alisa and lysandra

Quarterly Blog Review

March 20, 2016 by Naomi

Can you believe that a quarter of the year is already over? The past three months have absolutely flown by at IIHS and we certainly hope you have had a great year so far!

At IIHS we have been busy creating new content to inspire you, no matter if you are a home stager, an inspiring home stager or just interested in interior design!

This is a summary of our most loved blog posts of the year so far! You guys have been giving us some awesome feedback and we can tell how much you are really loving the blogs!

The first one we are going to look at is Feature Property – Inner City Charm. This traditional, renovated suburban home is absolutely lovely and an awesome family home! It has been staged in a way that creates a warm and homey feel. A wide variety of colours have been used to transform this home including greys, whites, oranges, blues and rose gold. We love giving you guys inspiration, examples and stand out pieces to work from and this home is great for that!

Next was Kona Colour of the Year 2016! This blog truly opened all of our eyes to the power of yellow. Everywhere you look this year there will be kona walls, stools, stables, lounges and feature pieces. Having such a lovely colour promoted in the design world may challenge some designers but will certainly brighten up any area that it is placed in!

After Kona there was Vignette Workshop with The Block Twins, Alisa and Lysandra! This blog and video compilation was a condensed workshop that Naomi Findlay had with Alisa and Lysandra from The Block, all about the best ways to use vignettes. We decided to share this workshop with you guys to help inspire you and provide some more information about how to style vignettes in a really simple and visual way!

Finally, there have been a bunch of love around the post Home Staging Prices: how much should I charge for home staging? This blog is a need to know topic, how much do I charge? While it is impossible to know exactly how much to charge when you are starting out, this blog will provide you with everything you need to consider before you start mapping out your prices!

We are looking forward to putting more content out into the world of home staging and hope you are excited to see what we have install!

Vignette Workshop with The Block twins, Alisa and Lysandra

February 23, 2016 by Naomi

When styling a home, something that can make or break the design is the use of vignettes.

Not sure what vignettes are? Chances are you do, and chances are you already use them!

Vignettes are the accessories, bits and pieces, or nick knacks we all have lying around our homes. They might not look like much on their own, but when placed correctly they can transform a rooms whole persona.

When Alisa and Lysandra met with IIHS for a vignettes styling session they didn’t know the power vignettes had in the home staging industry.

When using vignettes, it is important to layer. This allows you to connect the furniture to the rest of the home, creating flow and ease through design.

According to Naomi, there are some very important rules to follow when styling vignettes.

Firstly, you must use odd numbers. Not only is this more pleasing to the eye, but it also gives the area you are styling are more peaceful feeling. Think about it – one coffee table book looks fine, two doesn’t look finished and four looks overdone, so three would look great!

Secondly, use different heights. Think about this in a bigger context, a city skyline wouldn’t look nearly as beautiful if all the buildings were the same height, would it? The same goes for vignettes, use different items of all different sizes to make the area look more interesting.

Next, differently textures are extremely important. Pair worn with new, shiny with matte, rough with smooth. Doing this will make the area more interesting and visually pleasing. You don’t want anything stock standard or overdone. If you are obsessed with rose gold accessories, try adding a splash of matte black or grey, this will make the textures stand out more are become more of a statement.

Also, add light anywhere! Candles, desk lights, fairy lights, lamps and salt lamps are all great ways to add a touch of light to the space. Not only will this add another interesting aspect to the space, but it can provide a helpful device too. Lighting is a great way to, literally and metaphorically, light up a space.

Finally, depth is important. This isn’t a library where everything needs to be pushed to the front! Have some things sitting further back than others. Think this might look out of order or messy? This of it as ordered placement. Everything is there because you put it there, not everything has to be in line.

So, what did Alisa and Lysandra take away from this workshop and what should you take away from it as well?

