The furniture handbook, p.25
The Furniture Handbook, page 25
2017
Furniture Design Museum
The Furniture Design Museum in Stockholm was opened by its founders Lars Bülow and Kersti Sandin Bülow in November 2017.
During their careers, both Kersti and Lars have worked for the Furniture Institute, Konstfack (University of Arts, Crafts and Design), and Swedish Design. In their younger years, they also cooperated closely with IKEA and with the Cooperative Union. Given their background as designers, design entrepreneurs, and educators, they recognized that there was a lack of a specifically design-oriented museum in the capital of Sweden and decided to set up the Furniture Design Museum using their own collection of design furniture from the early twentieth century to the present as a basis.
2020
Furniture Facts 2.0
Furniture Facts 2.0 was launched with the ambition to become the leading labeling system for Scandinavia and trendsetting for Europe as a whole. Furniture Facts Sweden AB is a profit-driven company, majority owned by IVL Swedish Environmental Institute and run in cooperation with the Timber and Furniture Companies (TMF). TMF is the trade and employer organization for the whole of the timber refining and furniture industry in Sweden. They represent about 650 member businesses.
Boverket and its predecessor, the Planning and Housing Agency, regulate housebuilding in Sweden and have published many papers and collections of regulations over the years. These affect the nature of our housing and how we plan our design. They’ve been given all kinds of titles, everything from directives to general advice and suggestions. They have sometimes included binding rules that have to be followed; sometimes it’s a matter of recommendations. Frequently it’s been a matter of clarifying details and making the criteria necessary and how certain functions may best be achieved more precise. Revision and updating are ongoing procedures, and you can keep up-to-date by following the Boverket homepage, boverket.se.
Planning Measurements and Concepts
Furnishing a room is not just a matter of aesthetics; it also involves a certain amount of mathematics. When interior designers and architects are working out how much space various arrangements will need as a minimum, they work from these four factors: the measurement of the piece of furniture, the measurement of the piece when in use, the space necessary for cleaning, and the space necessary for getting past it.
This may all sound very obvious, but it happens more often than not that, when we leaf through magazines or look at the photos on social media, we see houses and flats that are far too overfull or foolishly furnished. In this chapter I intend to run through some of the points that will help you work out how the furniture will fit into the space you are furnishing.
The Space When in Use
When planning the furnishing or trying to decide on a purchase in a shop, it’s all too easy just to measure the pieces of furniture in their “unused state.” Don’t forget to think about the radius necessary to open doors and drawers and to measure the amount of free space you need in front of the item when it’s in use. You also need to estimate the amount of space your own body will occupy when you are pulling drawers or trays out to their full extent or using rotating storage racks or wardrobe doors. These are by no means the least important aspects to be considered when you are deciding on which items to choose. These spaces may actually overlap, but they must not bump into any of the fixed parts of the building. And remember that you yourself take up different amounts of space when using one and the same item of furniture—chests of drawers, for instance: you take up less room when opening the top drawer compared with opening the bottom drawer.
Opening Radius
It’s not just the moving radius of the piece of furniture you have to think about; there is also the radius of fixed parts of the structure. How, for instance, do the outer and inner doors open, or the balcony doors and windows? How much space will you have to allow?
A common mistake is to forget to consider the radius of the opening of the door: you’ve measured the room but forgotten that the door needs to open. You can end up creating an annoying—and unnecessary—daily irritant if the edge of the carpet catches or a chair has to be moved every time you open the door.
Passing Room
Normal level: Basic accessibility
short passage past items of furniture
between furniture and wall
between walls
Raised level: Increased accessibility
short passage past items of furniture
between furniture and wall
between walls
Lower level: No need for accessibility
short passage past items of furniture
staircase indoors or main passage
Passing Measurements
Designers reckon that the average adult measures about 24 inches (60 cm) elbow to elbow. Therefore, it is recommended that trafficked passageways in a home should be at least 39 inches (100 cm) wide to allow two people to pass one another without problems. Residences are designed with this in mind, but the occupants frequently create bottlenecks in the places where space is needed most.
Fixed Restrictions
Small but important details can affect the furnishing of a room: wall-mounted radiators, pipes, electric outlets, for instance, and baseboards if you are choosing a cabinet that stands against the wall.
