The Importance Of Architecture And Interior Design For Retail Businesses

Opening and running a retail business is more complicated than just buying or renting a space and opening for business. There is competition and the whim of the public to consider. there is also the proper display of merchandise and the safety of the shoppers who come. well designed businesses attract more customers and sell more of their goods. they also stay in business longer and make better profits. Taking the time and making the investment in a good architect or Interior designer is just good business.

Some things that must be considered in planning a retail business are location, store front design, traffic flow inside the business, customer safety, color scheme, ambiance, decor style, ease of maintenance and customer convenience. Location of different departments and display cases can make a big difference in the success or failure of a business. A professional store designer can put together floor plans that will work for each kind of business that take safety and traffic flow into consideration. Most businesses have one chance to impress the buying public. Waste that chance with bad ambiance or poor store design and the business will fail.

The first consideration, after location choice, is matching the design and decor to the product to be sold. A gourmet restaurant needs a different decor than a coffee shop or fast food place. A sea food restaurant needs different decor than an Irish pub and so on. The decor needs to match the product sold to be most effective. Most customers will be expecting certain decor for the product they are shopping for. An intimate apparel and lingerie shop will have a more feminine feel than a men's sportswear shop. An Interior Designer or an architect specializing in retail design can suggest decor and merchandise arrangement that will help customers shop with ease and purchase more.

Once the business has a design that matches the merchandise, it is important to pick a decor theme within that design. This theme can be ultra contemporary, European, glam or traditional and everything in between. this theme can be in different colors. It is important to pick a color scheme that is pleasing to customers and encourages them to buy. There are studies that show certain colors in restaurants work better than others to encourage customers to eat and drink more. The colors of walls, flooring and store furnishings should all go pleasantly together making customers comfortable and in a mood to buy more.

All the decor items in a business should be easy to maintain and safe for clientele. flooring choices should be considered with safety in mind. No one wants customers slipping and hurting themselves on a too shinny flooring. The floor plans should group related items together for customer convenience. Check out lanes should be conveniently located and manned. A well designed and implemented store will sell more merchandise.

Small Bedroom Interior Design

Your bedroom is the only arena in your home that helps you relax and transcend into a peaceful state, after a stressful and hectic day in your office. Therefore, it is absolutely imperative that each decorative, movable or immovable, contributes towards relieving you from your stress and tensions.

 

Your room ought to be clean and streamlined for an inviting and calm look. Below are some small bedroom interior design ideas to incorporate while planning to renovate your bedroom.

Choose the right hues: The colors and hues in your bedroom can render a vivid or a dull appeal to your room. Therefore, be very careful while selecting the right shade for your bedroom. Nowadays, muted / natural colors like beige, grey, and taupe are popularly picked by people planning their small bedroom interior design for a more subtle look. You can also opt from colors like brown, mauve's at all for a more composed appeal.

Be selective with your furniture: A room populated with large and too much of furniture crowds the room. For your small bedroom interior design, look for petite and small pieces of furniture that gives a spacious look to your room. Do away with large and garish wardrobes in wood along with huge dressing table and king sized bed. Instead look for bed pieces in queen sizes that have no headboard. Make an intelligent use of modular furniture to make the best use of the little space available.

The aesthetic touch: In your attempt to avoid clutters in your small bedroom, do not forget to add essentials that may enhance the appeal of your room. The secret to a successful small bedroom interior design lies in accessorizing your room to give it a modern appeal.

Funky lamp shades, mirrors, beautiful carved glass pieces make for a great interior decor. Jazzy wall art, like painting a unique canvas on the wall with one color at all, instills life in your other wise dull looking room. The key lies in striking the right cord between funky accessories and a simple design to give it the right aesthetic touch.

Beautiful Small Bedroom Decorating Ideas

Here are the sample pictures of small beautiful bedroom interior designs for kids and girl or children. This home design pictures can give inspiration in designing your kids and girls bedrooms.

Designing your small bedrooms following the Sample Pictures of Beautiful Small Bedroom Decorating Ideas displayed on this site is the best decision since the designs have already followed the latest and new trend of stylish bedroom designs. The designs have been adjusted with the small space of room. Make sure that your small bedroom design follows the sample small bedroom if you want to create the harmony and cool look of bedroom design. The other related furniture should be well matched so as to make the room look bigger and large. Remember to share the great ideas of small bedroom design to any friends looking for the best design of small bedroom.

