Tag Archives: loft

Minimalism is the process of eliminating clutter. The decorative accessories are thrown out. Only the key pieces are salvaged. Everything is stripped to the bare essentials: colours, materials, and furniture. This gives greater depth to the decor, which is, to be frank, quite refreshing.

Minimalism is at the centre of the contemporary style, but it can also be expressed through other styles, like the rustic, lounge, industrial (loft, among others) decors or the shaker design, which is probably the barest look of all.

The simplicity of minimalism resides more in the shape and number of pieces than in the style itself. Sometimes, a room is so bare that only one expression comes to mind to describe it: it is naked.

The monochrome design is one of the secrets of minimalism. Usually, the colours are neutral. More often than not, everything is white, from the ceilings to the floors, as is the furniture. If not, you will find two colours, seldom three. Oftentimes, it’s the same colour that fades out into different shades. Featured somewhere: a concrete floor painted in turquoise with a sofa of the same colour.[……]

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Often created in decommissioned industrial buildings, lofts offer an immense open space to decorate, a single room whose dimensions are around 500 square metres, with ceilings of up to three metres and more.

Few doors, few walls, often nothing at all. A wave of natural light from the long vertical windows along the wall floods the central space. Added to these windows you sometimes find a windowed façade, skylights or windows on the ceiling.

Wood or steel beams, concrete, brick and metal surfaces are everywhere. And the abandoned vestiges of the building’s past: pulleys, wooden cases, platforms, giant washbasins, air conditioning conduits, steel tables, oversized chimney.

What do you do with this unrefined decor? Make it your home.

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Once the cleaning work is done, the real work starts. Most owners keep traces of the building’s former vocation for decorative purposes. That’s what makes a loft a loft. That’s what separates it from a penthouse.

If partitions are needed for a certain intimacy, they should be as discreet as possible in order to maintain the continuity of the space and let the light flood in. That is why complete walls are rare. Or areas are combined, such as the living room and dining room. Or low walls, mobile screens, opaque or trans lucid panels are added.  

A loft is a paradise for colour. Owners often use colour to divide the space into areas: one dominant colour per area, or one dominant colour on the ground floor and a second on the upper floor, which is usually a mezzanine.[……]

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