Interior Design vs Real Homes

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about "Interior Design" and what it really means to me (I live in a real home with a lovely but untidy husband, a 2 year old with boundless energy and limited concentration and a dog with paws that are magnets for mud)

I guess when we say Interior Design these types of rooms spring to mind, a luxurious boutique hotel style bedroom or a large double height living space.

        

Both of which are gorgeous, don't get me wrong, but is it really possible for the majority of us to achieve this?  Of course it is for some people but for the majority, perhaps the dream and the reality are a little different. 

            

  

                The dream      vs       The reality 

There is absolutely nothing wrong with any property that you call home, but I feel like interior design magazines and some interior designers seem to think that large rooms with lovely high ceilings and endless budgets are the norm.  I'm confident that modern housing estates, with smaller rooms, standard low ceilings and small budgets are in fact much more usual.  

We don't and can't all live in period properties or New York style loft apartments.  So the challenge is to take these amazing designs for large grand rooms and translate them to smaller rooms without being overpowering.  I wish more 'interior design' magazines used real home examples - and I mean REAL homes, homes built in the last 20 years, with smaller proportions, of people who have children and pets and can't keep them showroom perfect all the time.  

It seems to me that this is like those size 8 mannequins in shops, where dresses look beautiful and drape perfectly - and then someone with a real figure puts in on and suddenly the dress is clinging unceremoniously to all the lumps and bumps.

Take this as an example, the first picture is a real living room in a modern house, but tidied (toys removed) and styled for a photograph.  The second picture is the tidiest version of reality, including children's toys.  

With this as reality, I like to focus my designs on clever and practical uses of space.  I believe functional does not equal ugly or boring, but functional is perhaps more important than beautiful in a real family home and a balance needs to be found.