The best trick to take advantage of spaces in home

The best trick to take advantage of spaces in the home is not any technique to fold clothes or stack boxes. It is about something more conceptual: adequately conceiving the space.

In our opinion, it is essential to think about what we want to happen in each of these spaces, which often does not coincide with what usually happens.

Design places to turn them into the desired spaces

After all, spaces are places where certain things happen and these define them. In this way, the same place can be different spaces depending on what happens in them. If we think of a square in any city, we will see it clearly. The same place, a square, for example, becomes a different space on any given Tuesday at 11 am with older people walking or playing sports; at the exit of the schools with the boys and girls on the swings or on a Friday night with young people chatting before going out to party. Or in the same way, the same square can become a space for concerts during the festival or a book, craft, or food fair.

A space is defined by the things that happen in it. We design spaces because we not only design the place but also what we want to happen in them. For this reason, there are certain elements and proportions in some places and not others. For things to happen as we want, we have to have the essential elements and eliminate all those that do not collaborate or hinder us from enjoying that space as we would like.

A good example is the terraces, balconies, or patios. When the weather is bad, it is where to leave the bicycles, where that plant miraculously survives, or where leaves and dust accumulate. During spring and summer, we see it clearly. It’s time to reconquer those spaces and we do it by taking out some chairs, a small table, and a parasol because we want to enjoy vermouth and an aperitif outdoors. We want certain things to happen and we find a way to move that space forward, modifying the place.

How to use interior design to take advantage of spaces

If it is possible in our terraces, we can do the same with the rest of the places in our home or work spaces and redefine the different spaces depending on what we want to happen in them. Obviously, it is not always easy and there are limitations to overcome. We may lack space, budget to make changes or the orientation is not optimal, among other things. The grace of our job, as architects and interior designers, is to solve this puzzle made up of all these elements.

Our best weapon is a good custom furniture design that helps to redefine, distribute and link different spaces. But often just by removing elements and repositioning others, we can have a huge improvement. The key is to dare to maintain a global perspective in our approach. Well, often we focus on a specific area without facing a conception of the different places in relation to the spaces to be recreated. Our way of thinking about homes or offices often suffers from the capture of rooms, halls, closets, and shelves as pre-existing elements that condition a global vision of what we would like to see happen.

Designer’s way of thinking

In recent years, design thinking has become very popular among the management of teams and projects of all kinds. A novel terminology that is also descriptive of the method that design professionals recognize as their own and habitual: imagine the ideal final result and then adapt the path, the process for its realization.

In this way, the best trick to take advantage of spaces in the home is to imagine the final result and rethink the different places that make up our home so that they become the desired spaces. With this perspective, everything unnecessary will come out of the equation and we will ensure that all the elements are 100% functional in terms of what we want to happen, each space fulfilling its function in the best possible conditions.