Harmony Between You and Your Space
Your space is your safe haven, and to feel comfortable in it, creating visual harmony in your home is crucial. A harmonious home allows for positive and peaceful energy to flow within, giving you a sense of serenity and calmness. And this article will inform you about all the ways you can balance your surroundings.
We’ll cover the fundamental design principles, proper management of the energy in the room, lighting, biophilic design, and much more.
Without further ado, let’s see how you can design the space of your dreams.
Managing Energy of the Space via Design to Make You Feel Comfortable
Creating a harmonious design for your space requires you to consider multiple aspects so that all the elements in the space complement themselves.
The Current State of Your Space
Before you start working on your space, evaluate it. Based on the area you have at your disposal, you can choose specific elements that will enrich the space in both function and aesthetics. Be mindful that in smaller spaces, you'll need extra creativity to achieve balance and harmony.
Harmonious Lighting
Lighting is one of the key parts of creating a harmonious space. The first goal toward harmonious lighting in your space is to have enough natural light.
Furthermore, you need to focus on the type of light that makes you feel comfortable. Strong artificial light isn’t good for achieving a warm and cozy atmosphere, but it’s essential for some tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, and so on. When you have a general idea about the mood you want to create in your space, you’re one step closer to finding the right lighting to create that mood.
Avoid Overcrowding and Make Sure Most Items Have a Purpose
One of the most important aspects of creating harmony is balancing the emptiness and the elements in the space. Finding this balance between having enough elements for you to function in your space without it feeling crowded and cluttered is key to creating the space of your dreams.
To achieve this, be very strict and picky about the items you choose to add to a room and make sure that every item serves a purpose.
Balance of Objects and Inclusion of Negative Spaces
Just as it’s important to evaluate what to include in your space and what not to include, it’s also important to harmoniously distribute the objects throughout the room. The balance of elements in a space is extremely important, not only in terms of empty vs. full, but also in terms of combining contrasting shapes, colors, textures, and materials.
The contrast makes a space more interesting, for example, light vs. dark, rough vs. smooth, colorful vs. monochrome, and so on. So, if you properly manage the empty areas as well as balance, combine, and use contrast while designing, you’re bound to create a space that you enjoy spending time in.
And last but not least, know when to leave “negative” or “empty” space in a room that doesn't have as many design elements and decorations. Don’t be afraid of empty spaces because they can add lightness and airiness to a room that would be chaotic without them.
Textures, Color, Variety
We talked about the importance of textures in the previous paragraph, but we need to emphasize this once more as it’s essential for creating a harmonious space. Combine different patterns, different fabric textiles, and different materials to give your home both personality and style.
The well-planned mix between similar features and materials with the addition of a different color or texture creates a space with more depth. What’s crucial when combining all of these different materials and textures is creating balance and rhythm between the shapes, lines, colors, and textures and creating harmony instead of monotony.
Symmetry and Achieving Visual Balance
Symmetry is another essential aspect of creating a balanced and harmonious space. This is true because symmetry creates both visual balance and rhythm.
The way to go about it is to properly distribute different pieces around the room. For example, instead of having a U-shaped seating area, invest in two couches, include matching sets of chairs, add curtains, etc. Start by finding the center line of the room and add the matching elements across it.
Arranging and Grounding Elements
Harmonious rooms are cohesive spaces that have visually grounded seating arrangements and not a lot of elements that look like they’re floating on their own. The idea with this is to make sure that all the elements in a space are connected.
For example, you can use rugs to connect the seating arrangements in a room, or use trays to integrate small objects used as decorations. The possibilities are endless, you just have to find creative ways to achieve this.
Biophilic Design
We all know that nature promotes happiness and tranquility, so another great idea is to make biophilic design a priority.
The 411 on Biophilic Design
Biophilic design is a design movement that's inspired by nature. This concept isn’t exactly new as it has been quite prominent in architectural circles for ages. For example, Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the architects that were very involved in translating nature into “organic architecture”.
This way of designing was slowly converted into a movement, and this is how biophilic design was born. The approach focuses on fostering a connection between nature and people through the design of contemporary landscapes and buildings.
The biophilic design comes from the evolutionary need of people to feel close to nature, like we did back when we lived in smaller communities and thrived as hunters and gatherers. Due to the indispensable bond between humans and nature, including nature when designing a space makes it more harmonious and lively.
Biophilic design is becoming much more popular in recent years due to the number of benefits it has, such as:
- Increasing productivity levels
- Boosting creativity
- Reducing stress
To bring these benefits of biophilic design to life, we need to know the key design principles and how to manipulate them.
Principles of Biophilic Design
Generally, there are six design principles that we can build the biophilic design on:
- Natural environment - incorporating features of the natural world into the office or home setting. These include implementing colors you find in nature, bringing in natural light, including plant patterns in the design, and adding animal and nature-themed photos.