Be brave – chances are if you try something new it will turn out awesome! The worst thing you could do is listen the voice in the back of your head that’s telling you that those vignettes don’t go together.
Experiment with different ideas – styles are made to be mixed and mashed together. Use what you already have to create something totally new!
Tell a story – make everything flow, add dimension to a space to create something awesome!

Want to find out more about styling? Check out the video Naomi made with Alisa and Lysandra below and make sure you leave a comment telling us what your favourite tip was!

Lysandra and Alisa on IIHS Colour Design

July 29, 2014 by Naomi

I thought it was about time that you heard from me again and my continual progress through the modules with the International Institute of Home Staging. The thing I love most about IIHS is that it’s so simple to understand. It’s all written in laymen’s terms, which is what I need to be able to understand what is being said.

Today I’ll be talking about Module 4, which explores the principals and the terminologies behind light and colour in your home. I’ll be focusing more on colour in your home during this blog. What I’m discovering is it’s so much more than just selecting a colour from the paint store, which in hindsight seems like a simple process. The next time I select a paint colour for a project or my home, I will be armed with the knowledge and principals to help me get it right. So I’m going to relay what I have learnt in Module 4, here the top 3 things that I learnt about colour in your home.

The first thing I learnt is that there really is no set rule when it comes to selecting the right colour for your home. The colour of a room can instantly create an emotion as soon as you enter, whether consciously or subconsciously so it is important to get it right. It really is a matter of experimenting with colours, get lots of colour swatches from your paint store and experiment, experiment, experiment. There are so many different colours, tints and shades that can complicate your decision even more. Put the swatches up against your choice of flooring, furniture or window dressings until you are happy with a colour that fits.

A very interesting fact that I learnt through this module was that colour refers to the way our brain registers the different wavelengths of light entering our eyes. A single ray of light is made up of the spectrum of colours – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet – all of which have their own wavelength.

You may have heard people use the word “Hue” before and this essentially means they are describing the pure nature of the colour such as green or blue and it is free from white, black or grey. When you hear the word “tint” being used it means that (let’s use blue as an example) when white is added to blue it create a “tint”. Another term used is “Shade” this refers to black being added to the blue to create a “Shade” of blue. That brings us to the next word “Tone” buy adding grey to blue it produces a “Tone” of blue.

There are 12 segments of the colour wheel, 3 primary, 3 secondary and 6 tertiary colours. I won’t go too much into this as it is fairly in-depth but it is useful for highlighting how colours relate to each other and which colours can be mixed to make new colours,colours relate to each other and which colours can be mixed to make new colours. Using the colour wheel (once you get your head around it) can be useful as it teaches you how to create a balanced colour scheme that will be complementary in your home.

Colour, like art, is very subjective and can be one of the most powerful elements of interior design. If you think about it, colour more than any other item or object in a room, can change the way you feel instantly. It is also a cost effective way to create an impact or give your room the change it’s looking for.

The Block Twins – What IIHS is teaching us!

June 1, 2014 by Naomi

Whoever thought becoming a student again could be so much fun? I am currently a couple modules into my design course through the International Institute of Home Staging and have learnt about the importance of size, scale, proportion and balance. I guess this is something I had never given too much thought to, well consciously anyway. Alisa and I were able to put rooms together, but we had never really considered in depth the importance of these elements.

The first element to module 4, was size. I learnt that size was based mostly on instinct. When you walk into a room you may not know the metric measurements, but you instinctively know whether if feels big, small, clutter or airy.

The second element was scale. I am learning that all principals and elements of design blend and correlate with each other. Scale is one of the most difficult elements to understand. Scale works in with the size of a room, objects, ceiling heights and layouts of a room. Alisa and I failed during living/dining week on Fans vs Favs in relation to our scale.

We had grand ceiling heights and the room was open and airy. We under estimated the size of the space and subsequently bought furniture that was too small for the room. On completion of the room, we both stood back and loved what we’d created. The judges felt that the rug was too small for the space (they said it look like a tea towel) and the coffee table was insignificant. They believed that the couch was also lost in the room.

