Practical Design of a Family Room

Family Room Interior Design

Family room interior design ties together family entertainment, comfort, and style. Often called a "great room," the ideal family room is a place for all members of the family to relax, watch a movie, read a book, and just enjoy some time together. Such rooms are generally less formal than traditional living rooms. Consider these tips when designing your family room:

Common Family Room Interior Design Elements

A successfully decorated family room needs to incorporate ample seating, entertainment options, and unobtrusive storage.

* Seating - A family room needs seating for the family to enjoy the room's entertainment options and in which to relax. Ideally, the furniture in a family room should be soft and comfortable with separate areas for TV viewing, game playing, and office work (if applicable).
* Entertainment - The family room is the place for that big-screen TV, the Nintendo game console, and the mega-watt stereo system. Guard against designing the entire room around one item, like a flat-screen TV, however. A perfect family room is about enjoying family and friends, not a showcase for a new electronic "toy."
* Storage - In addition to comfortable seating and entertainment options, a family room needs a tasteful and organized place to store books, CDs, DVDs, games, and other entertainment accessories. Built-in bookcases are one option as are entertainment centers with drawer and racks for storage.

Designed for Comfort

A well-designed family room has a comfortable and welcoming feel to it. To achieve this, consider the following design aspects:

* Color - A family room is not the place to try out that bold, "in-your-face" color palette. An ideal family room design is soothing and peaceful, using cool and neutral colors, reserving bright colors for accents.
* Lighting - Lighting in a family room needs to be bright for games and reading as well as low and offset for TV viewing and relaxing. Lights with dimmers are one way to do this, or you can have different types of lighting for each activity.
* Traffic Pattern - A well-designed family room should have a comfortable flow from one area to another. When you enter the room, it should be easy to get to the different seating areas without walking around furniture or squeezing through a tight area. Seating areas may be defined by rugs, by furniture groupings, and/or by color.
* Controls - Another important thing to consider is how to conveniently control the lights, the television, and other entertainment options. Consider placing the light controls and the master console near the main seating area so that you won't have to get up and down constantly when you are enjoying the room.

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Interior Lighting

Understanding The Lighting System

Light can define space, substance and style. Outdoors, with the shifting sun and atmospheric conditions, light and the shadows change the appearance of things natural and man made. But in the indoors, the play of natural and artificial lighting largely determine both function and decoration.

Today lighting is considered to be a very important element of decorating scheme. The invention of the incandescent bulb in 1978 revolutionized lighting systems as it allowed light to be easily manipulated. Apart from exploiting natural light by using opaque or transparent glass walls, sky lights, large windows etc. for offices, architect work out the detailed light fittings which are conducive for a work environment. In homes, a careful selection of lights extends and enhances the aesthetics of interiors. Similarly for hotels, showrooms, museums, gardens, water bodies, individual lighting requirements are worked out. Artificial light falling from various angles and heights on different surfaces guide us to perceive various features and dimensions while creating a specific mood. With technological developments and the stress on precision lighting, a variety of lighting fixtures are readily available with options which offer manifold possibilities in terms of effect.

The choice of fitting according to the room , gets very difficult , one gets puzzled off as there are so many varieties in lights like the table lamps , spot lights , clamp lights , recessed / surface mounted lights , up lighters , halogens , incandescent bulb , pendants , fluorescent fixtures and lots of others. Once the basic idea of the space, mood, interior design, highlighting, function of work have been specified, one can then consider the basic types of lighting. Initially only the planned positions of lights need to be decided. Later, the selection of bulbs and the exact effect can be created. One should always keep in mind some of the basic rules while designing the light.

* Every activity that takes place in the interior must have lights of the right kind, intensity and the right direction.
* The eye prefers even lighting with the minimum of contrast between the brightness of the room surfaces and the lighting fixtures.
* The eye works best when the work surface is more brightly lit then the surroundings.
* The eye is stimulated by the contrast of tone and sparkle.
* When room lighting change, color changes or disappear, thus objects become more or less important in the room.
* There are three basic types of lighting which are categorized according to the intensity of the light used.

General lighting - It supplies an overall illumination in the area.

Task lighting - It supplies the required illumination for specific tasks such as reading, painting etc. It directs strong local illumination without high general illumination as required for activities carried in a particular area.

Accent lighting- It offers a decorative element to the area by highlighting the particular objects or features in the area. They are auxiliary to the general lighting and provide an added, and at times, dramatic dimensions to the scheme.

Spaces can be provided with one, two or all types of these lightings, depending upon the requirement. With different types of lighting in each room and dimmers to adjust the intensity of light, an ordinary space can be infused with much dramatic look to convey different moods to suit different times of the day.

source: www.sereneinteriors.com