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interior design

in home

Interior Design by blackmana – App Review

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February 3, 2016
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Have you ever wanted to make an EXACT, to scale, blueprint of your future house so that you can plan out furniture placement, decor, and paint colors? I have! Which is why I started looking for iPad apps that would help me do this very thing.

Interior Design by blackmana is $8.99 in the App Store. This is by no means trivial. I normally only download free apps, and I will only actually purchase apps if I happen to have an iTunes gift card. I just so happened to have such a gift card. Even so, I think this is well worth it if making a replica of your home is important to you. This app has close to no in-app purchases and everything from furniture to textures to materials are included.

Let’s talk about the different features of the app. There are three different views.

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in inspiration

Style Inspiration: NYC Restaurant L’Amico

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December 27, 2015
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These days no matter where I am, a restaurant, a coffee shop, a clothing store, a friend’s house, all I see are possible design ideas and inspiration. This was no different at L’Amico, a bright, modern farmhouse of an Italian restaurant with an open kitchen and wood everywhere.

What I noticed upon entering the restaurant was that I loved everything about it. It made you feel hip and yet at home at the same time. The front wall of windows had been retracted so that the whole restaurant was open to the busy streets of Midtown Manhattan and yet it still felt cozy. I began collecting observations so that I could understand how this ambiance was created.

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Open Kitchen: You can see the chefs hard at work in the background of the photo above. It was essential to me when choosing a floorplan for my own home that the kitchen be open to the family room. To me, a kitchen is a family room and they should naturally just be parts of the same room. This is how you achieve that feeling of warmth.

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in inspiration

Style Inspiration: $2.4 Million Mansion

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November 15, 2015
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When your local paper features a story on a new model home with a two story master closet, you go. Thus my lazy Saturday style adventure began. After you choose and purchase your new home, there seems little reason to continue looking at model homes. But this is actually the most beneficial time to go to model homes. As I mentioned in my previous post Model Home Mirages, model homes set a pretty unrealistic expectation of what your home is going to look like. They have all the bells and whistles and are decorated so fine, that you feel like you’re in a Better Homes and Gardens magazine.

And that is EXACTLY how you should see it. Now that I’ve already chosen my home, I am using this opportunity to walk through model homes only focusing on the amazing interior design. Instead of buying magazines for $10 a pop, I can simply drive to a few local model homes and experience the designs first hand; walk through the living exhibit, touch it, live it, and figure out what I want in my own home. Therefore price doesn’t matter and of course I chose to walk through a $2.4 million dollar, 5000 sq ft monstrosity.

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