A Room in a House - How to "Build" a Character
You, my dear actor, are a designer. After many arduous competitions with other incredible constructors and architects, you have been chosen to decorate a beautiful room in a house.
The foundations of the house are already there. The blueprints of the building were drawn centuries ago by the most famous builders of their time. Everyone knows what the house is supposed to look like, in theory. It has been copied again and again all over the world, with the same white walls and pointed roofs. On the outside, there are dozens of replicas of the exact same house.
On the inside, there is a common understanding of where each room is supposed to be: the kitchen is on the left, next to the living room. The bathroom is connected to the main suite. There is a garden outside the house that reaches out to the street, where you can say hello to those passing by.
However, each room can be decorated in its own original way. How you choose to decorate is up to you. But how do you do that, exactly? You have been given an empty box, and it is your job to fill it and present it in a way that feels uniform with the rest of the house. So how can you make this room truly yours?
The first thing you need to know is what the room is for. What is the purpose of the room? What's the reason it was put there?
To answer that, it's important to know what kind of house is being built: A modern apartment? A cottage in the woods? A Victorian manor? Your "guests" need to be able to tell this just by the interior design, so that's what you'll need to focus on when choosing your furniture.
It always helps to do research into the setting. This is not just about the inside of the house — the time and location where things take place, the political issues of the time, the kinds of clothing worn — but also the house's history. Who created the blueprints? Most writers — oops, sorry, "architects" — bring in messages and conflicts from their own life into their creations, so it's vital to understand what lessons or themes they wanted to present at the start.
When you're focusing on one room, try to summarize its purpose in one sentence: the kitchen is where you eat, the bedroom is where you sleep, the basement is where you hide the secrets. Each room has a meaning, both for the guests and for the house itself, and this helps give you a straightforward direction for what you're here to do.
If you're decorating the living room, you have a big task! This is the first thing that guests will see. First impressions are very important. It sets up the shape of the house, connecting to each and every other room. This is your main space, the lead, where guests will spend most of their time — so it needs to show the house's purpose immediately. Sometimes, there's a monologue printed on the wall or an "I want" song playing on the radio that spells it out plainly for you. Regardless, the designer still has to know what these goals are, and the house's structure follows along the pursuit of those goals.
Remember: your room has to be interesting, not beautiful. It doesn't matter if it's good or bad, evil or saintly, logical or insane. Every home has its eccentricities. Sometimes there's a broken antenna on the old TV, but that's still a part of the house. It needs to be there at that specific angle for the signal to work. You don't have to clean it or fix it. As long as it's possible to peek through the window into someone's life, people will be curious to walk in. Open your doors. Let guests see into every dusty nook and cranny: especially the ones that aren't so pleasant.
On top of all this, there is a very important question that people forget to ask themselves:
Why?
You know the living room has a sofa, a carpet, a coffee table, a shelf, and a TV. That's fine — anyone can shove the cheapest furniture they find at IKEA in a reasonable arrangement and call that a living room. However, if you really want to take up space, create something genuinely appealing that people will actually call home, you have to ask what those things are trying to achieve.
You need a coffee table because you need an easy place to put things down. That's straightforward enough — but maybe, you know that there was once a fight in the living room. The coffee table might've once been made out of glass, but now it has been changed to a harder wood to keep people safe. Maybe there are still fragments of that fight embedded in the floorboards, that you scrub and broom but they never go away. Do you want to seem simplistic, contained, and keep to minimalistic decorations? If so, you put a basic white vase right in the middle of the table — but it's left empty, because you've never received a bouquet from a friend before. Or maybe you want to appear gentle and caring, placing a little crocheted runner with embroidered blue flowers? Those flowers could be forget-me-nots, so guests never forget what actually happened to the original glass table.
You must see the same types of little choices in your own house. You surely have a charger you always keep next to the couch because one time someone needed it and it's now a permanent fixture; a slight stain on your bedsheets because your best friend spilled wine on it and you were never able to wash it off; a lightbulb that went out and you spent months trying to find the replacement but never could. It's not the best, or healthiest, decision to replicate your room exactly, but it always helps to take some inspiration from your own experiences to have ideas.
