Residential Interior Design Guide — Room By Room
Good home interiors are decided by a handful of dimensions and circuits, most of them fixed before anything visible is installed. Here is what to settle in each room, in the order it matters.
Start with circulation and fixed dimensions in each room, then services and lighting circuits, then storage volume, and only then finishes and décor because layout and services cannot be changed after execution without significant cost.
Living room
Set the seating distance to the screen first, then the walkway, then the furniture. Keep 90 cm of clear circulation behind seating and 40–45 cm between sofa and coffee table. If the room is small, wall-mount storage and keep legs visible floor you can see reads as space you have.
Kitchen
The work triangle still holds: sink, hob and refrigerator within comfortable reach of one another and out of the main walkway. Counter height should follow the primary cook, not the catalogue 85–90 cm suits most, and getting this right matters more than any finish.
Spend on the carcass and hardware. BWP ply in wet zones, soft-close everywhere, and a tall unit if the ceiling allows it. Shutters can be upgraded in ten years; the carcass cannot.
Bedrooms
Leave at least 60 cm on the sides you use to get into bed and 75 cm in front of the wardrobe. Put a switched socket on both sides of the bed and a two-way switch at the door and at the bedside small, cheap decisions that shape daily comfort.
Bathrooms
Waterproofing and slope are the entire project; everything else is decoration. Insist on a flood test before tiling. Provide a niche during the civil stage rather than surface-mounting shelves later, and choose anti-skid flooring in the wet zone.
Storage and lighting across the home
Plan storage as a household inventory rather than as furniture count what actually needs a home, then design to it. For lighting, run at least two circuits in every room so you can drop to a low, warm layer in the evening. It costs almost nothing at first fix and cannot be added afterwards without opening walls.