Upon returning to “The Block” and having a subjective look, we realised that the scale was very out of proportion to the room. It was at that exact point, that I understood the importance of getting the scale right – and it ultimately cost us the win for that room.

The proportion of a room is strongly related to the size and scale of the space. When designing any room you will no doubt faces some challenges. When I think of proportion, I think of the second bedroom during “Sky high”. It was long and skinny and quite a difficult space to use. By positioning the wardrobes against the longest wall and placing the appropriate sized bed in between, we turned an awkward layout, into a very useable space.

The final element is balance. In design, balance creates a feeling of equilibrium, or in layman’s terms, evenness or symmetry. There are different forms of symmetry; axialsymmetry, radial symmetry and asymmetric symmetry. The perfect way to describe balance (axial) is to envisage a bedroom. How often would you go into a bedroom, and if you put a line down the middle of the bed, it would be a mirror image of each other. Balance doesn’t mean that it has to be an exact match on either side of the room; it’s about distributing the visual weight of objects within a space to achieve a feeling of equilibrium. It is the best way to achieve balance within a space and often leaves you with a welcoming and comfortable feel. Without balance things tend to go sideways.

I don’t blame you if you’re trying to get your head wrapped around the above elements; I was the same. If you are like me, you’re probably thinking, “yeah but isn’t proportion the same as scale?” Then add balance and size to the mix and it seems as though it all blends into one. To a certain extend they do, but they all have their place when it comes to designing a room. If this doesn’t make sense, then I recommend you do what I’m doing and do some study with IIHS. Even though I’ve only been studying with IIHS for a few months, it’s finally all starting to make sense and I cannot wait to start the next modules.

Check out Lysandra’s Block confessions here.

Check out the highlights of the last IIHS workshop with Alisa and Lysandra here.

Click here to start studying with IIHS!

Lysandra from The Block confesses

April 30, 2014 by Naomi

I have a confession to make. After a year and a half of being a contestant on The Block, it is only now that I finally get my first opportunity to sit down and get my head stuck into learning the core principles of interior design. It’s so funny that Alisa and I have been designing winning rooms on The Block without learning the principles of interior design.

People think that we know what we are talking about because we have that natural ability to put a room together. Alisa and I have never pretended that we are interior design gurus, but hopefully after completing our course with the International Institute of Home Staging we will be well on our way.

I remember one of the first questions we got asked when we got onto The Block: Sky High was, “What style would you say describes you?” My response was, “Ummm, we don’t really know. Let’s call it the Alisa and Lysandra Style.” Looking back we had absolutely no idea about anything, we didn’t know the difference between contemporary or modern, for crying out loud.

Yes we have done two seasons of The Block, but the rooms that we produced were by complete instinct, not because we had an idea about what we should and shouldn’t be doing.

I sat down on my laptop and opened my first module, Design Skills 1. By the end of this module I am finally able to describe the core principles of design and how they vary from one another. It’s all well and good for Alisa and I, to be able to put a room together and make it look good (and even have people exclaim ‘Wow!’ when they walk in the room), but if we are serious about our career as designers, it is paramount that we learn the core principals of design.

The first module covers the core principals of size, scale, balance and proportion. Completing this module makes us excited about what more we could produce when we combine our experience of two seasons on The Block with the knowledge we have gained so far in our IIHS course.

Alisa and I have been very fortunate to have Naomi Findlay, principal of International Institute of Home Staging, take us under her wing as a design mentor. Bring on the next module I say!

About Alisa and Lysandra:

Identical twins Alisa and Lysandra are best known as winners of renovation and design show, The Block. After winning The Block: Sky High and being crowned the Bathroom and Kitchen Queens, they were asked back as favourites for a second series, The Block Fans VS Faves. They have now launched their new stylish online homewares store, Alisa & Lysandra Collections.