Luxury Homes

Most people’s favorite room when it comes to decorating, a formal drawing room provides the most wonderful opportunity to demonstrate your decorating skills and to express your personality.

In all the other rooms in the house a preoccupation with the practicalities usually has to dominate, sometimes at the expense of aesthetic considerations.

Although it has to perform and respond to our needs, the formal drawing room is above all a room for pleasure – to satisfy all the senses. This may involve some subterfuge where there is a conflict between what is needed for comfort and what appeals visually. Here are some examples:

A television set cannot be anything but an ugly piece of equipment with cash loans, yet hidden beneath a round table with a full-length cloth it need not be an eyesore. Radiators are rarely attractive, but can be disguised if encased in a box or painted to match their surroundings. Ugly contours in a room shape can be boxed in to give symmetry and provide storage. A badly proportioned window can have its dimensions hidden behind well-designed curtains.

The style of a drawing room is most likely to be dictated by the period or style of the building that houses it; occasionally, however, it can be interesting to go against the architecture and so create drama by a clashing of the centuries.

Antiques in a modem warehouse space or contemporary furnishings in a classical Georgian interior are just two examples of the excitement that you can create. Mixing periods within the same room is also a possibility, but needs to be done with skill. The most successful results are produced by combining contrasts: rough aged wood with smooth tubular-steel; antique matt velvet with glossy chintz; polished marble with rough medieval matting.

This is a room where many people choose to display their most precious possessions – portraits of ancestors, family silver, collections – and it is important to bear this in mind when deciding upon a scheme. It is all too easy to go overboard and cover every surface with pattern, only to find that when accessories are placed they disappear against a dominant background.

To avoid this an experienced designer will always gather together the accessories right at the start (or, if they are not yet accumulated, will have them in mind) and will think of them as part of the overall scheme. If you like your furniture, accessories and guests to star, select plain surface treatments and create a ‘blank canvas’ backdrop for your features.

Should flowers be your passion, leave space for a judiciously placed vase, and when planning flower arrangements, always take into consideration their surroundings – give thought to their color and form within the context of your scheme. Try mixing fresh blooms with artificial greenery to make your bouquets go further and have in reserve further silk imitations for when fresh flowers are not to hand. If no flowers are available, try sprinkling flower essences in your room – you will find your guests searching for the bouquet.

When arranging furniture in a drawing room, view the room from every direction before settling on a format. Make sure that from each position you have a pleasant vista. The view of the room you get upon first entering is particularly important and sometimes this can be much improved by rehanging the entrance door on the opposite axis, so that it opens flat against an adjacent wall and you are able to view me whole room immediately.