Cubello Ice Kitchen by Amr Designs

Through studying and predicting its customers’ present & future kitchen habits and preferences, Egyptian kitchen manufacturer Amr Helmy Designs claims to be able to invent breakthrough organic design solutions. The company’s catch phrase is “7 Years Ahead”, which sums up its goal to fill a gap in the kitchen market by 2015 by offering improved functionality, taste and service. With the Cubello Series, Amr Helmy was aiming to revolutionize kitchen design by offering a range that is designed around a grid system based on just 24 different units and one size of door.

This approach top kitchen design has a number of benefits. The factory has a minimum number of components to work with so a number of costs are reduced including: warehousing; machine set-up; packing; and shipping. The grid system allegedly makes it easier for designers to work with and ensures that all design output is aesthetically maximized.

The most interesting design aspect of the Cubello kitchen though has to be the innovative configuration options provided by the island unit. Featuring the sink and the cooktop, the island unit provides the main work area within the kitchen. Surface space is maximised through the use of off-set counter tops and a swivelling surface that contains the kitchen sink. This surface is on wheels so it can easily be repositioned for best use of space.

Owen Jones and Medieval Stained Glass Design

Illustration: Stained Glass from Owen Jones The Grammar of Ornament, 1856

In Britain stained glass design and production saw a massive rise in both popularity and function in the nineteenth century. It was used extensively in both the domestic and ecclesiastical markets and although artistically it can be said that the twentieth century may well have seen the apex of stained glass design work as far as creativity is concerned, it is still the nineteenth century that saw the craft appealing almost universally, probably for the first time since the medieval period.

Although Owen Jones does cover stained glass decorative work in his 1856 The Grammar of Ornament, it is very much tucked away within the larger Medieval Ornament chapter. However, there are twenty nine examples on two large colour plates covering the time period between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

As with many examples of ornament around the world and in a number of different time periods that Jones included within his seminal book, he was convinced that on average and with some exceptions, the earlier the period of decoration the more symptomatic it was to an ideal that later became subverted or diluted, ending in an eventual ghost impression of the original ideal. Although this to a certain extent is a simplification of Jones theories regarding the history of decoration, it is also to some extent again, an over simplification on Jones part of the history of the decorative arts. There are always a number of factors that go into the development of styles and eras of decoration. Trying to seek the early purest form of a decorative style and isolating that style from all other influences and cultural cross-pollinations is difficult at the best of times and often impossible.

Illustration: Stained Glass from Owen Jones The Grammar of Ornament, 1856

This theory of early is best, was used by Jones for his all too brief description of medieval stained glass decoration. He closely associated the pattern and ornamental elements of early stained glass design with that of medieval illuminated manuscripts. In some respects this makes a great deal of sense as stained glass, along with painted wall decoration was often the only physical example of the ideals of a religion that was available to the general public. The Bible itself during this period was considered off limits to all but the chosen few and therefore interpretation was limited to the visual.

Jones believed that the more accomplished stained glass designers and craftsmen became, the more pretentious they eventually became, adding superfluous affectations and gimmicks within the work. Eventually this was to lead to the craft trying to imitate the world around it, rather than being content to interpret that world symbolically. As far as Jones was concerned, along with many of his contemporary nineteenth century critics, the attempt was always doomed to failure with the craft tradition and decorative arts always being the ones to suffer most.

Although perhaps Jones critical stand was more of an ideological one than that of one that considered the elements of practical application, there is still much to be said for the theory. There is little doubt that many craft disciplines, particularly those such as stained glass that were heavily defined by their own practicalities, have suffered by the imposition of decorative fashions and styling.  There are particular eras whereby designers either failed to understand the physical limitations of stained glass, or refused point blank to curtail their enthusiasm for decorative schemes in order to accommodate stained glass limits.

This attitude has inevitably led to stained glass work that can only be seen to be classed as such under the very loosest of definitions. It was perhaps no bad thing for Victorian stained glass designers to be gently attracted towards the earlier forms of the craft by such critics as Jones.

