Design Philosophy

Do I want to live with this stuff and why?

That is the question you should ask yourself before buying something for your home. Does the object have some meaning to you? What is that meaning? Do you need something for just its functionality, say a frying pan, or can you create a better environment for yourself by living with objects that are important to you; they mean something to you. Quality functional products are available everywhere at very reasonable prices. At Intiri Designs we feel that you will get more from your life and your home if you live with meaningful objects.

Consumers in developed countries have enough stuff. Industrialization and the huge benefits of science and reason have been a specular success in the past 100 years. However, we now have huge environmental issues to work on, from landfills to dwindling supplies of resources to fuel our highly developed and material world to global warming and air and water pollution.

How can we help fix this mess? Try to make your purchases meaningful. You will live with meaningful products longer and create a lower environmental impact. Dispose of objects that aren't meaningful to you on eBay or Goodwill or wherever so that less fortunate people can enjoy their functionality without buying new products and increasing their environmental footprint.

At Intiri Designs we select many products that could have meaning for you. Many of our suppliers are crafts people, not huge automated factories. Technology and new processes make handcrafted products affordable to most people. For most of us, knowing the story of the person who created your product helps to make it meaningful and creates a lasting relationship with the item. When you purchase handcrafted products you are also helping to create a meaningful career for a crafts person. You improve your well-being and the crafts person's well-being. Nice.

Design inspiration and concepts

Before desiging our first table settings we spent years in research and development of a conceptual framework for our designs that we call Meaning Design. Meaning Design looks to research by neuroscientists, psychologists, environmental behavior researchers, and such, along with crossing over concepts from other fields such as landscape painting. We interviewed famous painters such as Curt Walters (Southwest landscapes) and wine scene painter Thomas Arvid for their thoughts on designing for light, texture, emotion, and meaning. We interviewed lighting engineers and researchers and read hundreds of professional research papers and books in over a dozen fields. Each year we take several field trips throughout the American West for design and ethnographic research in wine regions, the deserts, and cottage towns such as Carmel and Cannon Beach. This work informs our designs and is present in every decision we make. Our goal is to increase your well-being, including health, with meaningful product and interior design.

Table settings

Our wine country table setting kits contain everything you need to stage a wine country meal - just add friends, food, and wine. Whether this is a gift to yourself, an unusual or romantic wedding gift, an anniversary gift, or a gift for a special occasion, that person will be able to use the kit as a stage for memorable meals and entertaining. Our kits can be configured in various ways for a customized experience. Notice in the photos that we have suggested settings for one, two, or four people to give you a jump start on designing your own table setting. Have fun with it! Dare to dream a bit! Change things around or add your own items from your travels and treasure hunts!

Wine country ambiance

The Intiri Designs table setting concept:

Create intimacy with "bookends"

Accessories are jewelry for the table. Think it through, what does the typical plain table setting communicate, not just to you, but to your family and friends? Does it make them feel special? Add meaning, interest, and intimacy to your meals by placing the decor on the ends of the table as "bookends". Bookend decor defines the space and brings people closer together, a little alcove. Candles add warmth and color, along with a gentle light that provides a pleasant glow on human skin. Avoid center pieces, they get in the way. Once you've dined with our kit, meals elsewhere are just, well, eating food.

Create comfort with balanced lighting

In most dining settings the light source is above the table. This casts shadows across the faces of the the diners and is not all that appealing. We design our table settings to reflect light up and help to balance facial lighting. The result is to smooth the appearance of the skin and help people to feel more comfortable and relaxed.

Create interest with customizable settings

Intiri Designs' kits are platforms for building your own settings. You are free to experiment with the decor and add your own treasures. We provide items that are not all that easy to find and we carefully design for meaningful ambiance. The kit will save you hundreds of hours of seeking just the right products to create ambiance, but it also makes it easy to build upon this design with your own treasures. Have fun with your kit! Your table guests will appreciate dining in an interesting setting, probably for the first time in their lives!

We provide photos of suggested settings for one, two, or four people to give you a jump start on designing your own table setting. Have fun with it! Dare to dream a bit! Change things around or add your own items from your travels and treasure hunts!

For casual lifestyles like California Wine Country or Cottage you do not need to pay attention to the "proper" way of displaying the table setting. Put your utensils where you want them, not where some expert in our dark past decided things should be positioned. You aren't creating a keyboard that needs to be uniformly laid out so everyone can use it, this is just a table setting. Your fellow diners will find the fork and probably not spend much mental energy on it.

Create ambiance with meaningful settings

Humans emotionally respond to meaningful ambiance far more than to aesthetics - just beautiful things. Our kits are designed in the California Wine Country and we use handmade wine country products as much as possible. With our kit you have an authentic wine country setting for a real wine country experience.

We design our wine country kits with the color palette of the California Wine Country. In 2005 and 2006 we traveled the major wine regions of California collecting colors with a colorimeter no less. This is the palette we use for selecting textiles, candle colors, and other items for our kits.

Lighting

Lighting is an exciting area of interior design and affects your moods and well-being. Early scientific research is hinting that lighting can affect your health. Most lighting is done wrong and we'll be discussing the reasons and solutions here when we find the time.

For now, we strongly recommend that you read Richard Whitehead's "Residential Lighting" for the best book on the subject. Before this book was published we were using the techniques he recommends for our commercial remodeling projects. We also use them at home and our home is now far more cozy, inviting, soothing, and relaxing. Besides, we are having fun with it.

We are prototyping several light fixture designs with CFL (compact fluorescent lamps) and LED lamps (Light Emitting Diodes). Lamps is the real lighting word for bulbs. LED's are more directional and energy efficient than CFL's. We have worked with lighting engineers on the problem with LED's having too narrow a color temperature spectrum and seem to have found a solution. We are doing nothing with standard tungsten lighting, including halogen. They have to go.

This topic is huge and our discussion will live on its own Web page when we get to it.

Paint

If you make a big investment in paint then you may tend to be less adventurious with colors. You may be reluctant to re-paint and change colors. Pretty much any decent paint will do. It is the light that is more important anyway. Your choice of lighting will affect the colors reflected and the two should be coordinated. Paint color changes as it dries so be prepared for a little shock if you see it wet. It won't look like the color you selected. It may not even when dry because color changes with light. Please see your discussion on color and light.