I got this from dealing with white paint. You know how you get a
little chip of white paint with the faintest tint of a color like
yellow and you look at it in the can and it looks white and you paint
it on the wall all of a sudden it looks more yellow than you ever
thought because there's such a big expanse of it. Well that works
pretty well for white paint, but it's harder to apply to floors. Sure
it makes sense that a slightly red color will look -really- red when
applied in situ so watch out for that. But what about natural. Is it
going to look REALLY natural? Well, probably the natural tint bias
will show more clearly but a lot of times it's hard to see the tint to
begin with. I found that I used to use the same idea with the weather
at school. If it's cool in Pasadena it will be cold there, breezy
here, windy there. But what happens when it's temperate here. Is it
going to be -more- temperate there? So that 'design theory' doesn't
always work.
2. If I like it it will match.
This one seems to work pretty well if used within reason. My
sensibility is so ingrained that if I like something, it will probably
match other things I get. This is as opposed to one of my friends who
said his mom buys stuff she likes and it never seems to match, it all
looks arbitrary. This is how I bought the wood floor I realized. At HD
they had the red oak and then showed what it looked like with cherry
stain which looked great. So I just bought it assuming it would match.
Hope the 'theory' works.
3. You get more depth when you pull light and dark out of a midtone
This is just a 2d design strategy that I like. In a design you can
either go darks on light, or lights on dark or dark and light on
midtone. The third approach seems to give you the most depth. That's
partially where I'm getting that 'paint the kitchen cabinet wall
celadon' from.
4. It's the struggle that makes it work
This comes from abstract expressionist aesthetics. The idea is that
it's the process of struggle to make things work that makes a design
interesting. It's similar to the design idea that solving tough
problems makes for more interesting solutions. In this general idea,
you just have to make some 'statements' at a certain point and then
deal with the consequences and it's dealing with this consequences and
working them out that creates the character of the design. So in this
case, I've made a series of wood choices and the interest will be how
and how well I can get everything to work together. And if successful,
you get something way more interesting than the typical over-matched
house. If unsuccessful....
I guess both Mark and I work without nets. Mark in the sense that his
design approach puts a huge emphasis on the initial design which makes
it more difficult to fix things later in the 'decorating' & my design
approach in that half the time I don't know what I'm doing, but I
forge ahead anyway assuming I can fix it.
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