New shot of home - simply elegance and indulgence

After months of survey, we have finally brought our 1st LCD (37” Panasonic). Exciting of course, hubby and I always play with it; reading its manual and exploring its functions. 2 days later, the Omni mount arrives. It has the ability to tilt, pan and swivel. Without further delays, my hubby was immediately starting his little project of installing the mount; follow by install the LCD onto the mount. There are challenges in the progress. He has to drill at least 2 inch deep into the wall without damaging the wallpapers and has to ensure it proportional well so that will not end up watching the LCD with head and body suffers. Amazing work he did, it was perfectly done.

It wasn’t finish yet, the wires and screws are all scattered around the living hall. It was a total mess. Without hesitate, he starts plugging and unplugging cables, cable extension, aligning the cables ensuring all are completely out-of sight. It was a tedious work as it took him almost 2 hours to complete. Amazing work he did again, it was so neat now as you can see in the pictures.








A simple celebration after tiring work and project completion; had a glass of whisky under homey nice embience + Lisa Ekdahl songs.... Simply indulgence and perfect satisfaction!


My hubby is in the mood of practicing his photography skills, this is one of his work. Not bad isn't? ;P

In love with wall art....

Lately I felt in love with wall art; the wall as media for you to express your creativities on is far more wonderful than drawing on a piece of paper. Using furniture and home décor items as accessories to complete your piece of art work, creating an art piece that are with 3D and more realistic vision. Arrrhh… just love it.

For ID, its able to strengthen the accent to your wall furnishes and style of a space. Providing viewer a potential exposure to imagine and sometimes could be inspiring! It does redefine a space just like adding a favor to a dish. Results sometimes could be astounding!

Wall art could be presented in many ways that you think of, such as via printing into sticker or wallpaper, or real paint on wall, etc…. I have seen a wall art with many colors of different materials in different shape paste on a wall, created a wonderful art piece with sensation. I have seen artist inspired by everyday element, forged from durable, lightweight combinations of metals, each modern wall hanging is hand-brushed for added dimension and texture. It’s fantastic! From three-dimensional wall sculptures to a visionary big piece of art work, you're sure find it just the right contemporary accent to transform your space.

Trend of Specializing

Direction now also leads to specializing because of open market that advertise individualism and uniqueness, peoples nowadays are skillful and knowledgeable enough to do whatever possibly matters where they do not need to spend money to get what they need, they could perform on their own. First, what mean by specializing anyway? Look backward of 20 years ago in production era where major market players and demand are on products, things created from raw materials and we have products. Well, life moves on where peoples see the importance of innovating technology to outstand from the crowd and win in this competitive market. Some smarter ones they creates niche products that not even public realizing it that they needs one; Yet, they successfully market their niche product by educated the market that “You” need one. And what next era will be? Imagine demanding customers will never disappear and they will gradually increase their expectation. So as a service provider or manufacturer, you would need to gradually improve your product and service, look into every possible areas to identify where can outperform better than your competitor. That’s where you eventually emphasizing on specialize area. And consumer expectation will be towards your specialty and expertise. Another higher level from specialty and expertise, people may decide which to buy based on branding. Well, that’s another huge topic to talks about.

Take a very good example, IT industry that I am currently worked on. You may realize as well more and more processes and more specialize/ specific areas were being identified such as incident management in IT service industry to restore a normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the impact on business operations. To delight a customers become more challenging, one single mistake could possibly leads to a company big trouble. And that’s where many specific processes and management are in place to make sure things are in control and meet expectation as well. Jobs like consultants, specialist or expert are exist compare to last time no such demand or jobs exist. Perhaps in the future cleaner could be a high paid job with job title cleaning specialist/ cleaning consultant/ advisor J In fact, its happening now already….

Today hire a plumber may cost you few hundreds for a job. But in the future may be a few hundreds per hour just like lawyer or doctor nowadays. In fact in some areas over at developed countries already happens these. More specific, a plumber may be call as sanitary specialist in the future. So, self-employed volume would gradually increase in very near future and more people would value skills and knowledge than anything else. Drawbacks of these trends might be poorer people might suffer. There might be huge groups of people who can’t effort it and this eventually leads to trends of DIY. Certainly the DIY market would rise, with open source and informative on internet, people could just grab whatever knowledge they want on DIY. Moreover, many internet portal that provides the facilities that accommodate them to perform whatever DIY projects that possible, for instance DIY handicrafts, DIY web sites, DIY computer programs, DIY designers, DIY draftsman, DIY plumber, DIY electrician, etc…. This will cause great impact to small and medium industries. Imagine in the very near future, almost all people who knows to create own web sites, write little programs to ease their life, designer of their own, song writer of their own, everyone could sing well and plays well too. Nevertheless, existing industry will still survive as there are still groups of people who can afford it and willing to pay for people to do for them. In fact, it’s a huge group of people as human nature of lazy and ignorant. For instance, billboard list with top singer will still; May be you score 1 million fans today but tomorrow all fans goes to other singer. It’s a tuff game back then.

Ideas that matter most....

