Seeing as how nothing but “new apartment, new furniture, new life” is on my mind right now, I might as well write about that. I’m not going to bother reiterating the fact that I’ve moved. Suffice it to say that I’ve moved. But more excitingly, I get to buy all this furniture that I haven’t previously needed.

Buying new furniture is kind of like buying a brand-new car: you only get to do it once. With a car, it’s all about the experience of having a new car no one else has had. With new furniture, it’s less about the fact that it’s brand-new, and more about how furniture seems to hang around forever—until it literally falls apart, in some cases—and buying new furniture is hardly justifiable when you have older pieces that still work. So while you can buy entirely new suites of furniture, designing from scratch, few people do so. With that in mind, I wanted to get it right the first time.

“When it comes to interior design, it appears a great number of people are making it up as they go along.”

The process, as I mentioned in my update, is fun, but not the sort of thing I’d want to be doing all the time. The reason for that, I believe, is that I just don’t have very much experience with it. When it comes to doing anything, I prefer to rehearse (and by extension, screw up) in private for many months until such a time as when I feel comfortable exhibiting the results of my labors. This is why I am unable to draw while someone is watching over my shoulder. In essence, it comes down to me not wanting to justify my actions. Why did I draw that line and then erase it? I erased it because it was wrong. I didn’t know it would be wrong until I drew it. And if I could have drawn it right the first time, I would be an automaton.

So here I am—Mr. Doesn’t Let People Watch The Process—hashing out ideas for the rooms I need to decorate. I’d be less self-conscious about screwing up if I did it more often. Fortunately the saleswomen who helped me seemed used to people who didn’t know what they were doing, and she steered me clear of poor design choices.

But what I started to notice through the process was that those poor design decisions weren’t just a matter of poor interior design. They were poor design design—from any standpoint. Originally I was approaching the whole house decoration process as being a domain in itself. I assumed a set of rules exists exclusive to interior design. I had my own ideas of how I wanted things to go, but being ignorant of the rules of interior design, I questioned the validity of every detail. Turns out this wasn’t necessary.

While I may be inexperienced with interior design from the standpoint of, for example, how long 42 inches is, I don’t have to throw years of design experience out the window just because I’m dealing with unfamiliar measurements. The basic design principals of balance, color, shape, and so on—these things still apply. So if my design intuition tells me that this chair shouldn’t go in this corner because that will throw off the balance of the entire room—well, sure. No need to second guess these things.

Validation for this came when I was trying to decide on end tables. The arm-height of the loveseat was 26″, but the height of the end tables was only 22″. I asked what the acceptable height difference was between furniture and occasionals and one of the other designers said, “um, there’s not really a rule for that.” That turned out to be more common than not. General design sense comes first. Make things look good and balanced. Everything else is open for interpretation. (I ended up not going with the side tables, anyway, but not due to the height.)

And that’s how I deduced one of the most important rules of interior design. Following general design principals will get you started on the right path. But after that: it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you do it boldly. Or looking at it the other way: don’t do stuff half-assed. Everyone can tell. But you can get away with pretty much anything if you say, “I’m doing this; that’s the way it is” and—to quote Steve Jobs—boom.

You can get away with this more in interior design than graphic design, I believe, for a number of reasons. For one thing, there are more amateurs doing interior design (that is, they do it themselves) than there is doing graphic design. But also, interior design comes with a set of pre-defined pieces that you then have to arrange. Graphic design has fonts, which is similar to this in concept (few graphic designers endeavor to create their own typefaces as, I presume, few interior designers build their own furniture), and if you’re working for a client who supplies their own images and logos, you have to fit these predefined pieces into a composition. But for the most part, graphic design is a little more open ended in terms of elements, and a little more well defined in terms of process.

When it comes to interior design, it appears a great number of people are making it up as they go along. Combine that with a little practical design grounding, and you can do some pretty cool stuff. It’s an ongoing project, this house. I’ll probably talk about it more when I get a little further along. The furniture is just the first step. Later, art personalizes.

-Ted