The Office: Colors Galore

Hey guys,

After deciding on a layout and determining our aesthetic, it's now time for color! This is the part that I was very excited about for a few reasons.

1. I'm inspired by designers who use colors, patterns and textures in such tactful ways.
2. The current color scheme of our house is very neutral — a lot of grays and a bluish gray color... I think it's time for a change.
3. Using colors pushes me outside of my comfort zone, so I want to challenge myself to use color.

As I was thinking about the office, I knew that every color palette I selected need to to incorporate non-neutral colors. I used Kelly Moore's Color Studio to select a set of colors for three different color palettes. Many paint companies have similar design tools as Kelly Moore. I decided to use Kelly Moore because it's pretty easy to use.

Here's what I put together...

OPTION #1: AUTUMN ACCENT
In this palette, I used neutral color combinations for the walls and tried to bring in brighter pops of color. In general, the palette is very muted, but definitely incorporates colors that I wouldn't normally use.

None of these colors are ones that I would actually, use except for the neutrals (the gray and the charcoal).
But I think they look nice together.

OPTION #2: FOGGY BOTTOM
This palette is very neutral with a small pop of color. Foggy Bottom probably fits better with the themes in the rest of our house.

Pretty much all neutral colors with the purple as the main "pop"

OPTION #3: CITRUS FRUIT
This palette, while full of neutrals, has very bold and strong colors that will make anyone's head turn. It naturally is a more eclectic selection.

Very bright accents...challenge accepted!

In the end, we decided to be bold and step completely out of our comfort zone. We went with Citrus Fruit!

I am super excited to have a bright orange wall and can't wait to piece everything together!

Up next we will take a look at various design concepts in order to hone in on a final concept.


Stay tuned!

{Rashida}

The Office: What's Your Aesthetic?

Residential interior designers often say that they have to be marriage therapists too. Husbands and wives tend to get at each others' throats when selecting furniture, materials, paint, etc. for something so personal as their own house. Luckily, Ben and I are not the combative type, but I didn't realize how different our aesthetics were until now.

This next phase in our office design, and for any Flashbent Interiors project, is to understand our client's aesthetic. After all, not everyone can live in an boudoir inspired bedroom with black lace...

...but it works for Christina Aguilera.

So how does one figure out their aesthetic?

One great resource is Houzz. It's like Pinterest for interiors. Browse through the many pictures of interiors to get a sense of what resonates with you, what you like, and what you hate. As the designer for our office, I created an IdeaBook with a bunch of images of home offices that I LOVED, liked, and I thought were OK. I didn't select any that I hated since I am also the client :)

I absolutely LOVE this office space. It's unique, bright, modern, and eye-catching.

Contemporary Home Office by San Francisco Interior Designers & Decorators Artistic Designs for Living, Tineke Triggs

I like this. It's a subtle mix of color.

Contemporary Home Office by Dallas Interior Designers & Decorators Traci Connell Interiors

This is not bad. It's a little more traditional or formal than I would like, but I wouldn't protest if this were our office.

Contemporary Home Office by Oakland Interior Designers & Decorators Shari Misturak

Of the 30 home office images that I selected, Ben liked only a few. None were on my LOVE list, but were doable. And marriage is all about compromise. I learned that Ben's aesthetic is slightly contemporary, but highly functional. He wouldn't want anything just because it's "pretty"; it has to be useful.

This was one of his favorites. He really likes the stripes on the wall and likes the clean lines. He doesn't like the main office chair though.

Transitional Home Office by Toronto Interior Designers & Decorators Jane Lockhart Interior Design

This was probably on the extreme of what Ben liked, but he said he liked the color and that it looks functional.

Contemporary Home Office

Given his choices and my choices, we are agreeing that a contemporary style is the way to go. The main colors should be subtle and more neutral looking (for Ben), but there can be some pops of color for my eclectic taste.

I love it when we both can have our way. :)

SIDENOTE // many people think they are a certain aesthetic when they really are not. The nice thing about Houzz is that I can put together an Ideabook with many different styles and tastes to find out what actually suits my clients best.

Next step is selecting our color palette.

Stay tuned!

{Rashida}

The Office: Laying out an Oddly Shaped Room

Our Office project is going to be a Furnishing Project. Based on the need-finding we explained in the Setting the Stage post, we only need a furniture solution rather than a structural solution, which would be a Restructure Project. The first part of a Flashbent Furnishing Project is working with the client to choose a layout for the space. Since it's our own project, we are our own clients!

As I mentioned in the previous post, the room we're transforming is very awkwardly shaped. There are lots of doors, the room slants, and there is a built-in window bench. Due to this difficult configuration of space, we decided to mock up a few different layouts in AutoCAD to ensure that real furniture could actually fit in the space. Typically rough sketches would suffice for allowing the client to see the layout opportunities for their space, but precision was key in this case. The layouts had to have:

• a desk (preferably two)
• chairs (preferably two)
• a sleeper couch 

So here we go!

Layout A: This is a basic arrangement, utilizing the right wall for my desk and the couch. The desk is a little too small for the type of school & business work I anticipate doing in the future.

Layout B: This layout features the main desk near the closet, providing a location for a printer, while also being close to the Ethernet port near the main door. The smaller desk in the corner can be used for my computer work, but again is too small for any layout or drafting work.

Layout C: This layout utilizes the right wall for the full desk space, leaving the window seat open as an alternate seating space to the couch. However, it's a tight squeeze between the desk and the wall to the bathroom.

Layout D: In this layout, there are two different sized desks that are arranged more towards the center of the room. It seems a little tight.

