How Fixtures Affect Interior Design

Imagine you’ve spent the better part of a year planning and designing a renovation for your kitchen or bathroom. You’ve taken all this time to pick all of the right materials, patterns, and structure to create your dream space! But, once it’s all put together… something feels off! You’ve forgotten to update your faucet and sink!

Fixtures are often the most overlooked part when it comes to interior design, especially for smaller projects and DIY, but the effect they have on the overall appearance and ambiance of a space cannot be overstated. Fixtures are important to the style, colour, and functionality of a space.

Style:

One of the most elusive and hard to pin down concepts in interior design is style. Style is often extremely subjective and based on historical trends and patterns - ultimately, most people will incorporate multiple styles together to create their preferred space. So how does one choose the right sinks and faucets to match the style of their kitchen and bathroom? A great way to decide would be to look at interior design samples and inspiration; find what suits you and build around that. Other times, style is based more on ambiance and intuition. 

Ex: if you’re looking to create a more modern bathroom, you might want to consider a faucet that is more sleek and simplistic to evoke a sense of minimalism. 

It’s important to find the right fixtures to match the style of your space because the human eye is often drawn to errors and things that are out of place. If you had a kitchen that was very flamboyant and farmhouse rustic, a modern matte black faucet would stick out very clearly and create a sense of incoherence. 

Colour Palette:

Another aspect of interior design that fixtures play a role in is colour.

When creating a palette, you have to think about the relationship between each colour and the type of palette it creates. We already explored many different types of colour relationships in our Colour Theory post here and how balancing out colours is often very challenging! Another challenge presents itself when designing a space: the colour, or, finish, of your fixtures.

The finish of your fixtures can either enhance or detract from the palette you’ve created for a space, so it’s important to pick the right one! Chrome is the most neutral of the standard finishes, however that does not mean it will be the right choice for your design. For example: If you are creating an earth tone space, a matte black would enhance the palette and match much better than a chrome finish, which would stand out in an unpleasant way.

Another example would be an all white kitchen: while a chrome faucet would serve well, a gold finish would add an extra punch to the starkness of the white and create a much nicer, warmer ambiance that a chrome finish would not.

Function:

First and foremost, the most important aspect of fixtures is their functionality. Even if you’ve chosen the perfect fixtures that match your design and space, it won’t ultimately matter if they don’t work for you and your needs.

Faucets all do the same thing on a basic level, but can have different features that help build the functionality and make an easier experience for you. If you are someone who cooks a lot and ends up having to do many dishes, you might want to think about a faucet that not only looks good in your kitchen, but also has variable sprays and a pullout feature to clean all those hard to reach spots.

Another example would be if your home has older pipes that can create build ups of metals and other unwanted materials in the faucet and water. To counter this, you would want the functionality of a faucet that has a built-in filter! 

Ultimately, fixtures should not be purely afterthoughts in a design due to their importance in the style, colour, and functionality of a space. Follow us on @kato.living and learn more about home decoration.