- Natural shapes - including natural patterns, shapes, and forms in the design process. Some examples of this are implementing vaults and arches, adding water elements, including natural stones, and other elements that are naturally occurring in nature.
- Natural patterns - implementing patterns and shapes that are common in nature. These include patterns that imitate the erosion of rocks over time, the use of rhythm and scale, plant patterns, and so on.
- Natural light - increasing the amount of natural sunlight in a room. Natural light helps merge the inside and outside of a space and bring nature in.
- Plants - including real plants in your home. This will not only promote natural air filtration but also bring greenery into the space, which promotes relaxation.
- The relationship between nature and the individual. This brings us back to the subject of making the connection between the people of today and our hunter and gatherer ancestors who lived in alignment with nature. In fact, this last principle also ties together all the previous principles mentioned above.
The Importance of Biophilic Design
To conclude everything that we’ve mentioned above, biophilic design combines the ideas of architecture, urbanism, and the natural environment in which everything is built. It allows us to combine these two opposites, nature and architecture, into one combined approach that has nature as a central focus. It enables us to look deeper and consider topics such as innovation, climate change, and nature, with a special focus on the physical and mental well-being of people.
Building in this manner will undoubtedly help us increase the percentage of green infrastructure which, in turn, helps decrease the CO2 emissions and combat the problem of air pollution that helps boost the biodiversity on the planet. Furthermore, as people work from home much more than they did in the last 50 years, now more than ever it’s important to implement biophilic design and make these work-home spaces more inspiring and harmonious.
Integrate Daily Life Into Design Elements
Your home should be a combination of both utility and design, which is where minimalism comes to mind.
Minimalist design, in the simplest form, prioritizes having only essential objects that we use daily to satisfy our needs and creating a space that contains all our belongings without having visual and spatial clutter. This type of design is used to strip the design element of excess ornamentation and promote elegance.
In some cases, this approach can be explained as effortlessly simple. However, it requires a lot of thought to create powerful simplicity, which is where the main appeal of such spaces comes from. Minimalism has continued to grow in recent years, although a lot of people aren’t convinced that it’s one of the best options for creating a harmonious space. Let’s explore this further.
Characteristics of Minimalist Design
We’ll try and explain the characteristics of minimalist design through the wise words of the most noteworthy architects from our past:
- “I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity.” (I. M. Pei, architect)
By looking at minimalism and design in this way, we see that interior design should be uncluttered, integrated, and offer open layouts that we can adapt to our own needs.
- “In pure architecture, the smallest detail should have a meaning or serve a purpose.” (Augustus W. N. Pugin, architect)
Minimalist design means that everything we include in the design process should add value to the space and have a purpose.
- “Less is more”. (Mies Van Der Rohe, architect)
The focus in design should be put on functionality rather than on adding unnecessary elements and ornamentation.
- “As we live and as we are, Simplicity – with a capital “S” – is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.” (Frank Lloyd Wright, architect) The space should be simple but serve its purpose.
Minimalist design incorporates the use of well-chosen materials, such as steel, concrete, wood, glass, and so on, but also focuses on the use of space and natural light.
- “An interesting plainness is the most difficult and precious thing to achieve.” (Mies Van Der Rohe, architect)
This is probably the most difficult thing to achieve by most architects as minimalist design generally incorporates a monochromatic color palette or uses color to enhance an environment, while the focus is put on craftsmanship by using clear and simple lines.
Combining Feng Shui And Vastu To Improve the Flow Of Energies
As we’ve mentioned in one of our previous articles, Feng Shui and Vastu both have great design principles that can help designers create a harmonious and serene space. When creating a space that focuses on the principles of these two disciplines, the essentials that we need to remember include:
- Focussing on the center and the central point of the home from where all the energy originates. It needs to be clutter-free to stimulate a pleasant environment.
- Next, we have the nature part of the design, which is achieved through the inclusion of leafy plants and flowers in the home that bring positive energy, boost the health of the people living there, and enrich the home.
- Third, are the specific colors that should be used according to each discipline that intend to make the space calmer and more harmonious. For example, Vastu recommends using grey, blue, green, and light rose for the bedroom, and Feng Shui recommends using muted colors for the bedroom, but more intensive colors in the living room. The prayer room, on the other hand, should be designed as a calm and harmonious space that uses light and serene colors.
- And last but not least, finding ways to bring about the five main elements that are the focus of each discipline. If you want to learn more about what those are, check out our Vastu/ Feng Shui article.
Final Thoughts
To create harmony in your space, you need to have an interdisciplinary approach and make use of all the information that’s available with regard to sustainability and nature-focused design.
To do this, you must first figure out which approach you’d like to take. Whether you want to dive more into some of the design principles and ideologies that we’ve talked about in this article, such as managing the energy of the space by making adjustments, designing with biophilic design principles in mind, implementing minimalist design principles, or even looking into other, less-researched design principles in the world, ensure that the design is people and nature-centered.