The interior design guide
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The interior design guide. A definitive knowledge base for interior designers.

From first principles to the finishing touches: shell, surfaces, space planning, furniture, electrics, plumbing and joinery, in the order a project runs.

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The Lexicon.

Every term, in plain words.

From hue and light reflectance to bonding and kick space, every term the guide uses has a short definition, what to know in practice and the pages that use it.

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The interior design guide.

A definitive knowledge base for interior designers.

Eleven chapters take a home from first principles to the moment you show it to the client. Start with Foundations and read in order, or search for a topic, a term or a rule of thumb.

Chapters.

Eleven steps, from principles to presentation.

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Where to go next.

Sections.

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Where to go next.

Negative space.

What it means in interior design.

Negative space is the empty area around and between objects. It gives important pieces room to read and gives the eye somewhere to rest.

In practice

Treat empty wall and floor as something you design, not space to fill. A bare stretch of wall beside a hero piece is what makes the piece.

Where the guide uses it

Related terms.

More from Foundations.

Hue

Hue is a colour’s family: red, yellow, blue-green and so on, its position on the colour wheel. It is what most people mean by “colour”, and usually the least important of the three dimensions in a room.

Value

Value is how light or dark a colour is, independent of its hue. A pale blue and a pale pink can share the same value.

Saturation

Saturation (or chroma) is a colour’s intensity: how far it is from grey. High saturation is vivid; low saturation is muted, dusty or greyed.

Complementary colours

Complementary colours sit opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as blue and orange or red and green. Placed together they intensify each other; mixed, they neutralise to grey.

Analogous colours

Analogous colours sit next to each other on the colour wheel, such as yellow-green, green and blue-green. They share a common hue, so they harmonise easily.

60-30-10 rule

The 60-30-10 rule is a rule of thumb for colour proportion: about 60% dominant colour, 30% secondary and 10% accent. It describes how much of each colour a room shows, not how many colours it has.

Anthropometrics

Anthropometrics is the measurement of the human body: heights, reaches, widths and how they vary between people. It is the data behind every seat height, worktop and doorway.

Proxemics

Proxemics is the study of how people use distance between one another, described by the anthropologist Edward T. Hall. He named four zones: intimate (to 45 cm), personal (45–120 cm), social (1.2–3.6 m) and public (beyond).

Plan

A plan is a horizontal section through a building, cut about 1.2 m above the floor and viewed from above. Cut walls are drawn heaviest or filled; everything below the cut is drawn lighter.

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