Prequote: "Out of sudden, some thoughts running in my mind about business and market again that I would like to share. Although it’s a bit off my blog’s topics, but business is something about imagination and creativity, don’t you think? So I think it’s relevant tho… :)"

With nowadays competitive market and getting tuff to satisfying customers which now evolves to another level “delighting customers” because basically retaining a customer become a greatest challenge now. So in order to remain profitable, companies which eventually needs to evolve their business model and focus area to survive OR find ways to keep on delighting customers.
Big companies such as IBM and Google, they invest lots of money on innovation and encouraging ideas as they aware retaining business and keep find ways to delight customers is not going to lead them to long term surviving and remains at top. IBM willing to let go their personal computing department (sell to Lenovo) is a good move because although that’s part of core business for IBM, relatively they have to let go as company focus ultimately is all about profit not keep on who you are.

So to be innovative, rises demand of ideas and comments. That’s why leading companies are willing to dump lots of money investing on innovation because they see it important. Partly due to open market and globalization, to get in touch direct to end-consumer are relatively easy with nowadays technology. Therefore, this contributed also to encourage most companies go straight to public to get ideas. Instead as past old business model that goes distributor/business partner/reseller then to end user. And towards management and leadership, this leads to open-candor management (encourage staff to speak out and discuss), prioritize voice and dignity from employee is a winning leadership strategy nowadays. Hahahha… In Buddhism said, back to the seed to find a solution (Well, its law of nature). Hahaha… suddenly like off topic already but its true, to be top of the trends and foresee the trends by seeing current state and applying law of nature could actually predict some part of future in general.

From these trends, now the focus/questions go to
1) How to encourage public to share ideas, voice out their valuable comments?
2) How to conduct these efficiently?

From these questions and focus created another demand market, obviously it’s a potential business to be. Just very lately, a few groups who are aware this trend and demand already started these business such as http://www.redesignme.com/, http://www.kluster.com/. Ideas will be, oh in fact already a sellable product, demand and value of it will tremendously increase in very near future. These trends also encourage research companies becoming more important and demanding, not only R&D but research companies who do survey and collecting comments from companies. These “Crown-sourcing” would become a hit and certainly will impact all industry on ways of operating. So for companies to survive, multi-layers of business model and management systems would eventually need to evolve. But conducting change is relatively challenging, imagine companies with thousands staff and layers of departments. Its real tuff! Ha, another demand rises again, not sure you have seen it? I’ll share in my next topics, time to eat now….

Color inspirations

After decided on concept/theme, next is to determine the colors according to your theme inclusive color of furniture, walls, flooring, etc. If you are an adventurous and brave enough, you can try other sharp color. Who knows, it might cause of contrast and outstand your unique creativity and style.

Observe that many Malaysians used to simply pick colors when come to home furnishing. And they often made the very first mistake or hasty decisions to choose majority liked colors or general basic colors that could never be wrong when comes to furniture matching. Best selling color like white, off-white, light blue, green or brown are often big fans of majority. After done furnishing, they often finds their house are not exclusive and just alike other typical house.

So, colors real play a very important role and a knowledge thought, that’s make designer home so different. Try to observe by your own, the details of a designer home colors theme from wall furnish, furniture colors, flooring and accessories color and try compare with your own house, clearly the results explain. Other than considering whether matching or not, colors in fact does impact your mood and evokes a specific mood and inspiring. As a home is our ultimate long run resting nest, so decides on the mood color that enables you to enjoy and be as much comfort the possible, perhaps increasing confidence, and drawing from instinct, need and memory and will be the right color to go for. There is no place where the influence of color is felt more keenly.

My advice is when picking for the colors, choose according to mood that you wish to perceived. This also much depends on your personality. For example, if you not an aggressive person yet you pain your hall with real red, you might not feel comfortable after then, definitely you won’t enjoy. Your home environment is essential to your Well-being. So choose for a color with mood that you wanted to perceive and in long run it will have psychology impact. With home theme, color and furnish that you selected or designed, that automatically draw your style and personality.

To know what color evokes what kind of mood, color database with millions colors options and paint calculator that determines how many liter of paint you need for shape and size of surface to be painted, you may refer to - hahttp://www.pantone.com/pages/paint/moodselector.aspx.

If you are not a DIY type of person, the market or economy will make you one

I read an article that trigger my thoughts to share this, well let’s put home décor topics aside for a while, I’m going to talk about home design in business perspective as a start.

Even though you've heard about the New Economy that coming our way or ALREADY happening that is EXPECTATION ECONOMY. Capturing the essence of 2008's demanding consumer arena, it is—surprise, surprise—all about those pesky, demanding consumers:
"The EXPECTATION ECONOMY is an economy inhabited by experienced, well-informed consumers from Canada to South Korea who have a long list of high expectations that they apply to each and every good, service and experience on offer.

Their expectations are based on years of self-training in hyperconsumption, and on the biblical flood of new-style, readily available information sources, curators and BS filters. Which all help them track down and expect not just basic standards of quality, but the 'best of the best'."
True enough, with this EXPECTATION ECONOMY has been building slowly in the background, with nowadays peoples that are well educated, readily available information sources around; Word of mouth now travels the world in a flash, making product launches instantly global, turning every new brand—big or small—into a potential 'player', and most importantly, rewarding exceptional performance with immediate interest and approval from consumers. Basically, your competitor could be anyone.

