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Northern Designer Awards
Interior Designer Of The Year 2001
The competition took place at the Concept For Living, Homes And Gardens Show at Tatton Park Cheshire. It was the second year that these awards had taken place for northern based interior designers.
The competition again was to design a room in 48hours of your choice in a 3 meter by 3 meter tent, a marquee was erected in the shape of a courtyard and then was divided into 30 sections, and each room had 3 tent sides and a wooden floor.
I decided again the best thing was to build a 3 meter by 3 meter open sided box, and again while building this box I kept adding to the design because this year, it not only had to be better, it had to be completely different in not only the concept but the style and the design. It had to look like nothing we had done before. So the box was finished it not only looked like a room but it looked good empty!
This aloud me to go for a modern, contemporary almost minimalist look, again I tied the ceiling and vaulted the middle and inserted low energy led down lights to look like the stars in the sky. The outer edge of the ceiling was mirrored and again had down lights, to fan the wall in the right places with light.
My inspiration when considering our design for the show was following through our philosophy on design concepts, the design of the room has been heavily influenced by the belief that it is perfectly feasible to integrate different styles, periods, textures and materials to maximum effect. I wanted to expand a lot of energy into the design of the room itself & also the ceiling as I wanted to draw attention to the importance of this part of the room, which is often overlooked and can make the room seem unfurnished. The use of stone was to appreciate the different textures and pigmentation in each stone tile. The puddle effect mirrors seemingly leaking from the basin taps, in conjunction with the parallel tiling of the walls and floor, gives the illusion that the room had be fliped over on its side. In the border of the floor I have always looked for opportunities to explore new ideas and concepts and decided to play with the notion of taking something that was whole and breaking it. In this way I creating something new and innovative, but at the same time not losing what came before. The Mirrors in the ceiling and the pillars were used to give the illusion of a large room than there was and also to refect different parts of the room from different sides as you looked round.
Designed By Matthew McCartan, ashley interiors ( The House Of Ashley )