The Decisions an Interior Designer Makes That You'd Never Notice
Sometimes 12" can make all the difference, and it's these little nuances we look at when we design a space at Allito Spaces. Where can we flex and where can we contract? Knowing this is what unlocks hidden possibilities.
Revising and creating a space plan is one of my favorite activities, I get almost giddy when it is time to play. I've always been an analytical person who loves solving puzzles and just happens to be a bit competitive too. It runs in the family, what can I say? My dad was a math major turned lawyer, my brother is an engineer and my other brother a professional sports bettor…my poor sister in law refuses to play Catan or any of the other board games we play at our family reunions because she knows how the Arons get.
Digging into a floorplan is almost like game night and I love the ability to really influence how someone lives. I want to give you just one small example of how this plays out in real life.
In this La Jolla village project, we were working with space constraints, which is often the case. The laundry room was a chosen area where space would be forfeited, but a laundry room is a high functioning room and its layout can really make day to day life more efficient or more frustrating. This particular laundry room backed up to a bathroom that would primarily be used for when company came over for dinner or entertaining. There was not a need for storage. When my team and I analyzed the floorplan, we discovered that we could lose a foot in the bathroom by using a shallower depth vanity which would then gain us a whole wall of additional cabinetry in the laundry room.
We lost nothing, but we gained the ability to hang clothes over the sink, store all of the cleaning essentials for the laundry room, create dedicated storage for dog supplies and a feeding station.
But sometimes we have to pivot from even the best laid construction plans once the build process starts. And in this case, we were forced to continue our problem solving in the laundry room as it turned out that we would need extra storage in the ceiling for HVAC equipment and it had to be accessible.
We were going to have to drop the ceiling somewhere and did not want to do it in a bedroom or communal living spaces, so the laundry was the easy target. Here we did have to make a compromise. We would lose the ability to do a built in washer and dryer and we needed our laundry hanging system to be movable.
In the end I think this was the right place to steal some ceiling space from, and the laundry still turned out completely stunning and functional to boot!
If this post has you looking at your own floor plan a little differently, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out through our contact page.