Where does interior design inspiration come from?
When embarking on an interior design project, cataloging ideas and photos - your own or sourced online - is incredibly useful. Finding interior design inspiration and categorising ideas to share with your interior designer is simple when you know how.
Create Perfect use a variety of tools to help visualise ideas, from social networking sites to professional 3D render packages. Too much information can be overwhelming at first. However collating and sharing ideas with an interior designer takes the guess work out of how the final room will appear. Here’s a list of 5 favourite tools to use for interior design inspiration.
Houzz is a social network for interior design inspiration and home renovation. A goldmine for discovering images of gorgeous homes and gardens as well as products for your home. Once you’ve set up a profile create ideabooks. Search for images of your dream interiors and save them. Label your idea books - by room or style for example - and make notes to remind you what’s special about them
Create Perfect uses Houzz to collaborate with clients by privately sharing ideabooks. Adding ‘collaborators’ to share means that other professionals are able co-work with the designer and collate pictures together as inspiration for design projects.
Depending on which part of the home is being worked on, private ideabooks can be shared with architects, kitchen builders, curtain makers or bathroom specialists for example. All of whom are able to add images and comment on the stages of the project to ensure consistent communication and no surprises when they turn up on site!
Many of the images have their products tagged with their cost and links to buy so it’s easy to source things when you see what you like. Follow our profile to see pictures of all the latest projects as well as ideabooks that are shared with clients.
Pinterest is described as the world’s catalogue of ideas. Search for interior design topics and you’ll discover individual posts to share on your own profile in catalogued boards.
Follow boards and other pinners to find pictures that inspire your dream home. Once you’ve created a board you can share it with others by emailing them a link to your board. Creating a joint board and pinning together with an interior designer is an easy way to collaborate on ideas. Share colours, styles, furniture and just about anything you want in your home renovation.
Searching instagram with hashtags usually gets you exactly what you were looking for and a few surprises to boot. There's lots of interior design inspiration here. When you find a picture that you like, look at the hashtags the instagrammer has used in the post. Usually by clicking on these you’ll be able to find other interesting content on the topic you’re looking for. Although you can’t catalogue and collaborate like Houzz and Pinterest bookmark your favourite pictures to keep.
This app is so much fun! Ever wondered what a room in your house would look like in a different colour? Now you can just point and shoot.
Take a photo of your room then choose colours from the full Dulux colour palette. Alternatively use a colour picker to match colours which colours which have inspired you. Create colour schemes by selecting colours from images of soft furnishings, furniture and paintings in your home. Use images room schemes you love, photos of colours you’ve seen and match them to the Dulux colour palette. The app also offers suggestions of complimentary colour schemes to try. You can even separate walls so they can be painted in different colours. Save your pictures to your phone or share them via email or social media.
Here’s an example of what the app did in just 10 minutes with a kitchen picture featuring a grey wall.
Using the app to create a new kitchen project, within just 10 minutes four different colour schemes were visualised. It’s not picture perfect as it doesn’t mask perfect around every item but it does give a great overall feel for the effect of the colour on the other features of the room.
So much quicker and easier than hunting for colour cards and buying tester pots. Although its always recommended to try actual paint samples on the wall before you buy gallons of the stuff, the app can help you hone down your final selection.
This website works in a very similar way to Pinterest. Unlike Pinterest you won’t find much other lifestyle content on the site. However if you love the Scandinavian aesthetic of our clean and simple home design the site is a must have. Search topics that you like to research and save pictures to your collections. Follow other collections and people to build up a bank of design led images as inspiration for your decorating project
Do you have any other favourite tools for interior design inspiration? Leave a comment to let us know.