Cetra Home and Garden

Professional interior designers are expertly trained in the use of lighting features to create breathtaking results. In this four-part series which I call “Colour Me Brightly: Understanding Light in Interior Design,” I draw on my experience in London’s interior design community to explain this fascinating subject. This second article talks about how to create patterns using illuminated materials.

Any perforated textile, when lit from the back or from the inside, will speckle adjacent forms with pattern, from point strips and pirouettes to constellations and dazzling laser specks. The professional interior designer can use the trim of a window covering to create fabulous banding across a shiny floor covering in the London summer. Some interior design firms love to use ornamental metal lanterns to paint fiery asteroids on walls and furniture, while light projected through a sculpted screen can create magnificent abstract outlines in expressive contemporary interior design schemes. A factory-inspired metal stairwell with perforated treads – of the type often reinterpreted for ultra-modern interior design schemes – can throw tiny checkmarks of light onto local furniture when exposed to a bright London sky in springtime. A fabulous option with a wooden staircase would require the interior designer to specify a grit-washed tread, to deliberately throw stunning shadows from the rail onto the adjacent wall. Abstract wire-mesh sculptures by local London artists can engender powerful interior design emotions, with the pattern even becoming more important than the object itself! Interior designers can expressively use perspective to distort the pattern from complete realism, when lit front-on, to Baconesque abstract enchantment when illuminated at an acute angle. The same effect can be created by using mirrors to refocus natural light from bay windows in some of the more luxurious London residences.

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Furniture doesn’t always come cheap and you want to get your money’s worth when you purchase any type of modern furniture for your home. While most classes of modern furniture do come with some kind of guarantee on the durability, it also would be helpful to learn more about regular cleaning and maintenance practices.The more care you shower on each item, the longer will your modern furniture last and heighten the look and beauty of your home.A regular dusting and cleaning routine, both daily and weekly/fortnightly, will aid in keeping your modern furniture upholstery, looking as good as new, even after a couple of years have taken place.

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With the coming up of construction databases, the way information is accessed and shared has undergone a dramatic change. Now you do not have to be lucky or high up in the construction industry to receive information about the latest construction projects in your area/locality or even in your state or country. These databases have uptodate information about projects in the pre-bidding and bidding stages.

Sites which own these construction databases offer easy access of information about the bidding process. At the click of a mouse, you can find bid due dates, project description, contact information, and more, without having to build contacts or rely on insider information. The websites enable you to search bids by state, project type or keyword. Thus you can identify and manage bidding opportunities in a convenient and effective manner.

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Santiago and Concepción are attractive for residential property investors, Viña Del Mar less so, says the Global Property Guide

There are surprisingly large differences between returns on residential property in Chile’s main cities. The Global Property Guide (http://www.globalpropertyguide.com), the research site for residential property, released today the results of research into rentals in major cities of Chile. It revealed that:
• Apartments in prime areas of Santiago have excellent average rental yields of 8.16%.
• Apartments in the city of Viña Del Mar yield only half as much, on average, with gross rental yields of around 4.31% only.

The rental yield is the annual rental income on a property, as a percentage of today’s property purchase price. This is what a landlord can expect as return to his investment. The rental yield is one useful yardstick of whether property is over-valued or under-valued

The high yields on apartments in prime areas of Santiago – Las Condes, Providencia, and Vitacura – suggest that these Santiago areas make good residential property investments.
Apartments in prime areas of Santiago cost on average US$ 98,520 for a 60 square meter apartment, according to the Global Property Guide’s research, versus US$ 87,480 for the same sized property in Viña Del Mar. However, 120 square meter apartments are more expensive in Viña Del Mar than in Santiago.

The result? Looking across the different sizes, prices in the two cities are more or less the same, on average.

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