Reference links:
The Grammar of Ornament: All 100 Color Plates from the Folio Edition of the Great Victorian Sourcebook of Historic Design (Dover Pictorial Archive Series)
The Grammar of Ornament. Folio Edition
Grammar of Ornament: A Monumental Work of Art
Victorian Stained Glass Pattern Book (Dover Pictorial Archives Series)
Stained Glass and the Victorian Gothic Revival (Studies in Design)
Medieval and Renaissance Stained Glass in the Victoria and Albert Museum
English and French Medieval Stained Glass in the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Corpus Vitrearum)

Wallpaper Design by Otto Eckmann

Illustration: Otto Eckmann. Wallpaper design, c1899

Otto Eckmann can be counted as one of the most interesting and diverse designers of his period. When he took up a second career in design at the end of 1894, he put a symbolic end to his first career as a fine art painter by auctioning off his entire collection of work, so as to start anew and fresh as a decorative artist.

Eckmann was involved in the design work of textiles and in particular embroidery and tugs, ceramics, metal, furniture, wallpaper and graphics. It is with wallpaper design that we are concerned with in this particular article. All of the wallpapers featured here were produced by Eckmann in around 1899. They are a stunning display of an individual's approach to wallpaper design and shows that Eckmann was neither overly influenced nor cowed or intimidated by the long history and traditions of the wallpaper industry, particularly by an individual who was approaching commercial design from a fine art background.

Illustration: Otto Eckmann. Wallpaper design, c1899

It could be said that it was actually Eckmann's artistic experience that gave him a particular edge over some of his rivals. It was the individual approach to both styling and composition that made his work appealing for both its novelty and its decorative potential. It was this external attitude that often produced work by artists and designers that stood out when they approached another and relatively unfamiliar discipline, achieving results of unexpected and unusual directions. However, this was not always the case and there were some spectacularly dire results of cross-discipline experiments. These failed ventures have proved to be of a serial nature and have dogged the decorative arts world down to our own contemporary era, mostly in the form of celebrity design launches.

Illustration: Otto Eckmann. Wallpaper design, c1899

Eckmann himself was not of this ilk and the wallpaper design work that he produced from the 1890s until his death in 1902 at the incredibly early age of thirty seven, show a clear definition of his approach to the decorative arts. It has been said by many that the artist turned designer was heavily influenced by the Japanese artistic and decorative format, and while this is true to a certain extent, it can only ever be classed as one thread of the creative work of Eckmann, not the only one.

It is the graphic work produced during the last years of his life that tended to influence the rest of his work through the various disciplines. This is an interesting development as many of the decorative arts had come to rely on the defined graphic quality of flat design. This came to be particularly true at the end of the nineteenth century when considering the textile and wallpaper disciplines for example. A number of illustrators and graphic artists became involved in wallpaper design at the turn of the century and there was a relatively busy and productive cross-pollination of ideas and theories that was to include the whole world of poster art, text, book illustration and wallpaper design.

Illustration: Otto Eckmann. Margueriten wallpaper design, c1899

It was this fruitful period that coincided with the general European Art Nouveau movement, known more specifically in Germany as the Jugendstil of which Eckmann became one of the leading lights. It was with the help of the individual styling of Eckmann's work along with that of others in Germany, that the Jugendstil made its own unique contribution to that of Art Nouveau, often countering to a certain extent, the inbuilt and often overly conscious flamboyance of the French and Belgian versions of the movement.

As with so many scenarios of the early death of a talented individual, it would have been interesting to have known how Eckmann had he lived past 1902, would have affected and influenced not only the dynamics of German decorative arts under the Jugendstil, but much further a field towards that of German Modernism. How his own personal career would have faired during the first and most important half of the twentieth century, we will never know.