Layout E: This last layout places the desks around the edges, leaving access to the window bench. Also like Layout B, having the main desk near the closet is ideal.

Given the need for large desk space for me and the proximity of the main desk to the closet, we decided to go with Layout E.

Up next is the exciting part, determining the style, where we choose the aesthetic for the room.  Do we want Modern? Traditional? Eclectic? Glam? Check back for the next post to find out!

{Rashida}

The Office: Setting the Stage

While our first real project for Flashbent is underway, we also have a little project of our own: converting a bedroom into our home office. We currently have an office, but it's really only a place where my hubby works, plus the space is small and the furniture is too big.

The goal of this project is to:

• Provide a space in which I can do my school work (so I am not doing it on my favorite place... the kitchen table)
• Create a space that is ready to meet with potential clients
• Provide a space for Ben to still do work, as this would be his new office as well

We are treating ourselves like one of our own clients so we can solidify our process, deliverables, and time frame. To use the tech industry's term, we will be "eating our own dog food."

This space is going to have to accomplish a lot:

• It needs to provide computer space and potentially layout space for me and my projects
• It needs to be a space for Ben to work with multiple monitors
• It needs to double as a guest room
• It will also need to serve as a "man cave" of sorts

Given the room's awkward small shape, we have an added challenge of furnishing the room without completely blocking windows, doors, and pathways.

Small bedroom with barely any wall space and a lot of doors.

In the next post, I'll talk about the different layouts I created to meet our goals and design challenges.

Stay tuned,

{Rashida}

Introducing... Flashbent!

After a year of interior design school and with some hearty instruction under my belt, I present to you Flashbent. We finally started our own company that not only provides interior design services, but also event planning/coordination, personalized web shoppes, and potentially more to come!

Simple logo that is clean and crisp.
Purposefully does not shout "interior design" since the company encompasses many fields.

We are a husband and wife team whose mission is to use the creative gifts God has given us to serve others (1 Peter 4:10). The name Flashbent is precisely that. Flash is to show or showcase. Bent is a natural talent or inclination. So Flashbent is to show our God-given gifts.

Specifically for Interiors, the goals of the company is to provide interior design and decoration services for residences in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area. This can include floorplan design, floorplan remodels,  color consultations, furniture selection/acquisitions, and furniture arrangement.

We also have our first real (as in not family) Interiors client in San Francisco!!! A huge thank you to my colleague (Anna) for recommending me! As the design process unfolds, I will post more about the color and furniture selections.

Stay tuned!

{Rashida}

Lighting Spec Sheet Project

Fundamentals of Lighting was an eye-opening class that I took in the Fall of 2012. I did not imagine how important lighting and layers of light was until this class. See my post entitled "Light it Up" about the layers of light.

For our final project, we were to design a lighting and switch plan for a young, single male in his thirties who designs custom motorcycles. He rents a city apartment that is a Live/Work space with a lot of exposed construction elements. His current furniture is Mid Century Modern and the lighting fixtures should coordinate with that style.

We received the floorplan and our teacher set us loose.

These were all of the decorative, task, and display lighting fixtures that I used in the design. Also included were the ambient lighting fixtures, which were basically can lights.

I used multiple layers of light in many of the spaces and developed a lighting plan with a lighting legend:

 Each symbol corresponds with a specific lighting fixture listed on this "Spec Sheet".

For details on the the light fixtures, such as photos and other lighting dimensions, I put together a Lighting Fixture Cut Sheet with all of the manufacturer documentation.

All in all, this project definitely taught me how intricate it is to put together a lighting plan, but it also showed me just how many fixtures were needed to have a well-balanced lighting plan in a project. It was very eye-opening.

{Rashida}

Residential Project: Choosing Textiles

In my Introduction to Textiles class at Chabot, we are learning about the properties of different fabrics and their uses. Our first assignment was to select a series of fabrics for a living and dining room space that we had to draw to scale.

The criteria was as follows:

• fabrics | a minimum of 3 patterned (more than one color, not tone on tone) fabrics in each room 
• spaces | dining and living rooms must be open to each other somehow
• measurements | walls to be 6 inches thick and both spaces need to have a combined area of approximately 600 square feet total
• scale | 1/2" scale on 11" X 17" paper
• furniture + decor | living room needs to have six specified items, dining room room needs to have 4
• presentation | fully color rendered floorplan, 3" x 3" samples of each fabric, and written descriptions of textile fibers

This assignment initially posed as a challenge for me because my design aesthetic is very minimal in terms of colors and patterns. But as a designer, I know that it is important to be nimble and flexible because my clients are not going to be just like me. So, I took this assignment as an opportunity to learn, grow, and expand my skill-set.

I am very intrigued by the Moroccan lattice designs and used that as inspiration as I began to explore patterned textiles.

Different lattice patterns that I used as inspiration for the final design.

Simultaneously, I began to create many floor plan iterations of my adjoining living and dining spaces. The many iterations occurred because plotting on AutoCad at 1/2" scale was posing to be a problem.

My first hand-drafted iteration of the floor plan. It ended up being too large of a footprint and wouldn't fit on the 11x17 paper.

There was not enough clearance for some of the furniture in this iteration.

This pretty much ended up being the final design, with a minor adjustment to the ottoman selection.

Eventually, I found a design that fit and went through a process of pairing fabrics together and pairing fabrics with furniture to see how they complemented each other.

This is what I ended up with:

I am very pleased with the final product (as was my professor). You can find the full presentation, with a detailed look of the fabrics and furniture selections here: Moroccan Twist Textiles Assignment.

I am now excited about working with different patterns in fabric and can't wait until I get to implement textiles in a new design.

Cheers,
{Rashida}