of skin, and general well-being.

I was skeptical: a room filled with salt is going to make me feel better? Other than the stiff neck and general weariness I had from the stress of living in New York City I had no particular health problems. I was more interested in the room from a design point of view, but also, I’m game—tell me a salt room is the latest thing, and that people with chronic pulmonary problems swear by it and I’ll give it a shot.

The entrance to the Halo Air Salt Rooms on West 22nd Street exudes relaxation, much in the way the waiting area for an acupuncturist or masseuse does. It’s all very simple, with white furniture and a glass coffee table.

Inside, the room itself is a paragon of simplicity. I went into the double room, which is furnished only with two white chaises, with a flat-screen television built into one wall. The walls and ceiling are covered with great, chunky salt, and the floor is covered with granulated salt.

From a small vent on one wall, salted air is pumped into the room while it’s occupied.

I thought this would be a terrific room to look at for our Room of the Month feature for this issue on The Ocean Blue—you can’t get closer to the ocean without actually being in it.

Looking at the function of this room, it’s apparent that its function is relaxation. The absence of any but the most essential furniture speaks to that.

The mood is one of peaceful calm. The all-white walls, ceiling, and floor, imbue the room with a sense of calm and relaxation.

In terms of harmony, it’s hard to find anything that doesn’t go with this room’s décor—the choice of the sleek white chaises seemed particularly apt.

We also took a look at this children’s playroom, used by little ones who have asthma or other respiratory problems. While it’s recommended that adults take the salt room cure in one-hour doses, for children a half-hour is recommended.

The function of the playroom is clearly to get and keep kids’ attention so they’ll see the experience as more of a treat than a treatment. Everything is on a child’s scale: miniature table, chairs, and even a mini-sofa.

The mood here is more playful than relaxing, with the bright colors and almost cartoonish shapes of the furniture.

Everything harmonizes here, too, in the style of playroom furniture.

After my session in the salt room, I spoke with Ron Rofe, the owner and manager of Halo Air. He told me that while it may be new in the U.S., salt rooms have a distinguished history in eastern and central Europe.

In the 1840s a Polish physician noticed that miners working in the salt caves had fewer respiratory problems, and the trend began—soon people with respiratory ailments were flocking to the caves, set some 300 meters down into the earth and furnished like 19th-century living rooms.

The salted air in the Halo Air salt rooms mimics the microclimate found in the salt caves, as it’s mixed with the right proportions of humidity and atomized salt particles. The atomized salt absorbs mucus, bacteria and pollution, Rofe said. The air is also rich in negative ions. (Negative ions are said to boost your mood.)

Rofe started his business in Israel, and now has eight such salt rooms in the U.S., and is planning on expanding with more. He brought in six tons of salt from Ukraine in order to fashion the rooms in New York, which were designed by Studio Drawer.

The frames of the furniture are made of corrosion-proof stainless steel, but otherwise nothing special is done with the furniture to make it suitable for the salt room.

I’m not a doctor so I can’t vouch for the medical benefits of the salt room—maybe the benefits I did feel came from sitting in a peaceful room for an hour on a busy weekday afternoon. But maybe it was the salt air: the morning after my session, I awoke feeling more refreshed and relaxed than I have in a long time, breathing more deeply, and indeed, my skin was clear and renewed. I even wondered when I might be able to go back for another session…

— Sarah Van Arsdale

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