As the year draws to a close, it is an opportune time to reflect on the past year, and get prepared for the new goals, resolutions and beginnings with the approach of 2018. To ring in the new year, many may take this chance to declutter and refurbish their homes in anticipation of the exciting new start. One could consider designing and creating a minimalist home, focusing on the important things that matter and to discard the excesses. However, a minimalist home does not need to be boring or devoid of character; in fact, a minimalist home is anything but that. It offers a lot of benefits, including a more aesthetically-pleasing appearance, an easier-to-clean home and a less stressful environment. Hansgrohe Singapore offers some tips on creating a beautiful minimalist home.
Accessorise Sparingly
As renowned architect Antonio Citterio aptly explains, accessories have a “significant effect on the overall appearance of a room” and are “an essential part of its décor”. Like small jewels, accessories add the perfect finishing touches to rooms, including the bathroom and the kitchen.
However, it is important not to over-accessorise the home with over decorative features which can end up cluttering the home. Accessories should be used sparingly, and home owners could consider accessories which are multi-functional and space-saving for a minimalist home.
AXOR offers the high quality and timeless Universal Accessories range, which can be used individually or flexibly combined with each other. With its smooth contours, the grab rail can be incorporated together with the shelf, allowing for a generous accessories space as well as a towel holder. This simple and space-saving combination is a perfect solution for minimalist bathrooms.
Minimalist design is not only applicable for the bathrooms; it can apply for other rooms in the home, including the kitchen. As a space for activities such as cooking, cleaning and washing, it may be a challenge to design a minimalist kitchen that is suitable for these activities. However, with the aid of accessories, this can be made possible.
AXOR Universal Accessories also bring comfort and beauty to the kitchen. For those who treasure organization, this product range offers creative freedom while ensuring that the most important kitchen utensils and favourite herbs and spices are within easy reach. This allows home owners to keep their kitchens clutter-free while still achieving a beautiful, elegant and minimalist look.
With the use of accessories to lightly decorate and store objects in a home, this can help to make the living space much more attractive and less stressful to manage.
Light-Filled Spaces
There should ideally be an abundance of light filling the space of a minimalist home, with light coloured surfaces and uncluttered spaces. The rooms could be designed to be spacious and clean, allowing for light to fill the room and freeing the home from unnecessary objects.
For instance, a bathroom can turn into a place of well-being with the liberal use of sunlight, made possible with large windows to create a spacious and comfortable ambience.
To complement clean and light-filled spaces, home owners can design their bathrooms with clean and minimalist bath fittings. The Hansgrohe brand offers the aesthetically-pleasing and high quality PuraVida bathroom fittings, which will be coveted for its award-winning sculptural appearance. Its DualFinish (white/chrome) brings a new design dimension to your bathroom, allowing surfaces to seamlessly blend together while brightening the bathroom with chrome and white.
With a good combination of clean and light-filled spaces with complementary products, the home can be transformed into a beautiful and attractive space with a lot of character and personality too.
Space-Saving Products
The key to a minimalist home is to have products with clean and simple details, thus offering the freedom of space in the home. Open floor plans and modest storage areas are features of minimalist homes, just like clean cabinetry with simple minimalist details. What are the other ways to create more space in the home?
Space-saving products are also important in freeing up space in the bathroom, which is increasingly becoming a sanctuary of retreat and rejuvenation, and not just a space for hygienic purposes. It is more and more common for different generations of families living together in the same space, sharing common rooms like the bathrooms, and it has also become important to make sure that the bathroom is uncluttered and easily accessible for everyone including the elderly and children.
AXOR One, designed with Barber & Osgerby, is a generously proportioned but fascinatingly clean masterpiece statement in the shower, which offers three individual controls in an all-in-one shower control element. With its monolithic but soft form, AXOR One creates a new spaciousness in the shower, evoking a pleasant feeling of clarity and tranquillity for the users when they use it to select between shower outlets, control the temperature or choose their preferred amount of water. The AXOR One handshower launched in 2017 complements the shower control, with its monolithic form, refined proportions and reduced design, thus creating a timeless statement in the bathroom.
Home owners can also consider products which help to free up more space in the kitchen.
Home owners will be thrilled to know that with the Hansgrohe brand’s recent foray into the kitchen sink business, the brand is now offering innovative sink products that not only help to save space but also are extremely practical and easy to use.
The innovative Hansgrohe Select technology is directly integrated into the Hansgrohe stainless steel sink itself. A large elegant button on the right sink rim turns water flow from the multi-jet kitchen mixer on and off. The clever button also opens and closes the drain so that no other control is required in or around the sink, or detracts from its visual appeal. This allows the easy control of the flow of water using the back of the hand of the elbow for the user, especially when he or she is holding a large pot with both spaces. The technology behind the Select button is purely mechanical. No electricity or extra devices are required in the base cabinet, therefore freeing up space.
In addition, home owners can opt to pair the new stainless steel sinks with Hansgrohe kitchen mixers with the new Hansgrohe sBox. The sBox keeps the base cabinet tidy and ensures reliable functioning. It stores the hose of the pull-out spray in a flat box specifically designed to fit standard base cabinets. This protects the hose from being bumped into by drawers and waste bins, and ensures comfortable, smooth and quiet operation.
Therefore, with such space-saving products found in the kitchen, the home can be transformed into a clean and minimalist space with added conveniences of cleaning and maintenance, which is very important for the modern home.
Simplified Colours
By reducing the variety of colours and simplifying the colour schemes to two or three colours, this could help to achieve a more uniform minimalist appearance for the home and could be achieved by having the same colour but in different textures. This does not, however, mean that home owners cannot be creative or artistic in a minimalist home – in fact, a minimalist home is about having simplified and well-balanced aesthetics.
If the home owners decide on a darker colour scheme like black, grey or even any dull tones, they could consider choosing fittings in customised colours like gold, bronze, brass etc which would match perfectly and stand out in the bathroom setting.
Almost all of AXOR bathroom fittings can be made bespoke with AXOR FinishPlus, a special service offered in Germany, with a total of 15 special finishes possible for selection. These special finishes are created with the PVD (Physical Vapour Deposition) and the result is a more robust and brilliant product, which adds exclusivity and elegance.
One example would be AXOR Uno, designed with Phoenix Design, which epitomises purism in perfection with consistent construction: two precisely shaped cylinders joined together at a right angle. With AXOR FinishPlus, the products become as visible as the user desires from a bold gold to a subdued nickel finish, perfect for the home owners to complement their minimalist colour scheme.
Text and Images by Hansgrohe