Space for Movement
In the section on anthropometrics, I mentioned the distinction between static and dynamic body measurements. In certain rooms we need to allow a little extra space not just for our bodies but also for whatever items we are setting in motion: in the hall, for instance, we need to think about the amount of space necessary for the heavy jacket or cape to hang as well as for the movements involved in donning them; in the bathroom there is the space needed for the towel and for us to move while drying ourselves; in the kitchen it’s probably not only our body and our elbow width, but also the tray we are carrying and which we need to find space for on the way to the table. And wherever there is cleaning to be done, we need to be able to reach in and move round with the vacuum cleaner; and we’ll want to be able to bend the vacuum tube down so that we can reach under the bed, the cabinet, the coffee table, or the sideboard, while still leaving room for ourselves.
Furnishability
The furnishability of a home doesn’t just depend on how big the rooms are; it depends just as much on the proportions and on the positions of the windows and doors. Big windows that run from ceiling to floor, or those with low sills, are common in current homes and allow a glorious amount of light in, but they can also make the room difficult to furnish since they reduce the available length of wall. It can be difficult to find space for bookshelves and wall-mounted TV screens—in the latter case also because of the way the light falls and is reflected on the available walls.
Many doors coming into a room can also have a negative impact on its furnishability, partly because you will need to take account of the space for the doors to open and partly because it will be difficult to arrange for a smooth traffic flow through the rooms.
You also need to take account of “softer” aspects that it may not be possible to draw on the plan. I’m thinking, for example, of the fact that certain parts of the room may have disruptive characteristics, such as drafts or strong evening light or dazzling sunlight. And there is also the need to ensure safe distances from fireplaces or other heating units when you are working out the furnishing.
Keep Things Close
In planning the location of the various modules in a kitchen, we often work to keep things close. Everything should be located as near its zone of usage as possible. The dishwasher should be near the sink; pans should be kept no more than a step away from the stove and oven. This basic principle should be used all over the house when you are furnishing it: what needs to be close to the piece of furniture you are positioning; what kind of situation is likely to arise that demands proximity; do you store things close to where you are likely to need them; do you have to go far to pick up or put things away in their proper place?
ANS Principle
There is a well-known furniture warehouse that works on the principle that has come to be known as the ANS principle. The abbreviation stands for “Activity, Need, Solution.” Designers schooled in this methodology always start their planning process by establishing which activities will take place in the environment, what needs will result from that, and what solutions should be in place.
Room Design, Shapes, and Zones
Room design is the shape of the room in plan, section, and size. When architects and designers use the phrase “room design,” they include the geometric basic shapes (square, rectangular, and so on), the physical and mental barriers that may arise or be experienced because of differences of level, distance, and the positioning of the furniture. A big bulky bookcase or a wall-length media system can change our experience of the proportions of the room. And, similarly, freestanding furniture, curtains, and screens can define different spaces in large, open-plan rooms.
When planning your furnishing, particularly in open-plan spaces, it may be helpful to start thinking in bubbles or bubble diagrams in order to plot which activities will take place and where before you move on to make concrete choices about exactly which model of sofa or armchair. You may find that you arrive at quite different solutions if, rather than the furniture, your starting point is the different zones of the room and which activities will take place where—and only then move on to which furniture will be necessary to fulfill those thoughts.
When computer game designers are creating environments, they make use of the basic principles as to how we read and orient ourselves in new spaces.
Organizing the Rooms
What we mean by organizing the rooms is how the more public areas of the home and the private spaces relate to each other. We can, of course, furnish our home just as we like, but we usually feel that the more private parts, such as the bedroom, should not have to act as a passageway to the living room or the dining room. The idea that a home should have separate social and private parts already existed in the 1800s. Well-off families were much concerned with entertaining guests in their homes, and this affected the planning of multi-apartment buildings: the drawing room and the formal rooms were placed at the front, facing the street, whereas the more private rooms were located at a suitable distance from them, facing the courtyard at the back.
The apartments built during the Million Program, however, were built to a different concept: their ideal was what was called “neutral communication,” which meant that all the rooms should be approached from the hall or from a corridor.
In the 1980s, planning in Sweden took a different turn. The earlier building norm that insisted on a separate kitchen was changed in 1985 and replaced with a policy emphasizing that “it should be possible to separate the kitchen from the living room in the future.” This led to the first open-plan solutions: these were popular with building firms, which saw the possibility of putting up more homes with a smaller area.
In the last couple of decades, many people have taken to renovating older apartments and houses according to their own ideas, not necessarily paying any attention to the need for room organization. But if you do have the possibility of affecting the room organization by your choice of furniture, it may well be an idea worth keeping in mind.
