Worst Home Designs

Normally, we like to celebrate great interior design, but today we're going to take a look at some of the most unpleasant home blunders around, from neon velour curtains to hideously chintzy sofas, and try to learn some valuable lessons from them.

Our first horrible home is this explosion of 70s excess, filled with over-the-top colours and horrendous clashes. Some of the furniture, such as the retro coffee table, may look good in a much less busy environment, but taken as a whole, this house is a migraine-inducing blizzard of optical confusion. Such bold and bright colours need to be contrasted with some plainer areas, to create a harmonious feel.

This home defines excess - how would you tone it down?



Could you get to sleep in this room?

Next up, the owners of this house have tried to stamp their personality all over their home, but only succeeded in creating a mess of poorly-thought through and hugely distracting features. First up is the conservatory, with its massive indoor rock garden and flimsy, unpleasant freestanding bar. Rather than go for such an ugly and inconveniently placed unit, the owners should have chosen a sideboard that could be moved to the side of the room if necessary. The indoor garden is bound to attract insects, and requires a great deal of maintenance, while the bar has not been designed with any kind of style in mind. The ugly pool table cover and zebra print rug don't do the room any favours either.

Would you like to spend time in here?

And now through to the bathroom - don't worry, that's paint on the walls. By attempting to create a homely, hand made look, the owners of this house have slipped up badly, and created a truly nauseous bathroom.

Don't worry, it's paint, but it's still unpleasant

Believe it or not, these kitchen cabinets aren't dirty - they've been rubbed with old teabags to give the impression of age, but the place looks smoke damaged. A distressed look can be stylish, but keep it subtle, and make sure it doesn't end up being just distressing.

This kitchen looks like a bomb has hit it

Our final home is in Mexico, and its owners obviously have a peculiar affinity for Louis Vuitton:

How would your neighbours react
if you did this to your home?

So what is the lesson here? All of these houses suffer from being too busy, and the owners have got carried away with implementing a style without considering how it actually looks. So, before you redecorate your home, consider your options carefully, and make sure that you come up with a careful plan that makes the best use of your space.

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How To Choose The Right Sideboard

Sideboards are highly versatile pieces of furniture that can really help you to win the war on cluuter, but with so many styles and looks available, it can sometimes be difficult to know where to start. That's where this handy guide comes in - we'll take you through the different types of sideboard, and help you to find the one that is just right for you.

This contemporary wooden sideboard
combines modern style with traditional warmth

Before you can pick the right sideboard, you need to think about the style you want to achieve in your dining room, and how a well chosen sideboard can help you to succeed. If you want to take advantage of a traditional sideboard's air of refinement and sophistication, then you can either look for an antique, or find a reproduction, and use it to bring a traditional charm to the room.

Traditional rooms are fairly straightforward, as selecting the right sideboard is usually a matter of going for the piece that most appeals, but if you are looking for a sideboard for a modern room, it can prove to be more tricky. Finding the right sideboard for a contemporary setting is hard, because most modern interior design relies on unusual combinations of texture and style, and an item as large as a sideboard can easily dominate a room.

The best way to proceed is to consider the materials and styles that are already at work in your room, and then try to find a sideboard that will harmonise with them. For instance, if you've gone for the classic white minimalist look, with a glass dining table, sleek leather dining chairs, and wooden flooring, why not choose a wooden sideboard to accent the floor, instead of a more modern storage unit that might make the room cold. The subtle air of charm that surrounds a wooden sideboard can be a really useful way to introduce some warmth into a contemporary space.

So make sure when you're browsing sideboards that you consider not just the style of the design, but the effect that each piece would have on your room.

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Worst Kitchen Designs

We've all seen one - a kitchen that is lost somewhere underneath a hideous decor scheme, cupboards fronted with ugly doors, badly-planned spaces with no room for food preparation. Today, we're taking a look at some of the worst kitchens out there.

Our first catastrophic kitchen is going for the crispness and clarity of a monochrome design, but is lost in a wilderness of busy lines and shapes, cluttered worktops and a rather horrible border around the top of the wall (and used as an accent beneath the cooker's fan hood) that features some rather portly dancing chefs. The problem with trying to achieve a harmonious simplicity is that if you fail to keep things organisied, and don't make sure that there is a place for everything, you soon end up with a kitchen disaster rather than the cool, sleek space that you had in mind. The lesson here is to be realistic about storage and clutter, and to decorate with your family's habits in mind. Try using wooden sideboards or dressers to maximise your storage.

This kitchen needs to be simplified

Our second kitchen nightmare is this awfully bodged repair job spotted by an estate agent. The owners of this kitchen have tried to hide a hole caused by moisture damage using the lid of a storage box. What's more, they then put their home on the market, leaving this terrible job to try and tempt buyers. Needless to say, the estate agent was unable to sell the property until the hole was properly attended to.

Would you buy this house?

Our next kitchen demonstrates the need for consistency and thoroughness. While the pink cupboard doors may not be to everybody's taste, they do speak of a clear design vision. The whole room is let down by the hideous window covering, which resembles a piece cut from the world's largest and loudest Hawaiian shirt. Remember - even if every other aspect of a room is flawless, even one detail out of place can ruin a room.