There is so much you can do with a simple space just by asking yourself what caused things to be the way that they are. When guests only catch one small glimpse, they don't need to have the complete story of someone's life, but they at least need to understand why the room is there, and why it's decorated the way it is. As the designer, you get to decide what parts of the story you want to show. You create the meaning behind every decision.
But importantly, a room does not exist on its own. Even the most amazingly decorated living room is useless if it has no hallways to connect to. You have to ask yourself: how does your room relate to the rest of the house?
What do you give to the neighboring rooms? Perhaps your space brings warmth from the fireplace, perhaps you complete each other like a bedroom and a walk-in closet. Perhaps it offers rest after a long journey through the house, or perhaps it disrupts the calm and forces guests to rethink what they’ve seen so far. Maybe colors bleed through the doorways, or noise might echo through the walls. In many ways, every room both shapes and is shaped by the ones around it.
Contrast and parallel are both important to consider. Some rooms are built to complement one another: the warm kitchen next to the lively dining room, the quiet study tucked away near the library. What do they offer each other, at the end of the day? What they agree on, what they learn from each other, and what they represent? Still, it's important to know what makes them different — what makes them distinct from each other? If they are too similar, you might as well take down the walls and turn them into just one larger room. If they are separate, there must be reasons why. What makes them separate?
Other rooms are deliberately placed to oppose each other, but even extremes still have things in common. The attic is upstairs with the most important family memories, open to a gorgeous sunroof. The basement is dark, shadowed, and grimy, left behind with pipes and rats. Despite being on the literal opposing side of the house, they are fundamentally similar — they both are dusty. They see the house changing while they stay stagnant, left forgotten behind closed, trapped doors.
Look closer, and you may find similarities hidden beneath the surface: perhaps both rooms serve the same purpose in different ways, or perhaps they were designed by the same hand, reflecting the same fears or hopes. There's still a lot they hold inside that is functionally the same, even if architects act upon them differently.
Some rooms transform dramatically as the house ages. The nursery becomes a bedroom, the workshop becomes an office, and the kitchen gets updated with a brand new fridge. These rooms undergo renovations to help reach those overarching goals. As a designer, it's important to ask yourself where the room starts when the house's doors are first opened, and how it changes as the guests go through it. Furniture moves, walls are repainted, and windows are opened that were once shut tight. How do you want the room to end up, and in what state is it in after the guests have left?
Other rooms remain mostly the same. Their role is not to change, but to give the rest of the house context. A stable room can act as a reference point — a place that shows how much everything else has shifted. Even without transforming or going through an arc, it can influence the transformation of the spaces around it. It serves its purpose, and that's never a bad thing.
Sometimes you're not tasked with decorating the living room, or the kitchen, or the evil basement. Sometimes you're just a storage closet. That's okay! It's just as important as any other room, and all these guidelines still apply. The house was built to include that storage closet for a reason. If you know those reasons well, you can still do the same kind of work. Even if the guests are with you for less time, they'll notice if you put effort into making it a very impactful and interconnected storage closet.
At the end of the day, the house does not belong to the designers alone. It belongs to the people who walk through it, the construction company, the team that set the land, the people who bought the paint, and the engineers who fixed the pipes.
You are not building the entire house. You are not even defining the walls that surround you. But within the small box you have been given, your decisions can give a very different impression of the house as a whole. Think about who passes through your door, what they bring, and what they should take away with them when they leave.
So ask yourself these questions, be creative, and put on a show. Most importantly of all, have fun! People will notice, and they'll have fun with you! Nobody will remember old blueprints or any nitpicky little flaws — they'll remember the rooms that felt alive.
Written by Ana Clara Martins, a dedicated Writing & Marketing Committee member!
You can find Ana Clara on Instagram: @anaa.logy