Take the Ikea style quiz

Kelly @ JAX Decor & Design
Check out this Ikea style quiz. It's supposed to tell you what kind of business space is best for you, but you could of course apply it to any space in your home.

I came up as Modern Urban. I'm not particularly modern and definitely not urban, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the quiz. But try it out anyway, just for fun :-)

Thanks to How About Orange for posting the link to the quiz, and to This Young House for posting the link to How About Orange :-)

Whose Design Is It Anyway?

Kelly @ JAX Decor & Design

Is there such a thing as a truly original design? Can one person “own” a design?

I was just browsing the Rate My Space web site. I saw four rooms with colour-blocked walls. They were all similar – blocks of various colours with white “grid” lines in between. A few years ago, a member of the House & Home forums painted the a similar colour block & grid wall in her daughter’s bedroom. Who came up with the idea first? Did they all copy each other? Can one of them lay claim to the design?

When you think about it, every design is based on another design. We take a design that we see and like, and then create our own interpretation of it, putting our own spin on it and giving it our own personal touches. For example – these are two of the walls in my home office (it still needs some furniture!!)



It was inspired by this nursery on Rate My Space (unfortunately, I can’t find the original post on RMS, so I can’t give proper credit to the creator of this room):



The inspiration for the letters on the nursery wall came from this bedding from DwellStudio:



And this bedding was inspired by… well, I guess the alphabet. The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt over 4,700 years ago. So does that mean the ancient Egyptians get credit for these three alphabet-inspired designs?

Here's another example. This is our bed:



My husband and I came up for the plans for it and built it. We based it on an upholstered bed from Restoration Hardware and a bed that Sarah Richardson designed for a bedroom on Sarah’s House:




There are obvious similarities between the three beds, but differences as well. All three have a nailhead trim detail. The headboard corner cut-outs and legs on our bed are based on Sarah’s bed. But Sarah used a bold patterned fabric on her bed and we used a solid brown velvet.

So who owns this design? I say all of us – and none us. The beds I used as inspiration for our bed were likely inspired by other beds. In fact, Sarah had to change her original headboard design because the original wouldn’t fit up the stairs to the bedroom. Which is an example of how a design evolves as you move through a project.

Nobody can say that a design is 100% (or even 99%) theirs. Every design is a collaboration of people and ideas – from pictures in books and magazines, TV shows, Internet forums, a friend’s house, stores, hotels, nature… design inspiration is all around us and in all of us.