Category: interior designer

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Interior Design Buzz Words – Trends and Which Bug You?

English: Selection of Danish Modern chairs at ...
English: Selection of Danish Modern chairs at the Danish Design Center, Copenhagen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Modern vs Contemporary: Contemporary is usually something that is modern or recent looking yet which takes something ‘good’ from the past such as, for example, GOOD traditional materials. Modern may sometimes (and probably incorrectly) infer a degree of futuristic design.

Vintage vs Retro vs Reproduction: Something vintage is from its original period. Retro is something that has been recently made in the style of an older piece or period. Reproduction is a copy of an item some time after its original period has finished. A fake is a reproduction that is specifically designed to be passed off as an original.

Selective indulgence: You probably haven’t got the budget to have a fully indulgent design. So instead you choose to be indulgent on certain concept or focus pieces that make a statement.

Organic – This can mean ‘eco’ in modern parlance. But you should also be aware that others use it to mean natural in a very broad sense – for example to how your entire scheme works together and fits to the space.

Energy: This is more about emotions and feelings than the vividness of colours or eye-catchingness of objects.

Re-purpose – this means more than just to re-use something. Yes you re-use it but you re-use it for a different purpose.

Diversified Portfolio: You have more than just taupe in the photos of your past work 😉 Your portfolio will show different types of projects, say, a classic villa and a contemporary restaurant

Collaborative spaces – allow spaces for group work but also allow such spaces to be able to be used and re-used for different functions or groups.

What do you think?or what is your bug bear?

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Interior Designers – Where are my customers?

English: Interior designer J.C. Hryb of Style de Vie and Twenty Gauge (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What do you mean “you have no back-links“. You must have back-links. Everyone should have back-links. Shouldn’t they?

Aren’t they really important?

Can my blog/website survive without them?

Let’s see shall we? Read on…

Some Interior Designers will use their blog or website as a means of lead generation and then of course that leads to REVENUE. To such people, where their website/blog appears in search results WILL affect how many leads they get. If you are one of those designers whose website is a branding statement or a follow-up to a business card or a place to get directions to your office, then maybe where your blog/website appears in Google searches is not so relevant. IE IF the target person for your company knows the name of your company then they are going to type in that name and, more often than not, you’ll pop up pretty soon…unless you are called BBC Interior Design or CNN Designers or something along those lines! You get the drift?

It is a fact that the more genuine links you have to your website the higher you will appear in Google searches than would otherwise be the case. Just go back and read that again and note the word GENUINE.

So what we do on this site periodically is link to the blogs and website of interior designers…new and old. Known and not known. We share our ‘likes’ indiscriminately.  IF we do that we are doing you a favour! (So kind). Yet in the process of doing that we often add a post to our blog with your information in it. Oh and that boosts the frequency of change on our site…which Google also likes and so we benefit. (Not so kind…more of selfish perhaps?..not really we ALL gain). These kind of back-links are good. They are genuine. They might help subscribers to our blog find out new interesting stuff, perhaps even from their competitors. Google kind-of recognise this and credit us both for it. Cool.

But now let’s go a little deeper and get to the home truths. Why would I link to your web site? No really … why? What is so great about it? There are a LOT of interior designers website out there (I mean a real LOT) is yours really so different? Do you copy other’s images and comment on them? That’s OK you are adding your own original content to someone else’s original image. I’d prefer to see YOUR pictures of YOUR projects and YOUR comments, that would be better but I can live with reading your thoughts and views and opinions – they are often funny and interesting.

Do you just put on pretty pictures and sleek images and have a really nice looking site. That’s potentially great. I’ll link to it once. BUT I WILL NEVER COME BACK. EVER. There you go you got me…and then you let me go.

You’ve got to have compelling, original content that changes regularly. If you have that EVERYTHING works; I come back Google thinks you’re wonderful and so on.

It’s a bit hard to do though isn’t it. Finding the time to write perhaps 2 or 3 times a week. You can be original and maybe even funny for a few months but it gets harder after that. Sorry just stating a ‘fact’ there, no magic solutions. Be creative, perhaps? That’s your job right?

Anyway. You’ve come to the point where you are running out of stuff to say and you remember that those back-links are darned good things to have. So you go with a company who you pay a bit of cash to to create links to your site from hundreds of pseudo-fake sites that they have created. This used to kind-of work. But the people at Google are clever, they constantly try to stop you cheating. SO this works much less well than it used to.

