Our Gardens Huys room transformation!

Welcome to our very first project - the Gardens-Huys!

Before

After

Before and after.

This one will forever be etched into our hearts because this is the project that says:

We are officially IN business!

The Gardens-Huys cemented my belief that you don’t necessarily need to buy new things to have a new space. You can use what you have to create your home and write your story.

The brief from the client was that she has all these pieces she just doesn’t know how to “piece” them together. We took note of her style and the pieces and tied them all together for them to tell a collective story. The story we wanted to tell was fun, M A X I M A L I S T, eclectic, and unique.

How we wrote the story:

-From the get-go we knew we wanted to paint and we wanted to paint pink! And from there we chose our colour palette.

-There was a need from the beginning to give the space more functionality by giving it more meaning. With a big open-plan space, like this room, it helps to divide the space into various sections to add interest and give it more meaning by making it serve more than one purpose. Dividing an open plan space also informs design decisions like space planning. We divided this space into a Living and Dining area.

The dining table and couch were all nested on one side of the space, so we moved the dining table to the end of the room. With this shift, we not only create interest but we also utilize the space more. I decided to move the dining table to the end of the room because when you enter the space I wanted to evoke the feeling of “at home”. Being greeted by a beautiful big red sofa is much more inviting than being blocked by the obstacle of a dining table.

-We removed the one big rug and swapped it out for two smaller area rugs. This also helps to divide the space into two different areas. When you use two different rugs in one space make sure that they are not too similar. For eg. Choose a plain rug in one area and add a rug with a pattern in the other area. Although you don’t want rugs that are too similar they still have to complement each other. So choose wisely.

The rug we used in the living area is the perfect colour combination - it draws in all the colours of our palette. But according to all interior “rules”, this rug is too small.

Usually, the rule of thumb with a rug is - bigger is better. You want all the front legs of the chairs in your living room to touch the rug.

With a maximalist eclectic style things can quickly feel cluttered and chaotic, and to get balance, you use positive and negative space.

Positive Space refers to the objects placed within the space, whereas negative space is the “empty” space around the objects.

The negative space around the rug, reveals more of this beautiful hardwood floor, and because it reveals more floor it brings more lightness to the room. This brings balance to the walls that are mostly covered with artwork (positive space) and do not have too much negative space. Therefore the rug works!

-The other task was to group and place the artwork in the room. Here we had two “dilemmas”:

This is a rental - so we did not want to drill too many holes into the wall.
The client has so many beautiful pieces - the objective was to find a way to arrange them together so that they work and complement each other, but also in a way that creates variation and isn’t repetitive.

We used a shelf above the couch to place multiple artworks and used picture hooks with fishing lines to hang the art without drilling too many holes. We played with the height and colour of the paintings to find groupings that were exciting yet balanced.

-Lastly, we added curtains in a darker shade of pink than the wall. We wanted to surround the room in a monochromatic moment because all the pieces within the space were so different in colour. The key to maximalism is to not introduce too many colours, but to use the colours that you do choose, to it’s maximum.

What you can take away from this story for yours is first to look at what you currently have, and what you can still use before you decide to throw it all out and start over.

These purple and orange dining chairs - did not work with our primary (pink) and secondary (turquoise) colours. Still, because she had them and they were in good condition we added pops of purple and orange to the scatter cushions for them to fit within her story.