Talks about ID, from a professional career as an ID designer or consultant move to now freelancers that attacking the market. Guess what the next trend, anyone could be an ID! In fact, it’s happening now. Well, IKEA was a very successful example who masters the market trends who lend the decision to consumers to choose freely with options. You want a rack with maroon color; well buy a rack and paint it with maroon. If you want to make it England-country style a bit, you can even paint it with flowers and pattern that you wanted. You want your house various items range from lights, carpet, chairs, tables, cabinet or even dining set and curtain with Zen style, there is already a set of Zen style items of all you wanted ready for you. They offer range of products for you to mix & match freely, whether you want according to a theme/style or into specific properties of the items, you can choose freely. Flexibility is the key of their success in this EXPECTATION ECONOMY or I called it “free-will” market, lending the control in consumer hands. Believe it or not if you are not a DIY type of person, the market or economy will make you one, the difference just lied between the results of each individual get, does it match your objective of what you wish your house to be! To achieve your objective, all you have to do just to know how, as I mentioned before the “steps”! Drop me an email if you keen to know the steps and checklist to help you.

Define your home design style

This is a far most important step that you MUST do before everything else. Lots of malaysian they often skip this step, straight away proceed to items shopping (e.g. paint color picking, lights and furniture shopping) and fits all stuff into the house and stay. Some who has a little passion on home décor, prior to start their home décor project, they often visit lots of show houses and referred many designing home magazines but end of the day they may find their house with many combination and thus didn’t portrays your own style. Try to imagine a house with a country cortage sofa mixed with modern contemporary design of dining set with steel and glass, plus another multi-partition of teak wood TV console. Country cortege + Balinese + modern contemporary? It is so odd. Reason is each style has its own color, material and structure combination that will creates an harmonies feeling if matching right, imagine wrong matching could creates awkward feelings.

Another types of Malaysian are often brought the things that looks nice in other people house, but after putting into own house doesn't looks or feels good. You may still not regreting of buying such a beautiful items but in fact it’s a total mistakes that put it in your house as it not matching. As a conclusion, do not sees only to the item perspective but to see your entire house as a whole will never be wrong. Because if you see only the items, then you may realize at the end it is not matching to other items may be too late.

Well, all you need to do is just plan ahead and prior to that defining your style first. But how? You may stuck in defining your own style, may be you not even know what style you like or design that you want. That is why IDs are here to help you. But have you ever imagined you can be an ID of your own too? Everyone owns creativity and style, only yourself able to portray the style out to maximum because only you yourself know what you want, what kind of feeling you wish to perceive in your house. Hire an ID may not be the best solution if you do not know to communicate your needs well or the ID not able to master your needs well. Everybody is gifted with sense of creativity and style, all you have to do is to know how to do it – the steps. Once you know how + your sense of creativity and style, I believe you could own a styling home you ever wanted with better budget control. Everything is possible provided you believe it so…. :)

My home picture to share....

Posted with a few more pictures of my house, designer that is myself and 100% DIY; my carpenter, wiring man, painter, plumber cum gardener is my fiancé. hahaha... we got the lightings, furniture, wallpapers, electronics and other decor items from various places, and prices are very reasonable. Ultimately we are overwhelm with the outcome and enjoying throughout the progress that we develop from scratch piece by piece to the end result, the joy of involving in every single details, putting in ideas and effort are really satisfying… :)

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Dream home in affordable price? It is possible....

My fiancé and I brought a double storey house in year 2006 and was completed on Sept 07. Both of us are so excited after we brought the house and always looking forward for the house completion. Almost every weekend, we will be there to see the progress of the development; Visit show houses around in different area; Visit all home expo; book that we will read when we step into bookstore are "Home decor magazines!"; Topics that we talk about was always about house, house, house…. Hahaha, think we are over too excited about owning our first house…

When I share with friends and relatives about the house we brought and things we plan to do, pool of ideas will start inputting from fellow friends and relatives that you should do like this, you shouldn’t do like that… Well, its good to have lots of ideas as a reference and good advice to avoid making the same mistakes as them again, but I think when comes to sharing it is more appropriate to use the word “you may or you could” that will be sounds more appropriate than “you should” because it sounds like an order or spell like it’s a fact which indeed it's not ;P

And when I told them of my plan and budget, they seems given me a common response that is “nuh, you need lots of money to do that” or “its impossible” or “you can if you are lucky enough” or “you need a lots of effort and long time to achieve that”… They may not have intention to stop my plan or idea but this was really their perceptions which think “it is impossible to have a designer home with limited budget”

Well of course to this advice, I absolutely cannot accept because my thinking was “Everything is possible, things are impossible because you do not choose to believe the other side”. So, without trying to argue, I decided to start action to prove them wrong. And guess what the result is? I better not to tell you the result now of whether I am succeeded or not. ;P Perhaps you can guess how much do I spent on décor itself first and you judge whether is reasonable price or affordable to implement the same to yourself or not. See the pics and make a wild guess and stay tuned for the answer in next post! ^_<