It’s said you can tell a lot about people by looking at
them, but the truth is you might be able to learn even more by
looking at the places they live.
Just like painting or fashion, car or furniture design, interior
decorating is an art form. And whether you’re a willing Da
Vinci or not, the room you live in is an artistic statement
expressing you. Modern artists have recently been recreating entire
historic rooms and including them in museum exhibitions.
“It’s creative arts,” said Sandra Costa, an
interior design project consultant. “(A room is) a
composition. Like in music you have to have harmony, rhythm and
rhyme. Without these things you’ll walk into a room and be
uncomfortable.”
Cheri Messerli, a fourth-year design student, isn’t
allowed to paint her apartment walls so instead she has covered
them ornamentally to make the room comfortable. They’re
adorned with her own drawings of weird random objects, a giant pink
lamp in the shape of a soft-serve ice cream cone, a poster with
trees and sketches on it she made for the Art & Design prom
spring quarter, and a huge red bulletin board covered with more
drawings and stickers.
She says the atmosphere is child-like ““ the stickers are
of Sanrio favorites like Hello Kitty ““ and colorful. Her
room, like so many songs, stories and films, is designed to
inspire.
“It keeps me wanting to work on stuff. I put up stuff I
like so it reminds me why I’m doing what I’m
doing,” Messerli said. “It drives me to be
creative.”
As a design student Messerli has an advantage over the average
collegiate interior designer, because she knows how to work with
space and visuals. This is essential, because a room’s
functionality is at least as important as the visual appeal.
“You’ll get maybe one percent of a percent of an
artistic designer who’s totally off the wall who’ll be
recognized as a genius, and not necessarily have any
functionality,” said Costa, likening a non-functional room
design to a really good looking chair that no one can sit in.
“For a room of a student who’s studying, the layout
of the room is just as important as other purchases. Like the
lighting setup needs to be comfortable or their study habits will
be worse,” Costa added.
Another fourth-year design student, Heidi Fikstad, designs her
room as a model of functionality mixed with unconventional
style.
“I want it to make as much space as it possibly
can,” Fikstad said.
To this end she is constructing a loft for her bed ““ she
couldn’t find a 3-foot loft at any store. She’s
considering upholstering the bed and loft frame both so it will be
soft if she runs into it and so it won’t just look like
wood.
Fikstad’s apartment also has a sense of color that would
blow Renoir or Picasso’s mind. She has painted her main room
a brownish purple, the bathroom is being finished with a dark
purple and gold, while the vanity room is now dirty shades of
yellow and green.
Messerli’s covered walls further reflect a need for
practical efficiency, which she also brings to her designs as a
student and artist.
“The layout on the wall is important to me. It’s
cluttered, but not disorganized. Like in work I like a lot of
stuff, but I also like to keep it clean,” Messerli said.
The art of room design is on display now more than ever, from
museum exhibits to pedestrian exhibitionists popping up all over
the Internet whose rooms can be viewed by anyone with the click of
a mouse.
UCLA student Graham Haynes, includes a scrolling picture of his
old room with rotating lines of poetry at the bottom in the
portfolio section of his Web site. The room holds mounted swords, a
large capital G over the bed, a well-placed mirror, a DJ area, and
a high-tech computer setup, coalescing for a sleek space of red,
white, black and tans. The shot of his room is included on the site
alongside creative photographs, drawings and original computer
animations.
As creative as some people get with their rooms, not everybody
needs to have plans for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in mind.
According to Costa, meditation can be just as important as
inspiration when thinking about rooms. Many people, she says, are
stressed out and want to avoid overabundances and in-your-face
design for something more quiet and restful.
It’s clear that whatever the preference, a person’s
room is, or should be, designed to be just that. And while nobody
really knows if a hundred years from now art types will look back
at pictures of a Sproul Hall dorm room and consider it the height
of post-modern design, the way a room is decorated will always be
fodder for aesthetic critique and personality analysis.
“I have piles of books around, my closet’s open so
you can see all my clothes and those are colorful,” Messerli
said. “It’s definitely a reflection of
myself.”