Home fashion and you

Mélange: No longer does the living room need to look like it has come from one furniture shop. Experiment with different styles, take an Italian sofa and team it with an industrial lamp. Throw in a designer coffee table, get adventurous.

Upcycling: It is no longer hand-me-downs but scale-me-up when it comes to clothes and décor. Ingenious homemakers are transforming old saris into blinds and partition screens. Cabinetry is seeing do-it-yourself designs to turn wobbly wooden chairs into stands for washbasins. Twisted ropes are turning into chairs and discarded clothes are being piled up as new-found bean bags.

Lighting: Lighting is globally being recognised as design enhancer. “2013 will see a shift from electricals to electronics with a focus on human centric approach, sustainability, and spatial articulation,” says Amit Gupta, managing director, Vis a Vis, a Delhi-based lighting firm. If LED has been in vogue, it’s also a technology that’s evolving fast. A new tool that manufacturers are exploring, to transform interiors, is called “RGBW”. For a long time, dynamic or colour changing meant a single luminaire changing colours of white light or RGB luminaire producing 16million “colours” but white. With RGBW, there can be a myriad options, from warm whites to neutral, and cool white to red, magenta, green, even violet. And just as HVAC levels, security systems and home automation are activated at the touch on the phone, lighting too will be as handy.