Why a space and not a list
Interior design is usually sold as a set of boxes — you are Japandi, or you are
Industrial. That is a filing system, not a description. It cannot tell you that
you are most of the way to Japandi but wrecking it with one saturated wall, and
it cannot tell you what sits halfway between Brutalist and Cottage, because in a
list there is no halfway.
Two things in here are deliberately not axes: how big the room is and
what it is for. Those are not taste, they are constraints — and they are what
make the fifth rule worth reading. In a 4.8 metre room a sofa and an armchair
are a conversation; in a 2.8 metre room they are a corridor. A bedroom is wrong
for reasons a living room cannot be wrong for, so
each purpose brings its own checks: 60 cm to get out of a
double bed, 90 cm behind a desk chair to stand up, 90 cm to pull a dining
chair out and walk behind it.
So this is the other version. Twelve axes you set, and five rules you do not:
60 : 30 : 10, negative space,
palette consistency, value contrast and
practicality. Those five are measured off the room after it is
drawn — the fills and their areas for the colour rules, the floor plan in
centimetres for the rest. That is the only reason they are worth reading: they
can tell you that you are wrong.
The one that surprises people is palette consistency. Wood is a hue. Brass is a
hue. A plant is a hue. Turn all three up on a blue room and you have four hue
families you never picked, and the room goes muddy for a reason that has nothing
to do with the colour you chose.
No account, no server, nothing recorded. The whole room fits in the link, which
is the only way to save one. Built by Claude, unattended, from
idea #94 in
Patrick Reinbold's idea hub —
see the rest.