Also again think what are these companies going to be linking back to? You have to have the content.

Let’s say you do not have a blog or perhaps one that you only wrote in for a month before giving up as no-one was reading it.   So again you go down the purchased back-links route. Why? what is it going to link to? You have to have the content. & it has to change to get real people to come back.

Actually IMHO if you are a start up company with a pagerank of 1 or zero. Then I’m pretty sure that these back-links would very quickly improve your pagerank to a 2 or 3.

So what to do?

Talk and write about your creativity. Your competitors will be interested for sure. THAT won’t benefit you at all. HOWEVER there are not many interior designers doing that, so when a potential customer sees your site some of them will notice.

People in the design industry should comment and re-publicise all our work more often (that’s kind of how Houzz works in  away if you think about it). When you share, you benefit, in the eWorld of Mr Google. You are opening up your secrets maybe, but those that share and participate in the online design community will gain the most from Mr Google. If you don’t share you may well keep your methods and clients secret but you may also never appear in Mr Google’s search results.

Thoughts welcomed. Creating false back-links could backfire and could cost you money. And we ALL know it is cheating but many of us still do it to beat the system.

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Interior Designers in 2012 – How Do People Find You On The Web?

Image via Wikipedia

The interior design world moves on and so does the way your clients use the internet to find you. Sometimes for the better and sometimes not.

Just after we have spent ages (days! weeks! months!…years?!) trying to figure out what search terms our clients might type into Mr Google, and then incorporate that into our online presences(s), we find they are morphing how they search into something new and far more sinister.

Would you believe it? In the design world, a place based on aesthetics, those darned potential customers are using images to find us. How annoying is that? It seems like only yesterday when we ignored images because we knew that google can’t really ‘see’ them and we balanced that by putting all the right words everywhere. We even got the odd first page google listing for some odd convoluted phrase that one client a year might potentially type!!

So now it seems that we have to go back to what we naively thought was right all along. All we have to do is just put lots of pretty pictures onto our site and the whole world will come flocking to our door.

Click To Read More Interior Design Articles
Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

Well, maybe! I’ll backtrack a little and explain where I’m coming from before everyone gets a little too excited!

I’ll come from one simple factoid. One of my interior design industry based web sites has about 500 hits a day. Not bad, I suppose. I looked into some of the stats a bit more last week and found that by far the most number of hits came from google. Fine. About 85% of the hits in fact. Nothing new there then? No.

But; there’s always a “but”.

When I delved deeper I found that 19% of the google hits were coming from the GOOGLE IMAGES part of the google search site. IE the bit where you type in ‘mohair velvet fabric’ (or whatever) and then find you have loads of pages returned to you, so you click on the images bit on the left hand side and it only shows you (in theory) lots of pretty pictures of mohair velvet fabrics. (As well as lots of other junk of course, but on the whole it’s not too bad).

19%. that’s quite a lot.

So I looked at different time frames and, yes, that 19% was pretty consistent over at least the last 6 months. Maybe 17%, maybe 23%, it varied. That’s still enough of a trend for me to believe it and I’m sure it would hold true if I  had bothered to look further back in time.

So what’s going on here then?

Well firstly it showed that I am doing some things right. I am putting images alongside my musings. It makes it easier to read, pretty pictures – some perhaps even relevant – just like a magazine. Also for the images to have been recognised by google then I must also have tagged them (the ALT tag if you want to be more precise in HTML terms). So yes I had images in my musing and they were correctly tagged images. That is, the images had a bit of text manually put on them by me. To make matters better I had also called the images the same thing (broadly) as the tags I intended to use.

Google looks at:

1. The name of your JPEG;

2. The image size;

3. The alt tags you give to the image; and peripherally at

4. The physical colour scale of the image (it can recognise it is mostly green, for example).

The first three of these are very important the 3rd much less so.

So you’ve just done a great design job for one of your better clients. You upload some pics of the rooms to your online portfolio and voila! 100s of people will beat their way to your internet door!…er no.

Let’s say you had this great picture of the main room. So you upload img_1325.jpg to your site and you cleverly ALT-TAG it as “main-room-31-randomstreet-localtown”.

