What About The Family Portraits?
Boccabella Family Portrait - The energy of 5 brothers with the spirit of yesteryear!
How could family portraits not be a priceless component for your Interior design project plan?
Yes. There’s that great one of grandfather and one of Uncle Silvio. As long as we are talking ancestry and history, how can we gracefully (and tactfully) contemporize memorabilia and bring it into our Interior design plan with balance, respect and beauty?
Well, it depends on how passionately a client feels about ancestors, antiques, Nonna’s keepsakes, The Family China and other treasures. How important are they as significant parts of their daily life in their Interior environment?
Does a client want tasteful vignettes throughout, accents here and there, a dedicated room or niche or a carefully strategized central theme that will keep family memories, stories and love alive to their younger generation?
Tradition and ancestry are very important aspects of Interior design. For many people, their forward motion in business or family considerations is driven by past foundational elements. Incorporation of those elements into Interior space planning and design can be as exciting as it can be exasperating! It is often difficult to immediately grasp just how important an element may be to a client who does not want it forgotten – but does not quite know exactly how they want it included!
Your Interior designer’s experience with such a dilemma can come to the rescue with innovative solutions. Whether designing the Interior of a business environment or a very personal residence, there are many ways to honor the past while meeting contemporary Interior design challenges.
Many businesses have poignant stories of their founders – often a family enterprise. Highlighting a successful commercial path from a century ago, for instance, is surely also a remarkable contemporary statement for longevity, stability, reliability and success! Your Interior design team takes its clue, in this area of the project, from those commendable patterns and concepts, and builds from there.
The family unit of today lives with patterns quite unlike even 50 years past, and it can be important to a client to emphasize – somewhere in their home – what came before. The roots, the environments, the tools, and the faces that brought them to their present place are important to them to share with their younger generation.
Reserving a portion of the Interior design plan for “the family portraits,”-- that is, the foundational elements that new generations build from -- is a validating aspect of any Interior project plan.
So many of these excellent components reside in attics and cellars, carefully wrapped so as not to get damaged! Obviously they are saved for some protective reason, but too often present a puzzle of what, how and where. Worse, they may simply be forgotten, whether past China cupboard treasures or faces from decades or centuries ago.
It can be a startling experience to rediscover such things, to peer at the unfamiliar faces of folks that gave you your DNA! And to handle pieces that were their daily fare can be quixotic. In an era where people by the millions are doing ancestral searches, maybe it’s also time for a Saturday in the attic or that offsite storage and those taped up mystery boxes from when the grandparents died.
Incorporating sentiment into your Interior design plan is not a No-No – certainly not when in the hands of a skilled professional who knows how to make Interior design magic. Incorporating your business or personal memories into the mix, where they can be appreciated, bring smiles or tears or teach about the past, is in an underrated Interior design toolbox!
Interior design, per se, is today a chapter in the industry’s own evolutionary path. Incorporating the design, art, culture and capabilities of the bygone in synthesized Interior design concepts, become beautiful tributes!
