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.

Guest House in the Treetops

When you think of home design that’s "rustic," you may think of rough-hewn log cabins furnished with heavy, dark bookcases and uncomfortable plaid sofas that exhale a puff of dust when you sit down.

But the term “rustic” encompasses several different looks. Yes, you can have a log-cabin and furniture made of tree branches (some of which we like very much indeed) but to give a feeling of rustic country coziness, you don’t have to give up cheerful, bright design that not only harmonizes but sings.

For this issue’s Room of the Month, we traveled to the Howard Street Guest House run by Andrea Gray in Burlington, Vermont, to take a look at how she’s created one of two guest suites in the converted garage on her property. The upstairs room has a more rustic feeling than the room on the first level, which we’ll feature in a future issue of Designer Monthly.

Analyzing it with the Sheffield Guidelines to Interior Design--- function, mood, and harmony---we see that this guest room has to function the way a studio apartment does. As one big, spacious room, it functions as bedroom, kitchen, and living room all at once, and yet doesn’t feel cramped or over-taxed.

Because it’s in a guest house, the room has to be easy to use. The people who stay here will be traveling; they’ve just flown in for a weekend of sight-seeing in Vermont, and they’ll be busy going apple-picking, or skiing, or boating on Lake Champlain. So when they come back to the guest house, they’ll want to kick off their muddy shoes and sprawl out.

The living area serves this function perfectly, inviting a guest to relax on the sofa, which is backed by a sofa table holding a reading lamp, or sit in the easy chair, which is flanked by a small table also holding a lamp. The kitchenette faces the dining table with its four chairs, so that it’s easy to cook up and serve a lunch before heading out again.

The mood here is definitely rustic. The slanted ceilings give the basis for the rustic mood of the room, and the bead board cabinets in the kitchen and bath, the patterned rugs, the striped sofa, and the wooden tables all contribute to this mood. But the look isn’t overdone; there are also elegant touches, like the mattelasse bedspread and the moss-green kitchen counter top, which keep the room charmingly old-fashioned without being stuffy.

This room also has a mood of bright cheeriness, created in large measure by the sky lights and the many windows. One of the biggest challenges in creating a room from an attic space is providing enough natural light, and here, that challenge is met head-on. In addition to the big skylights that seem to pull the sunlight in, three of the walls have windows, making the room bright even on dark days of November.

The cheery mood is enhanced by the use of color. The four dining chairs, each painted in a different pastel, the pale yellow walls in the living area, and the green in the bed and bath all work together to enhance the sunny mood.

One of the biggest problems faced by a designer working with a room that has to serve multiple purposes is that you want to create harmony, and yet you also want to find a way of marking each functional space as slightly separate from the other spaces.

Much of the harmony is achieved here with color. We find the common thread of green throughout the room, in the kitchen counter, the area rugs, the lamp shades, the upholstery, and in to the bedroom and bath.

However, if you look closely, you’ll see that those greens are each a little different from one other, and so they work also to mark the different areas of the room. The kitchen has the moss-green counter, the bath has a brighter, almost Kelly green tile trim. The green of the bedroom area is a pale sage.

Painting the single wall of the bedroom area green and the other walls pale yellow, goes a long way to making this room feel more spacious; you get the sense that the bedroom area really is separate, and yet the tone of the green wall and the tone of the yellow walls blend perfectly.

The use of color, light, and furnishings here creates a space that’s welcoming, relaxing, and homey without sacrificing up- to-date style: and that’s the best of rustic design.

Resources:

Howard Street Guest House

— Sarah Van Arsdale

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