Illustration: Otto Eckmann. Self Portrait

Reference links:
Modern Style: Jugendstil/Art Nouveau 1899-1905
Jugendstil, Graphik und Druckkunst
Art nouveau in Munich: Masters of Jugendstil from the Stadtmuseum, Munich, and other public and private collections
Jugendstil Art Nouveau
Ornament und Illustration um 1900: Handbuch fur Bild- und Textdokumente bekannter und unbekannter Kunstler aus der Zeit des Jugendstil (Asthetik der Alltagswelt) (German Edition)

Lace Design Work of Arpad Dekani

Illustration: Arpad Dekani Lace design c1908

Much of the early twentieth century revival of practical lace making, but more particularly that of designing lace within Hungary, can be attributed fairly squarely to Arpad Dekani. Professor Dekani, who started his career relatively humbly as a teacher at a provincial school in Hungary, eventually became a professor at the Arts and Crafts School in Budapest. It was in this position that he had the influence to restructure some of the aims and ambitions of lace production throughout Hungary.

Dekani used old traditional Hungarian patterns as an origin point in which to engender the production of a whole new system of styles for twentieth century lace production. He was also able to engineer the training of students on two levels. Firstly, there were those who would hopefully produce lace as a going concern. These students were trained in all forms of lace making as well as that of book keeping and the general maintenance and organization of a business. On another level Dekani organized the training of students which in turn who become teachers themselves. These newly trained teachers who were well versed in the new production and design parameters that Dekani had set out for the modernisation of Hungarian lace making, would filter out into the traditional areas of lace making in Hungary, particularly in the north of the country. These Dekani disciples if you will, were given the task of restructuring and repositioning local customs and traditional frameworks of lace production, not to industrialise the craft as such, but to give it a decent competitive edge within Europe.

Illustration: Arpad Dekani lace design c1908

A number of areas of traditional lace production in Europe particularly that of Italy and Austria, had already gone through a restructuring process, giving exports a much more contemporary look and feel to their lace design work. Although still based very much as a traditional craft, European lace did see a considerably robust marketing campaign in the late nineteenth century, but particularly that of the early years of the twentieth century, when so many other crafts and traditions were also having to reshape and redesign themselves for the new century.

Hungary as a partner within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, tended to follow the structure already set out by the Austrian craft schools and college system, whereby traditional craft design and decoration was upgraded, restyled, repackaged even. However, Austria was not the only example of this repositioning of design and craft for the new century. Schools and colleges from Glasgow to Moscow were having to re-evaluate the textile craft system, its present position and its potential future in a rapidly expanding market that was becoming increasingly dominated by mass production and consumerism. Hand production of printed and woven textiles, as well as that of embroidery and lace was particularly vulnerable to market forces. The situation was not helped by the increasing reluctance of customers to subsidise these traditional crafts by paying much more for hand crafted work than they would for industrially based work.

Illustration: Arpad Dekani lace design c1908

In some respects the blame for the decline of the craft system of hand production can be placed with the general buying public as much as with industry. Many who could afford to subsidise these old traditions did so on a progressively smaller scale. As fashion began to incorporate the marketing ploy of inbuilt obsolescence, there was even less room for the craft system to manouvere, particularly with a product that was often produced with the intention that it be seen as outside the role of obsolescence and therefore fashion. Even though some craft work might have attempted to compete with fashion, by its very nature and its high price tag, craft products were meant to be bought as long term investments rather than for short term profit.

This by no means implies that Dekani and many others like him across Europe failed in their attempt to redesign and in many cases relaunch craft traditions. There is a long line of repeated craft initiatives that stretch across the twentieth century. Many of these might well have been short term or failed for various marketing, pricing and fashion reasons. However, the craft system is still with us today and as it yet again restructures itself in the form of contemporary craft, we should be thankful for the many individuals, such as Arpad Dekani who kept the ideal of production that was largely outside the increasingly fragile and some might even say destructive cycle of fashion and redundancy.

Illustration: Arpad Dekani lace design c1908

Reference links:
By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art
Contemporary Crafts
Form Magazine - Australia
Crafts: Contemporary Design and Technique
Arts and Crafts Furniture: From Classic to Contemporary
Contemporary African Arts and Crafts: On-Site Working with Art Forms and Processes [460 Photographs; 23 Color Plates]
Common Ground: Contemporary Craft, Architecture and the Decorative Arts (Mercury Series)
Craft and Contemporary Theory
Craft and contemporary culture,
In Praise of Hands: Contemporary Crafts of the World
Exploring Contemporary Craft: History, Theory and Critical Writing
Jim Partridge (Contemporary Craft Series) (Contemporary Craft Series)