It’s funny when you read some of the interior design articles out there. The vast majority of them take you from the kitchen to the lounge, to the dining room, to the bedroom, but without so much as a word on the most important space in the house: the entrance hall.
In our humble opinion, the entrance hall is key to a good interior design project. Even if you have the most traditional farmhouse kitchen or a lounge with a gorgeous Scandinavian theme, if you haven’t got the entrance hall right, then you have fallen at the first hurdle.
In any walk of life, making a good first impression is important. The same goes for your interior design plan. You want people to walk into your home and immediately be wowed. After that, the rest of the interior design is a bonus, but it all starts with those first few steps.
And it doesn’t have to be hard, either! To help you out, we’ve come up with just two simple ways you can make a statement with your entrance hall, all of which can be enough to light up your space:
A Luxurious Lighting Scheme
To start off, you will need a strong lighting scheme. In any area of the house, it is essential to get the lighting right, ensuring that the space is not only bright but emits the atmosphere you initially envisaged. In the hallway, this atmosphere should be luxury.
Think about the best hotels you have been to. As soon as you walk into the lobby, you are surrounded by luxury, despite the fact that – like the hallway – you are not going to be spending the majority of your time there. Well, one of the key ways that hotels achieve this is through a clever lighting scheme.
Invest in a chandelier with warm yellow bulbs, to be fitted centrally in the ceiling. After this, purchase a luxurious lamp that can sit centrally on the table. Next to this lamp, place sterling silver candlesticks – even when not lit, the light of the lamp will give the impression that they are, so that should save you money on wax!
You are trying to achieve a bright entrance hall, but a hall that is warmly lit, so as to give that soft, relaxing and luxurious vibe of a hotel. As well as this, try to cover the corners with standing lampshades, depending on how dark they get during the day.
High-Quality Materials
Have you ever bought a really expensive sofa, only to have the shakes when people actually sit on it? It’s ridiculous, right? You bought the sofa so that people could sit on it, and yet it feels almost wrong when people use it for that very purpose.
Well, yes and no. Furniture can actually be a big statement piece, bought just as much for aesthetic reasons as it is for practical purposes.
So how do you appease this fact? Put your high-quality furniture in the entrance hall. It might seem counterintuitive – as mentioned before, people don’t spend a lot of time in the entrance hall – but that’s precisely the reason why it works.
High-quality furniture, including sofas, chairs, benches, cabinets, and tables, work well in the entrance hall, as they can add to that sense of luxury, and won’t have to suffer years of heavy usage. This makes it easier to keep them pristine, and keep the first impression of your home glowing!
Just these two decisions can immediately make a statement with your entrance hall, and ensure that the first stage of your interior design is a success!