Not good. Assuming it was not a tiny thumbnail image here is something along the lines of what you should have done:

1. Called it “contemporary-modern-home-belgravia.jpg” – or something similarly appropriate; and

2. Tagged it as “contemporary, modern, home, Belgravia” – or something similarly appropriate.

You get the idea? The keywords you have already discovered that work in the text of your writings now also need to be judiciously applied to your images. Get cracking!

Here are some of the posts I previously wrote or you can find them all in one go by <clicking here>

1. How to get links to your web site 

2. Interior Designers: Why does no-one visit your web site 

3. Interior Design Marketing Strategies 

4. Effective Ad Writing For Interior Designers on Facebook

5. Five Crucial Bits For Your Facebook Business Page

6. Seven Facebook Mistakes Interior Designers Make

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A Chat With Verity du Sautoy – Her Thoughts On Winter Fabrics

Luxury Silk velvet From KOTHEA
Truly beautiful Cashmere Silk Velvet by KOTHEA

KOTHEA Fabric Picks For A Chilly Winter’s Day
With Verity du Sautoy of KOTHEA.

We love the seasons. All have their beauties and all have touched our senses in memorable ways over the years. Winter is no exception: lower, more balanced light; quietness and chaos with both the shopping and the weather; festive celebrations; the cuddle of a loved one; the hope and expectation of early spring flowers grasping for rare and tiny glimmers of light; and, perhaps, the welcomed warmth of a beautiful fabric.

Some of my best memories are centred on family: a warm fire; a little baby; or a bouncing toddler. Then an old children’s classic on the iPlayer watched on my Mac as it balances precariously on an elegant coffee table. I stroke my children’s hair with one hand and rest my other hand on my sofa. A generous cushion is warm, encapsulating and a bit of fun for the little ones to hide under. The curtains are not yet fully drawn but they smooth the boundary to the cold outside and give us tantalising glimpses of the world beyond – should we venture too close to the sheers that offer the final, soft protection from the elements.

Dominika B Tana Lawn

I work for a fabric company. I love fabric. I can’t pretend that it (fabric) is a be-all and end-all to life and that somehow it will make your life complete. It can’t. But what it clearly can do is complete the sensory experiences in the parts of life that, if you choose, you have control over…the parts of your home. Memories are not just photo-like snapshots in your brain; they are stored, multi-sensory splashes of emotion.

Here are my Winter picks. They are actual ‘picks’ that I’ve recently purchased or are about to purchase.

Take my sofa as an example. My sofa isn’t Continue reading “A Chat With Verity du Sautoy – Her Thoughts On Winter Fabrics”

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Wyzenbeek – Martindale – Abrasion Testing

If you were given one pound for every time an interior designer asks which upholstery fabric is most durable, you would retire quickly. The answer is more complicated than a single test result can convey, and understanding why is useful when specifying fabric for a client.

What Abrasion Tests Actually Measure

Martindale and Wyzenbeek are abrasion tests. They measure one specific property: how many times a fabric can be rubbed against a standard surface before showing visible wear. They do not measure fibre strength, yarn construction, weave complexity, resistance to soiling, light fastness, or how well the fabric performs when cleaned. All of these variables also affect how long an upholstery fabric lasts in use.

There is a close relationship between fibre strength and yarn strength. Yarns are twisted to add strength, and a tighter twist generally produces a stronger yarn. This is measured in twists per inch or per metre. Tightly twisted yarns tend to be smooth and dense. Weave design adds another layer of complexity. The same fibre in different weave constructions can produce very different abrasion results. A fabric’s rub count is the outcome of fibre, yarn, and weave working together, which is why a single figure cannot tell the whole story.

The Two Tests

Martindale is the standard used in the UK and Europe. Wyzenbeek is the standard used in the United States. The two tests use different motions, different abradants, and different specimen orientations. There is no reliable correlation between them, and a result on one test cannot be used to predict a result on the other.

With Wyzenbeek, tested to ASTM D4157, a piece of cotton duck fabric or wire mesh is rubbed in a straight back-and-forth motion across the fabric until noticeable wear or thread break occurs. Each back-and-forth motion is one double rub.

With Martindale, tested to BS EN ISO 12947, the abradant is worsted wool or wire mesh and the fabric specimen is circular. The rubbing follows a Lissajous figure-of-eight pattern rather than a straight line. Each complete figure of eight is one cycle.