Attend to the details if you want to avoid this

Our final kitchen is a mess of clashing floral designs and dull, drab '70s wooden cabinets, that is sure to bring on a migraine should you find yourself spending more than five minutes looking at it. Make sure you don't overload your kitchen with patterns, as they can make a room look extremely busy. Instead, keep things simple, as no room attracts clutter like a kitchen, and your decor needs to create a clean, inviting look.

Could you put up with this?

American lifestyle presenter Rachael Ray held a contest to find America's worst kitchen. If you want to see the winning kitchen, and how it was fixed, check out this page, which recaps the whole contest, and see how you can turn a kitchen nightmare into a culinary dream.

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How to Create a Contemporary Dining Room

In the age of the celebrity chef, the pressure to create sumptuous restaurant quality meals means that even the most friendly dinner party is expected to be a dazzling culinary display in a sophisticated, stylish setting. If you want your dinner parties to be fondly remembered, it's important to make sure that your dining room is up to scratch, and one of the best ways to ensure that your dining area inspires relaxed conversation is to go for a sleek, elegant contemporary look that will also help your food to look irresistible.

A contemporary dining room is defined by its fresh and innovative approach to colour, texture and space, which makes it hard to successfully navigate the huge range of modern dining room furniture and accessories. That's why we've provided this guide, which is intended to help you to achieve a contemporary look that is warm, inviting, and which suits your individual tastes and personality.

Colour

Contemporary style demands an intelligent approach to colour, a departure from the norm. Try using bold, unusual colours with modern ideas like feature walls to really give your dining room that cutting-edge feel. If you need some inspiration, check out Fired Earth's stunning range of wall colours, specially selected by Kevin MacLeod, architect, designer, and presenter of Channel 4's Grand Designs.

Texture

This room uses a wooden dining table to
bring warmth to its contemporary look

Use of texture can really make an impact - when you think of a contemporary styled dining room, you may get an image of sleek, glass or metal furniture and unbroken straight lines, but in recent years, designers have incorporated the more warm, soft and inviting textures of more traditional materials such as solid oak, pine or ash. This allows you to build your dining room around a wooden dining table, for a great combination of traditional character and contemporary design, saving more modern textures such as metal or glass for other items and accessories, providing variety.

Space

The fabric blind used on this window
maximises the light

The use of space is really what defines contemporary style, with a focus on clean, uncluttered surroundings and the creative use of lighting. Use sideboards or chests to provide enough storage to keep your surfaces clear, and make sure you get curtains or blinds that allow you to maximise the light that comes from your windows, but which also look good when drawn. Make sure that you choose a lighting scheme that keeps the ceiling clear - think recessed halogen spotlights and carefully positioned low level lighting.

If you need a little extra inspiration, Channel4.com have a great gallery of contemporary dining room design ideas, which is well worth a look.

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How To Use Floors To Enhance Your Furniture

The choice of flooring can totally define the look of a room - when visitors arrive, the floor will dictate how they perceive the size, shape, function and style of your space, and by selecting the right flooring choice, you can make sure that your furniture is properly presented and your home looks its best.

Choose a flooring option that is
sympathetic to your furniture's style

Changing your floor is not as expensive as you might think- there are a huge range of options to suit all budgets. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Although they aren't as hard wearing as traditional carpets, foam-backed carpet is very cheap, and allows you to make a quick, cheap impact on a room. Make sure that if you have heavy wooden furniture you invest in some rubber or foam pads for the bases to prevent them from permanently marking the carpet.

Carpeting can stifle the style of modern furniture, especially if the carpet has a bold pattern, but when combined with more traditional pieces can help to create a warm, cosy effect.

Modern furniture relies on clean lines, and to reflect this, it works best with a sleek wooden parquet floor. If you want a wooden floor, but haven't quite got the money to spare, try installing some click-system, wood-effect laminate - it's cheap, and properly fitted it can be almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Make sure you place any large items of furniture, such as coffee tables or sideboards, on top of rugs or rubber pads to prevent them from marking the floor.

If your room is split into different areas for differing purposes, like an open-plan kitchen with a lounge area or a lounge/dining room, then it can be very effective to vary the flooring according to function, using ceramic tile for kitchen areas, carpet for lounge, and laminate for dining. This also allows you to create differently styled areas within the same room - a sleek contemporary dining set nestled at the end of a more cosy carpeted lounge, for example.

Make sure you consider the consequences of your new flooring choice - Ceramic tiles have the benefit of being easy to clean and totally waterproof, but they can become dangerously slippy, so make sure to use rugs to provide grip and warmth. Likewise, laminate flooring looks great, but can quickly deteriorate if used in a damp environment like a bathroom or kitchen, or in hotter rooms like conservatories.

A real wooden floor is great in any room, and really brings out the best in any type of furniture. It's a practical option too, as the wood can be sealed against moisture, and can naturally expand and contract with changes in temperature. The only drawback with wooden flooring is the cost and difficulty of installation.

If you're feeling adventurous, and think you've got what it takes to lay your own wooden floor, check out this youtube video which will show you exactly how it's done and warn you of some of the most common difficulties you may run into.

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Welcome to our new blog!

We are pleased to have finally got our blog up and running to go alongside our new PineSolutions website.

Keep an eye here for all the lastest furniture and interior design trends as well as all the lastest news from PineSolutions HQ.

If you haven't seen our new website - check it out www.pinesolutions.co.uk . There's a few things still to change but let us know what you think. We have a great selection of affordable solid oak, pine and painted furniture so you can give your home a new look for spring.

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