Axiality
According to Ola Nylander, a researcher at Chalmers Technical University in Gothenburg, axiality is a concept of significance for the unmeasurable values of a home. He describes it as “a line that connects two interesting points. An axis runs through and involves two or more rooms. An axis can also create the possibility of transparency and through-views in a home” (Nylander, 2011).
The more rooms the axis cuts through, the more clear-cut it becomes. If the architect had axiality in mind, it would of course be silly of us to move into the place and proceed to furnish it in a way that destroys the experience by having bulky furniture that disrupts the view between rooms or to the outside. Anyone living in a house may find it interesting to note what there is at the ends of the axial lines. Is there a color or a detail you can pick up in your choice of furniture, and is there anything you can do with the actual view out, with what can be seen on the other side of the window?
Enclosure
This refers to your experience of a room’s sense of enclosure or openness. Studies suggest that we need both if we are to feel good in our homes. Just as in the case of axiality, it becomes meaningless if we work counter to the architect’s underlying idea about enclosure when renovating or furnishing our home. We should avoid disposing of or overemphasizing the variations and possibilities of enclosure too much.
Daylight and Shadows
When setting about the furnishing of a new room, it’s really worthwhile to study the way the natural light flows. How does the light move around the room in the course of the day? Apart from direct light—the rays of the sun coming in through the window—it is also worth taking account of the indirect, reflected light, the shadows made by various fixed parts of the structure of the building, and how you experience the color of the light in the room. Daylight is often referred to as indirect light, that is, global radiation from the sky, sunlight reflected in the atmosphere and not to be confused with direct sunlight.
What effect sunlight or direct light has on the temperature of a room can vary depending on compass direction, time of day, and season of the year. Generally speaking, in our hemisphere, rooms in the north have colder light, whereas rooms in the south have warmer light. A simple explanation is to think of the sun as a lamp that heats up during the day the longer it stays on. Warm light tends to reinforce warm and clear colors, whereas a colder light tends to reinforce cold colors—it’s worth bearing this in mind when you are choosing the colors of your furniture and positioning various items that may reflect the light in the room.
Is there anything in the external environment that may affect the color of the indirect light that falls into the room you are designing?
Do you want your designer chair to stand out clearly? Choose a color that will contrast with the color of the wall and the surroundings. In The Interior Design Handbook, you’ll find more about how to perform magic tricks with focus points.
The color of indirect light indoors depends on many factors other than just the color of the sky at that moment. The light coming in, for instance, may first bounce off or be filtered by surrounding buildings that affect the color of the light before it reaches your room. If the window faces a wall of orange tiles that the incoming light is reflected off, it is likely that the color of the light will be warmer, irrespective of the direction or the season of the year.
Contrast Effect
I get questions every day from people who want advice about various color choices for their furniture (or walls). Should I go for black chairs, or gray, or wooden? What do you think of this color palette for my living room? It is actually impossible to give good advice without knowing what kind of contrast effect you want to achieve.
Do you want the furniture (or the wall) to stand out and be seen? In that case choose a color that contrasts with the background (or the foreground) against which it will stand. Do you want to create a sense of harmony and coherence? In that case choose walls and
furniture that blend with each other. Sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget when you’re worrying about making decisions.
Light Reflectance Value
When choosing colors for furniture or when lighting, painting, or choosing flooring for the room, light reflectance value (LRV for short) is a concept worth checking out. Interior designers use it, for instance, when they are working out how many and what kind of lamps a room will need, but it is also helpful when you are trying to create pleasing contrasts between different surfaces.
To have sufficient light and contrasts in a room is a matter of health and well-being, not just preference and taste. The LRV shows how much daylight and artificial light is reflected back from a surface measured on a scale from 0 to 100 percent, whereby a mirror scores 100 percent; a white-painted wall, usually about 85 percent; and a black wall, 0 percent. The LRV is given in the specifications of paints for walls and ceilings and also in those for various types of wooden and vinyl flooring.
LRV in Brief
• Walls, floors, and ceilings with a high LRV help to spread light efficiently around the whole room. The higher the LRV of a surface, the greater the effect achieved by the same fixture or level of daylight admitted.
• Furniture and surfaces with higher LRV demand less illumination, which means less energy usage.
• Colors with an LRV rating less than 50 percent absorb more light than they reflect.
• Since LRV is a universal scale for measuring the relative values of light and dark, different varieties of wood and different colors may have the same LRV. So, when choosing wall and floor colors, it makes sense to go for intermediates in order to avoid everything merging together. The recommendation for public spaces is that there should be at least 30 percent LRV difference between floors and walls and between doorjambs and walls. This is to make it easier for people to find their way round.
