Creating Your Brand: Putting Your Spin on Timeless Upgrades
Creating the perfect home remodeling project to increase your home value doesn’t happen without considerable effort. Like anything worth having, it’s worth the hard work. And with a little bit of creativity, it can be fun!
Home remodeling projects are serious investments of time, energy and of course, money. Even small remodeling projects require a significant amount of these resources. Since design tastes change over time, or you may decide to sell your home in the future, a well-respected school of thought is to choose timeless foundation pieces for expensive and harder to replace items like floors, cabinets, and fixtures. The decorating, then, is where you put your spin on those timeless updates. It’s important to know who you are before you get started.
Branding, a concept companies use to differentiate themselves from others, has found a whole new audience. Personal branding is a useful tool for use in all kinds of situations. How do you use this idea to create a home remodeling project to increase home value AND reflect the people who live there?
Jonathan Adler, internationally respected interior designer and potter, uses this process in all the rooms he creates for clients. He creates a road map, or guidebook, to stay on track for goals and strategy, and so the result reflects the person he is designing for.
In his series, “Decorate like a Designer” for Wondrum, Jonathan outlines this technique: he uses three descriptive words. The first word is an adjective to describe a trait for you or your family. Are you modern, fun-loving, a homebody, outdoorsy, or Bohemian? Don’t feel constrained to one word: maybe you’re a fun-loving eccentric!
The second word is environmental, referring to the environment you want your home to reflect. Words like urban, farmhouse, traditional, Scandinavian or Mediterranean describe the sense of place your home evokes.
The third word reflects an occupation or lifestyle – real, aspirational, or a combination. Lifestyle may be the easiest translate. Traveler, surfer, skier, or farmer fit this description.
When you put it all together, you might have something like “well-read, global, traveler,” “fun-loving, Mediterranean, farmer” or “free-spirited, urban, skier.”
These aren’t literal references, but a creative way to form a clearer idea or picture of your style to act as a framework for your all your remodeling design decisions. Your three-word brand describes how you want your space to flow and informs the styles and colors of furnishings, finishes and accessories that you choose use. For example, if you’re “outdoorsy, lakefront, water sports,”, an indoor-outdoor layout, rustic comfortable furnishings and fabrics and blues and greens might be your style. Or “eccentric, urban, traveler” might call up images of monochromatic color schemes and clean lines spiced with quirky accessories and artwork from your travels or places you want to visit.
Once you have this guidebook, looking at the myriad of choices you will have becomes less overwhelming as you view them in the light of personal brand. You can quickly narrow your selections to create your design. It will also make it easier to work with a design professional. You’ll have a ready answer for, “what’s your style?”