Specification Thresholds

The following figures represent standard guidance for specifying by application. For heavy duty contract use, the recommended minimum is 30,000 Wyzenbeek double rubs or 40,000 Martindale cycles. For general contract use the minimum is 15,000 Wyzenbeek double rubs or 20,000 Martindale cycles. For heavy domestic use the minimum is typically 15,000 Martindale cycles. For general domestic use, 15,000 to 25,000 Martindale cycles covers most applications. For light domestic or occasional use, 10,000 to 15,000 Martindale cycles is generally acceptable.

At results above 100,000, the practical difference in longevity becomes less meaningful for most residential applications. The cleaning and maintenance regime applied to a fabric will have more influence on its service life than the difference between a 100,000 and a 200,000 rub count.

On the Validity of Test Results

Some commentators question the reliability of abrasion test results. In the UK, test houses are independent and operate under British Standards monitoring. No individual fabric company is large enough to influence results, and it is in no supplier’s interest to undermine the authority of the independent bodies that regulate the industry. UK Martindale figures can generally be taken at face value when supplied with a third party test certificate from an accredited laboratory.

For the full technical methodology of the Martindale test, rub count classifications by application, and a detailed Martindale versus Wyzenbeek comparison, see: The Martindale Rub Test: A Complete Guide for Interior Designers and Specifiers.

For a direct side-by-side comparison of the two test methods, see: Martindale vs Wyzenbeek: Rub Test by Abrasion Explained.

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Upholstery Velvet – Sourcing Luxury Velvet (Mohair) in The UK

Luxury Mohair Velvet For Upholstery
Luxury Mohair Velvet For Upholstery

Luxury Upholstery Velvet is notoriously difficult for interior designers to consistently source. Sourcing a generic velvet is easy enough but often velvets vary greatly in quality with many being relatively cheap and scoring relatively well with Martindale results but they just look ‘cheap’. The look and feel of the velvet are, after all, two of several important reasons why you are specifying it in the first place.

A further problem is composition. When, for example, you say you want a Mohair Velvet that is what you want: a velvet made out of Mohair and NOT lots of other things PLUS a bit of Mohair.

Whilst Mohair velvets are generally very good across the market they too can vary significantly in quality. So even when you buy a Mohair Velvet you are not necessarily getting the durable, luxurious, fantastic-looking product that you hoped for.

Further complications come when looking at Velvets made of a mix of yarns. Well, some of the mixed fibre yarns are actually excellent in quality!

So I guess I’m saying that there really is no sure and fast way of knowing what you are buying without actually seeing the fabric AND being assured of its technical characteristics, notably Martindale as we are considering upholstery here.

Most KOTHEA luxury upholstery velvets have inherent Martindale rub tests of in excess of 20,000 rubs with several collections exceeding 100,000 rubs for contract usage – 20,000 Martindale being eminently suitable for domestic upholstery.

In addition to non-velvet, textured upholstery we have many luxury velvets suitable for upholstery including Italian Silk Velvet (high quality, luxury velvet), Cashmere & Silk Velvet (the ultimate velvet), trevira Velvet (inherent fire retardancy), Mohair Velvet (high quality, luxury velvet),

Most of our velvet is available by the metre with no minimum quantities.

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Fabric Tips #13: Velvet Curtain Making

Image by tenz1225 via Flickr

Here are some additional pointers to consider when you are making a curtain using a velvet. Remember that a velvet is just a type of fabric and the fibre(s) that the velvet is made from is important.

So for example, we would always recommend that you line a curtain. This gives a superior appearance but also reduced the amount of light going through the fabric hence limiting as much as possible the effect of any fading.

If the velvet has a pile that can be flattened in one direction then we would recommend that you have the pile going downwards for SHINY velvet fabrics and PATTERNED VELVETS.

If however you make up the curtain with the pile upwards then this will deepen the colour so you could make the curtains this way for cotton velvets and Trevira Velvet and Mohair velvets.

These are general guidelines and it is not necessarily wrong if you make up the curtain ‘the other way’ just so long as you understand the implications to the finished look and performance of the material.

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Fabric Tips #12: Rolling a velvet

Image via Wikipedia

You’ve just ordered a new velvet and unrolled it to admire your purchase. But how do you re-roll it?

When you roll almost any fabric you should have the face on the inside. With a velvet this is the pile so you have the pile on the inside.

