How to achieve seasonal looks for home?

The beauty about interiors design is that it is fluid and can morph with dashes of cosmetic changes where you need not get into expensive and cumbersome alterations. Infuse seasonal looks for home into your interiors colours of Spring-Summer, which lean towards cooling pastels like rose, alabaster, monsoon greys, ash, pale distressed tangerine and blue quartz. Ombre shading for walls is a new and fresh expression, which accentuates the soft and dusty colour palette.

Textures, water bodies with the illusion of depth, distressed feel finishes, weathered patinas for wall finishes, salvaged wood, railway-line woods for floorings, reclaimed metals, discarded looking, ravaged and ageing finishes on artefacts, the entire look is a Miss Havisham windswept cool! This when used sparingly with customised furniture, pastel pale colours, dramatic lighting intertwined with a light air and openness of nature gives the interiors a very cool trendy but comforting, welcoming and low maintenance feel.

WATER & ICE THEME

Ring in the cool ambience with accents of ice and water, breezes and seas like see-through light furniture, and sheer drapes and accessories that omit the heavy feel. Rotate paintings that are blues in all their shades, cool greens and pristine whites.

Basic sofa upholsteries could be neutral offwhites, stonewashed beiges, pastel washed-out blues, bleached greys these lend themselves to adornment with aqua, pale teal, grey blue accents and throws. A single wall could be a washed out aqua or a mystical violet, and the drapes a flowing rose or ivory.

The lighting effects of Winter work for Summer too, indirect diffused lighting is always soothing. Lots of natural light and air augment the feeling of summer cool.

DECLUTTER & OPEN UP SPACE

The best Summer antidote is a minimalistic sense of design. Space suggests the opposite of cosiness, so re-arrange furniture to give more floor space. Furs and too many floating table lamps could be put away. Avoid clutter or fuss. It is advisable to minimise the use of the plethora of cushions that give Winter such ‘comfort’ because Summers work on the ‘less is more’ formula. Wallpaper treatments would be more with Summer garden themes of flowers in cool colours with dragonflies or butterflies that is all the vogue in the fashion scene too. We do know that interior design and fashion borrow and follow similar drifts in their trend palettes. In the really hot Summers of the north and central India, verandahs are shaded with vetiver screens that cool the air and lend a pleasant fragrance to the surroundings.

Now is the time to bring in a mix of your favourite potted green foliage and ferns an immediate coolant to the look.

NATURAL SUMMERS

Eco-friendly and natural intertwined with a design language that is relaxed and free-spirited is the growing trend. With linens on walls, ageing patina for furniture and a general outdoor guise to interiors on the whole the entire focus in on being sensitive to the environment and taking the best nature has to offer. The look and feel is one that offers leisure. Like sitting outside while being in the cool comfort of an interior. This is accentuated with the use of mostly organic materials in design and trying to be sustainable when designing well, for a trendy, nature driven Summer interior. Avoid artificial synthetic fabrics to augment this look.

Once a beginning is made with some of these suggestions your own creative gene kicks in and ideas take over! You’ve got yourself the Summer haven at home.

WINTER TRANSFORMATIONS

Winter is all about intimate and warm compositions.

While it is not necessary to change the colour of your walls keep them a neutral colour. Choose one or two walls in the common living spaces halls, drawing rooms, passages with vivid rust, chrome, ochre, chrome or sunshine. With this as the thematic note, make use of colours from this warm palette and splash some pizazz onto your upholsteries, drapes, counterpane, kilims in proportioned measures.

The most versatile gambit for this Summer-Winter transition is to retain neutral coloured sofas and other major upholstery pieces in ivory, beige, off-white, even dun, or sheer whites. In Winters smother these with vivid warm throws, cushions, accents of pendulum lamps in graded heights in a multiplicity of clarets, burgundys, vivid teals, aubergines, chartreuse in weaves and mirror embroideries or even in the sheer beauty of vivid textured woven block colours. Just the bright perkiness and newness of the fabric is sure to delight and warm the cockles of your heart.

LIGHTING

Winters need lights a right well-lit interior and the dreariness of Winter vanishes. An effective transformation is easily found with oversized organic large lighting lamps that are more like sculptural installations. They augment the warmth of the interiors and brighten up the darkness of the Winters especially in the north. The paucity of daylight in the Winter is then unmissed and replaced with exciting light islands suspended on the ceiling creating wide pools of luminous optimism in your interior.

Large oversized fur toys are not only restricted to your child’s nursery. A long fur polar bear gives the effect of merriment and warmth upon a sofa as a warm comforting back and neck rest when rested diagonally upon the sofa. A long lifesize tortoiseshell cat will surprise you with its endearing warmth.

In my home, I have furry faux skins that I throw on chosen areas of the floor and seating. They come in beautiful natural simulations in greys, off-whites, chocolate and charcoal. There are also simulated leopard or tiger skins. Splurge on these accessories and you’ve got yourself a statement interior. Just roll them up and put most of them in a loft till the next season.

The bedrooms can use your stylish blankets in visible decor. Moody shades of eiderdowns, throws, bold counterpanes, and again for the pillows and cushions warm deep bold tones. Not too busy or overwhelming but chic, warm, welcoming.

Framed pictures, coloured prints or your valued paintings in the darker hues which you kept away for the Summer can be re-arranged for a brighter visibility in the Winter.

An easy Winter transformation to the corridor would be a glorious bold wallpaper on a single wall in deeper renaissance colours of deep emeralds and claret. Use all or any of these tried gambits. A hand-painted kitsch trunk art piece becomes a bright, cheerful Spring-Summer conversation piece in your corridor. A single brushstroke of optimism is to buy the best simulated tropical flowers or plants you can get, amazingly real ones or in your face funky designer ones for this corridor or foyer and lo and behold your entrance gives a welcoming warm even tropical paradise feeling, a haven from the bleak scene outside.

Take one wall and create an abstract DIY ‘painting’ in a more ‘lazy’ forgotten space of the home. This can be a most simplistic DIY endeavour. Take a sponge, wear rubber gloves, dip the sponge in paint, squeeze to get streaky freehand whorls beginning from ceiling downwards (the drips if any will merge in the whorls as you paint down). Do not stop to get self-critical. Finish it determinedly. What emerges is a modernistic abstract 'painting' of a wall!

Carpets are a good idea in cold climes. Roll them out to bring in the feeling of snug luxury. Prized carpets are all weather show pieces. Wall to-wall carpets in neutral greys, beiges,teals or ash rose lend to a variety of changeable kaleidoscopes of upholstery, curtains cushions but also allow for that subliminal atmosphere of relaxation in the look and appearance of the space.