Blainey North’s Top Interior Design Principles

Hi, this is Nina. If you’re planning to renovate, remodel or simply freshen up your interior décor, then you should start looking for ideas from the best persons in the industry. They are the trendsetters whose advice will help you enhance the visual features of your space and discover new principles of aesthetics. One such remarkable person is Australian interior designer and architect Blainey North, who is an inspiration for both personal development and showcasing the top interior design principles for your home.

Who is Blainey North?

Blainey North is one of the leading Australian designers who is slowly taking over the world with her innovative furniture and space arrangements. She founded her company Blainey North & Associates when she was only 22 years old and currently they have offices in both Sydney and London. Ever since she was a little girl, she has been drawing buildings something her art teachers saw as potential and encouraged her to study architecture.

Thanks to her talent for architecture and a keen eye for interior design, her company is one of the most sought-after for both residential and commercial spaces. One of the aspects she pays careful attention to is respecting the importance of details and textures of materials and so she treats every project like haute couture. Blainey is passionate about art, fashion, and film which she likes to include in her ideas and use to push conceptual boundaries.

So, it’s no wonder that many find her approach to interior design inspiring and something they want to incorporate in their homes. If you are one of them, here are Blainey North’s top interior design principles which will help you reinvent your home and make it uniquely stylish.

Go to Nature for Inspiration

High ceilings, natural materials, and spaciousness are the things you will easily notice in Blainey’s design ideas. This freedom of space is something she learned from nature, which is one of her biggest inspirations when designing and reinventing spaces. Basically, you just need to look around you and try to find what makes you feel excited about your environment.

This is perfect advice for people who want to make their home more eco-friendly since it will help you find green solutions more easily. Reclaimed wood is a wonderful material that will give a rich and organic environment to your home without decreasing the elegance of your interior design.

Top Interior Design Principles: That Feeling of Surprise

Blainey thinks of aesthetics as something that should surprise you and make you feel like you are seeing it for the first time. But at the same time, it should calm and relax you for a comfortable experience in your space. Namely, you should sigh from content and not gasp from the displeasure of what you see upon entering your home.

In practice, top interior design principles like this one mean that you decorate your home with a style that is close to your heart, rather than to impress other people. No matter which style you prefer, minimalist or Hygge, you can still create a visual experience that is both aesthetically satisfying and comfortable.

Every Project Starts with a Big Concept

When you think about what you want from your interior design, always come up with a big concept. And for Blainey North, that’s perfectly okay and actually an ideal starting point to define your desires. This is how a strong idea is conceived that will give you the feel and flavor you expect to have in your home.

And from then on, start connecting the dots and adding pieces that will bring your idea to fruition without creating chaos and overcrowding the space. You don’t need less furniture to organize your space, but to create the bond between pieces, which leads to fluidity. No wonder it’s one of her top interior design principles.

Use Fashion to Generate New Ideas

Besides nature, Blainey cites fashion as being another thing that inspires her to create designs and furniture. Basically, all you need to do is watch fashion and soon enough you will be able to identify what excites you. And since fashion is a broad field, it covers everything from shoes, clothes, and consequently furniture, fixtures, and home accessories.

You will not find exactly what you want – and you shouldn’t – since while you go through magazines and tons of images, you will spark your creative juices and come up with what’s uniquely yours. For example, if you want something minimalistic, pay close attention to designers like Issey Miyake and then expand on those concepts until you find a comfortable style. That’s the way to learn how to combine colors and shapes into the interior design you love in the home.

More Top Interior Design Principles of Blainey North

Look at New Art

Art is a perfect source for inspiration, especially the contemporary one that you can easily find in your local galleries. Go to art shows and see what is currently happening with artistic ideas and concepts.

Surely you will find something that will inspire your solution for interior design. Watch movies that defined a certain era and are considered visually iconic to help expand your field of perception too.

Blainey North even finds inspiration in food and fusion of different cultures, something inherent to Australia and especially Sydney. So in a way, you have to use your origins to form your vision since it will help you come up with ideas you feel comfy bringing to life.

Inspiration from Light Refraction and Reflection

One of the inspirations Blainey points out is the idea of light and reflection. It is inspired by Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian.

This means that you can take any reflective surface and allow it to reflect the light to make the space more reactive than before. It also creates the fluidity of colors, shapes, and depth to help make a space almost magical with illusionary elements.

Light plays a pivotal role in nature, and so you will easily notice how much emphasis Blainey puts on it when organizing a space. Thus, you should use natural sources of light as much as possible and even use mirrors to expand the angles of illumination. A sunlit room, for example, will evoke the luxurious features of your design and help to achieve sophisticated details.

Buy Nice Furniture

Blainey North designs her own furniture and has a very successful collection inspired by the Art Deco style. For her, furniture is what will give your space uniqueness and something inherently yours. That’s one of her top interior design principles.

But before you buy furniture, take a look at your space and start cleaning it up from clutter and unnecessary accessories. Look for online removal quotes to find the best solution for these unwanted items to help free up space.

Next, visualize what it can become with some quality furniture pieces. Blainey believes that the biggest problem on the furniture market today is that it lacks pieces that fulfill the needs of young people for modern styles.

Just like she is redefining the market with her own furniture collections, you can do the same. Try adding edgy pieces to make your home more modern and less traditional, for instance.

Pretty isn’t Good Enough

For Blainey and her associates, the design is about rigor and pretty isn’t good enough. It’s about observing the bigger picture and not limiting yourself only to aesthetics.

Since interior design is a process, Blainey believes that the best way to approach it is by envisioning the idea in your mind. And then, walk through the design in your mind and notice every detail in every corner before you make it happen in reality.

Doing so will help you to truly feel the space and whether it sits well with you. Then you can create something to fully enjoy and experience.

Final Thoughts on Top Interior Design Principles

Blainey North is a very successful woman in a highly competitive industry. Although she likes large spaces and big projects, her top interior design principles are functional even for small homes.

Just trust your instincts and let them guide you to find the artistic elements you like. And then combine it with practical expectations so you would create a functional yet stylish interior design.

About Today’s Writer

Nina Simons is a lifestyle blogger, yoga aficionado and travel enthusiast with a distinctive taste for home decor. She’s passionate about learning new things and sharing meaningful ideas. In her free time, she loves to design clothes and furniture. If you wanna see what she’s up to you can find her on Twitter.