Some, but not all, velvet piles stand straight up others will ‘lay down’. for the former it does not matter which way you then roll the fabric (provided the pile is on the inside). However for typically longer pile which lays down (ie you can brush it flat with your hand in one direction only) then you should roll the fabric down the pile as you return it to its roll.

Hopefully that made sense. Good luck.

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Fabric Tips #11: Mohair Velvet – How To Store

Image via Wikipedia – Alpaca Wool can be made into luxurious alpaca velvet…if you can find it

How to store Velvet.

The same instructions apply to all velvets.

Some background first: As an interior designer you buy and handle many fabrics. You may have wondered why some fabrics come in rolls of up to 100m whereas other come in much smaller lengths. Is this because of their value? The likelihood of them being sold quickly enough? Or perhaps longer lengths of some fabrics would be just to heavy for someone in a warehouse to physically carry or indeed too heavy for a courier to carry? Or perhaps it’s something to do with the thickness of the roll?

Well there is some truth no doubt in all of these reasons and others to. But one very important consideration with a velvet and especially with a Mohair velvets is the weight of the fabric and the weight of the fabric ON ITSELF. Because velvets have a pile they are thicker and heavier than other fabrics as they contain more material; similarly some velvets such as many mohair velvets have a dense pile…again more fabric and more weight.

There comes a point when the sheer weight of the roll of fabric becomes too much for the pile of the first part of the wrapped fabric on the roll and the inherent weight of all the fabric can cause damage to the pile. So velvets and especially mohair velvets have smaller lengths on the roll. Sometimes 25m but sometimes also 40m and 50m per roll.

So the length of fabric on a roll will be impacted by the weight of the fabric per linear metre AND the fact that a pile fabric can be more affected by added weight than other fabric.

So, how to store.

1. Store horizontally

2. Store with no other, external weight applied to the fabric.

3. Covered up to avoid exposure to dirt and dust i the air  -especially if stored for long periods

Typically you will find that many of our velvets come to you in special containers where the velvet is on a roll and suspended by special cardboard ends in the boxes. For small volumes of velvet on a single roll there is often no need for these special containers. Where the velvets are supplied in suspended roll containers it is safe to store the velvet in this form. Ideally youwould have a horizontal racking system for rolls of fabric as lengths can easily be cut off as and when you need them but cleary most interior designers do not have this facility.

The safest method of course is to let your supplier hold the stock and order cut lengths from them. It de-risks you damaging the fabric. Unless of course the supplier can specifically reserve entire rolls just for you, you would have the potential problem of dye lot or batch variation of colour with many fabric dyes. There would normally be a charge for an additional service such as this.

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Upholstery Linen – Sourcing Luxury Upholstery Linen in the UK

Upholstery Linen
Upholstery Linen

Upholstery Linen is notoriously difficult for interior designers to source. Sourcing linens for curtains is easy enough but often linens are not woven with sufficient strength to score Martindale results that are high enough to warrant using the fabric for upholstery.

Some suppliers can be a little evasive and will quote the weight of the linen as a measure of the linen’s quality. The implication is that the higher the weight the better suited the fabric will be for upholstery. There is some truth in that implication but you cannot say for certain that high-weight linen is inherently suitable for upholstery. Get the Martindale!

Most KOTHEA luxury upholstery linens have inherent Martindale rub tests of around 20,000 rubs with one range further strengthened to 85,000 rubs for contract usage – 20,000 Martindale being eminently suitable for domestic upholstery.

Furthermore, when buying upholstery- (or curtain-) linen you need to know whether or not it will shrink when washed. Linen ALWAYS shrinks. So what you have to find out is whether or not it has been pre-shrunk before you buy it. A common way of pre-shrinking linen is through the sanforisation process.

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

Here are the details of our new 2011 upholstery linens that are named Recline, Relax and Restful. We have many others, these are just the new ones:

Name: Recline

Usage: Luxury Contract Upholstery

Colourways: 24

Width:   135cm

Comp:  54% Li 35% Co 11% Pa

Weight: >350g/m2

Notes:   Martindale >85,000

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Name: Relax

Usage: Luxury Domestic Upholstery

Colourways: 24

Width:  135cm

Comp: 100% Li

Weight: >265 g/m2

Notes:   Martindale >15,000

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Name: Restful

Usage: Heavyweight Luxury Domestic Upholstery

Colourways: 4

Width:  135cm

Comp: 100% Li

Weight: >470 g/m2

Notes:   Martindale >45,000

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