In launching our Essential Guide to Your Living Room, Never Too Small has collated the best design tips from over 120 projects, architects and designers from all over the globe. Over 100 pages of beautiful tips, illustrations and images bring this fantastic digital guide to life and making the small footprint aesthetics of Never Too Small available to everyone.
Never Too Small sits down with one of our own, Colin Chee, to discuss how this guide came to life.
NTS - Colin, this guide feels like it’s come at a time when housing affordability is out of reach and the waitlist for materials and trades is at an all-time high. Was this guide born out of frustration?
Colin Chee - In the last five years, we have been profiling all these not only beautiful yet ingeniously designed small spaces from all over the world, and we have great support from our lovely viewers from every corner of the globe one could imagine. We think it’s time for us to give something back to our audience. We decided to create a digital guide, a piece of Never Too Small that you can have, in a very affordable range and no matter where you are, by just downloading them without going through some expensive shipment.This is the first volume of the 4 others. We start with the Living Room, Kitchen, Bedroom and Bathroom then followed by Plants For Small Spaces.
Looking back to when you started Never Too Small, did you always have the intention to help others redesign their own spaces, or is this a response to demand, or a gap you’ve seen?
Involving an architect or professional designer to design your home isn’t something that everyone can afford. This design guide contains tips and knowledge that you can apply to your space without breaking your wallet or bank account.
There are plenty of DIY guides around, what can Never Too Small fans expect to be different in this one?
This is the quintessential Never Too Small design guide with design tips and knowledge we gathered and learned from some of the very best architects and designers whom we have featured on NTS. This is like the compilation version of the essential knowledge and ideas we gathered from our episodes and also from architects and designers whom we invited to contribute to our guides, from the very beginning, we know it was a guide that everyone can follow easily without having to spend 3 months reading them like a novel.
This guide is put in a way that no matter if you’re just about to move into a new place, or someone who’s in the middle of designing your new home, or someone who has been living in your small home for a while and want to improve your current home, there’s still something you can pick up from this guide to apply to your home to make it even better.
This guide is not something that requires you to spend more money to make your home look amazing, but we put it together in a way to guide you to make better decisions. From planning, budgeting, how to explore your style, to choosing the right furniture, and also how to get your priority right when designing your small living room.
Of course, every person’s lifestyle is different, and everyone’s taste is different, that’s the fun part, this guide can provide professional knowledge and tips and it’s up to your interpretation to apply them and design your space. At the end of the day, there’s no right or wrong, what matters is, what is perfect for you.
Did you have anyone collaborate with you in creating this guide, where are the ideas from?
For each guide, we invite some architects and designers to contribute their extensive knowledge and experience with us. For volume 1, which is the Essential Guide To Designing Your Small Living Room, we have three different designers and architects who we sat down with for hours to pick their brains on their expertise, and they gladly and generously shared their knowledge with us, knowledge which would normally go only to their paying clients.
What’s your favourite idea contained within the guide?
My favourite idea is Choosing your furniture section, where we discuss a lot about how to get the right furniture that not only suits your style but the option for multifunctional furniture and how it can enhance the feeling of space. I wish I knew this when I moved into my first studio apartment many years ago.
Is this a guide for anyone, or do you need to have a certain level of trade proficiency?
This guide is definitely for everyone, from zero design skills to professional level. No matter if you are designing our small living room from the start, or you just want to improve your existing living room; no matter if you’re renting or owning, this guide has something for you.
You don’t have to follow every step in this guide, be selective, and choose what’s right or works for you, after all, the design process is also a process for you to get to know yourself.
The beauty of small-space design ideas is that you can always apply them to a bigger space, but it usually doesn’t go the other way around.
