Hotel to Home: Functional and Stylish Design Tips

Finding the right house is not an easy task and it can take months or even years to find the property that best suits your needs and lifestyle. Even if you do find a suitable house, you will probably need to spend some money bringing it up to scratch and renovating it to your taste. These renovations could cost you a considerable amount of money, and on top of the price of the actual house, it can prove to be a very expensive endeavor just to find something that has the potential to be a suitable house for you to live in.

In fact, the cost can be so high that it could prove to be cheaper to build your own house. It’s a tricky task and one that could take years of planning, but when you consider how long it can take to get an existing house to suit your exact needs, it doesn’t seem as bad.

There’s a lot of boring stuff to consider when building a house, such as building the foundations, making sure the property is fully watertight (even the slightest crack could invite in destructive damp like dry rot which will eventually spread without water and destroy house foundations), and installing skirting boards. None of those things are particularly fun, but they’re essential for making sure a house works as it should. Whilst these things are a must for every property, that doesn’t mean you can’t have some FUNctional design features like the ones listed below!

Add an Invisible Book Shelf

When it comes to room design, storage has to take priority. You don’t realise how much stuff you actually own until you move house and find you have nowhere to store all of your worldly belongings. If there’s one thing that takes up a lot more space than anything else, it’s books. Bookshelves can be clunky and big, not to mention they collect dust. Instead of incorporating a standard bookshelf into your new home, try an invisible book shelf instead! This allows you to display your books but in a way that doesn’t take up valuable floorspace. All you need is a standard L-shape bracket and some books. Find the biggest book you have and secure it so that the entire book is on top of the bracket, except for the back cover which you will need to tack to the bottom of the bracket.

This is a fantastically functional home design idea that looks cool and keeps the floor free for other furniture and activities.

Install Sliding Doors

Doors take up a lot of space and can be a real hindrance when it comes to designing a home, but they don’t have to be. Doors normally open outwards which means furniture can’t be placed behind them or in front of them, and that can be really annoying in terms of home layout. Well, instead of opening outwards and demanding more space than is necessary, install sliding doors. These are particularly good for smaller spaces or awkward shaped areas like utility rooms, bathrooms and pantries.

Not only do sliding doors look really suave; they are extra safe, too. They don’t slam shut which makes them great for young families because the risk of sore fingers is greatly reduced.

Don’t Overlook Small Spaces

Do you have a lot of wall art that you can’t quite find a space for in other rooms but that you don’t want to put into storage?  Hold off on the cardboard boxes and take advantage of small rooms like a w/c. You can really add some creative flair in small rooms and find a place for your precious wall art all at the same time by creating a montage. Find some matching frames and carefully position your art within the room. In and amongst the pictures you could add some mirrors to make the room look bigger and brighter which is an age-old design hack to make a space appear larger than it is, and it works especially well in rooms without a lot of natural light, too.

Whether you’re building your own house or renovating an existing property, try out these three functional design tips and watch the space transform into something extraordinary.