See Our New Interior Designer-Inspired Mood Boards
Because buying flooring often means you’re looking to refurbish a room or even a whole home, it’s essential to see it as the first step in a well-thought-through interior design plan.
Your choice of vinyl or carpet – its colour, texture, fabric, and pattern – provides the basis for a template that will run through your decisions around the paint, wallpaper, curtains, blinds, furniture … even the way your rooms are laid out.
This means that a decision over new flooring has to take into consideration specific styles and fashions you might like to replicate through a room – and that’s why Harrisons Carpet has in-house designer Anita Shirley, who has created a series of mood boards to help homeowners visualise how a room might look depending on that initial choice.
But it’s not enough to have just a standard set of templates. The world of interior design – just like any form of fashion – is constantly evolving, and that’s why Anita creates updated series of mood boards to reflect ongoing trends and to ensure that homeowners who want to refresh, refurbish or redesign have the chance to do so with the latest styles.
Anita produces a new set of mood boards each year to keep up with the latest styles.
“There are a variety of ways in which a mood board collection evolves into being,” she says.
“It could be from market feedback, supplier developments, trend forecasts, environmental inspiration or a combination of all of the above.
“Generally, colour forecast trends come from companies like Resene, fashion magazines, fabric houses and – in New Zealand – tend to follow what comes out of Europe. This time, the main drivers are a more natural palette and the chance to bring in more colours through fabrics.”
The chance to show off various fabrics, carpet and vinyl planks is vital, Anita says, when building a room’s look from the carpet up – but it’s more about creating options than dictating what must happen.
“Franchisees have a set of four mood boards built on the four main colour choices people in New Zealand tend to go with: beige, chocolate brown, light grey and charcoal,” she says. “Then, from there, it’s just a matter of showing what fabrics you can choose and keeping everything in the right tone while mixing and matching. Most people find this problematic, and where they tend to go wrong – you can still mix up different textures and colours as long as you follow the same tone.
“For example, with a charcoal carpet you would follow charcoal tones, but because within charcoal you can also have many different shades, such as a green-grey, a blue-grey or a red-grey – you could then work with all those different colours and tones.
“It’s all about layering and finding different textures because if you have everything the same tone, it would be very boring. So it would be best if you had some texture in your carpet and then bring that texture into fabrics and maybe wallpaper as well as a flat surface where you might use your paint. “So it’s all about adding interest. You don’t have to add different colours – you use the same tone and add texture in different products.”
Of course, all New Zealand homes and homeowners can’t be summed up in four mood boards – but they provide a tremendous inspirational start to designing a new room. And Anita says the Harrisons franchisees are also clued up on how the mood boards can work as an initial motivation to find a style for any home.
“It does depend on the different style of a house as well as the style of the homeowner,” she says. “A lot might depend on how the light comes into the house, and then in a new build, you’re working with an open palette, and you can go anywhere, but if, say, you’re renovating an old villa with lots of rimu then you might want to stick with brown tones rather than moving to a grey or charcoal. But the beauty of what we do and how we have learnt to do it is that every job is different – the mood boards help you address all the contributing factors.”
If you are looking for inspiration for renovating a room or even a whole house, talk to one of our flooring experts about the best option for your lifestyle and space. As well as being able to visualise how your rooms might look through our new mood boards, we’ll give you a closer look at our vinyl ranges and show you how the carpets can perform in different conditions during a free in-home consultation with a Harrisons expert. Call us to book an appointment on 0800 421001 or fill out the booking form online.
