It seems it is now trendy to have minimalistic design in many areas. Minimalistic logos, business cards, branding and electronics to name a few. Flashy colors and fonts seem to be out of style. Clutter also has little place in our homes it seems and interior designers have started a trend with embracing minimalistic features.
This trend is not exactly new. For a long time now people have been trying to shrink things down, to minimize what isn’t necessary in order to make everything look more beautiful and clean. Even websites, operating systems and other software seem to be implementing minimalism. There are some apartments with low amount of usable area which have been designed in a way to transform one room into three or four different rooms – a living room, a bedroom, a home office and even a kitchen. How? Minimalism and smart designers.
For the longest time I wanted to live in an apartment with tighter furniture, with a simpler, more of a clean look. It isn’t easy, however, as throw away things and buying new to fit your idea is neither easy, nor cheap. On the emotional side we grow connected to our possessions. We first have to accept that we need to say goodbye to certain items, which when it comes down to it are rarely used and may not even have sentimental value. For example, my uncle used to collect all kinds of things and a while back he decided to give them all to me, to deal with them however I want. But I didn’t want to throw them away so I just stashed them. So I had boxes full of items like broken phones, spoons, china, chess sets and more, which I would probably not even rummage through, ever. But I just didn’t know what to do.
But time came when I had to switch apartments in Chicago and so it was decided – my new place will house only what is necessary with no clutter and useless things. Smaller furniture, simple color scheme and everything. So I hired a moving company to transport only my most needed things, which turned out to not be that many after all. All my uncle’s stuff I either donated, gifted or threw away. For me I kept a couple of chess sets, one that is glass which would fit nicely with my vision of a new home, with minimalistic design.
There are some obstacles on the road to minimalism, however. I like books and I wanted to have a nice bookcase to house them, but my new interior design revolves around glass and metal. Go figure how to add such a bookcase in your home. Not that I couldn’t do it, but books, which look old and smell so nice and warm, in my mind could only go together with a wooden bookcase. And the simple color scheme couldn’t work with wood either. So I had to decide what to do with all those books. Looking through the internet I found a nice idea – wrapping them in colored paper. The example that was given was a white, thick paper, but I went for gray and washed-out red. Finding a proper bookcase for that color scheme was easy enough.
And there I had it – minimalistic design, black-white-red color scheme, with glass, metal and a bit of paper accents (red paper flowers tied in perfectly). Today I have some things changed, but the whole idea of minimalism is still the same. And besides looking good, it also inspires my creativity, as I write for living, and also helps me be more organized, because it just doesn’t look good if a single thing is out of place.