Creating A Home with Flexibility | Samsung QLED

If you were to visit our house regularly you'd soon notice that we're constantly moving things around. Our current partnership with Samsung has given us the perfect opportunity to create each space with its own purpose.

This post is brought to you in partnership with Samsung.

The role which design plays within our daily lives is of a huge importance. It affects our buying habits, how we choose to lead our lifestyle, the way we use of technology, and how we go about spending our downtime. We each hold the values of design differently, and in my opinion there really can't be a right or wrong way. Everything has been created to fit a brief; a solution to a problem, an enhancement to a solution, or something purely aesthetic.

How design can impact the individual is something that interests me greatly. A simple tweak of material on a swimming cap, the narrowing of frame on a bicycle, or the shape of a fork in a dinner set - each changes the user experience in the aim of being memorable or useful. Buying into "design with a purpose" generally leads to a lesser chance of us falling out of love with it a few months down the road.

Samsung is at the forefront of home design technology, and as longstanding advocates of the brand it has been a pleasure to welcome the QLED collection into our home for the past few months. I wouldn't call myself a tech-obsessed person, but the items that I do use throughout my day hold a high level of importance. My laptop, camera + phone each play invaluable roles within my freelance life, so it may sound silly to call a television "important", but hear me out.

I've battled with switching off from my working life since I began as a full-time freelancer around three years ago, but over last few months I've started to feel more at ease with disconnecting. Television plays a huge role in that feeling. Turn the clocks back two years, and the idea of me sitting down watching back-to-back episode of shows on Netflix would have been an alien concept, but the escapism that it brings me has become invaluable to my well-being. Add this to the experience that Samsung's QLED technology offers, and we're on to a winning combination - its unrivalled picture quality makes it tower above anything else I've ever experienced.

 The Samsung QLED, styled with furniture by IKEA, HAY + vintage finds

We moved into our house with very little possessions. It was the first time we'd experienced the flexibility (and restrictions) that comes with owning your own place. We had ideas of what we'd like to do with each room, but we were aware that flexibility always had to be on our mind.

I started to considering the affects of designs much more than I'd ever done before. Take the contents of our toolbox - a super boring example, but I reckon it makes sense - and all the different pieces you need for the jobs that you didn't even know existed! Each designed with a specific function in mind, all necessary in some way. These items hardly ever see the light of day, but they played an important part in making our home. The other side of design is the visual aspect (something which can enhances the enjoyment of using a product), and how small chances in function can appeal to different people. The Slow Living and Minimalism trends were built on the ethos of the mid-century modern movement, combined with growing concerns from the current environmental crisis and the over-saturation of the way we consume media. Design is both reactive and proactive.

When it came deciding which room we wanted to the Samsung QLED 7 Series TV to be in, we had the luxury of being super flexible with this too, due to its versatile design qualities. We began by using the QLED on the slick Studio Stand, which worked perfectly within our open-plan living room, and here's where we enjoyed having it for a over a month. With its location very close to our large bi-folding doors we did think the issue of glare would hamper our viewing, but the QLED's light reflectivity technology quickly became invaluable. Having dinner on the sofa quickly became standard...

Soon after, we were curious to see how well the QLED would work against the exposed brickwork of our dining room, so we decided to do a mini overhaul of the room by turning the space into a living area. Home cinema dreams coming true! The incredibly crisp picture quality was noticeable from the start, which is one of the most powerful draws of the QLED, but the immersive experience really came to live when we tailored the space towards the function.

Keeping with the Samsung studio stand, we styled the area with a mixture of vintage furniture, Danish design pieces by HAY, and our growing plant collection. The clever near-invisible optical cables ports worked perfectly with the "tidy home, tidy mind" ethos.

 Chair by DFS | Throw by Opumo | Planter by West Elm

This switch-around gave the space a totally different feel - and the shape of the space amplified the sound output to all-consuming levels - but we felt the room needed to feel a little cosier to maximise our experience. We swapped the QLED to its original table stand, and positioned it on our locker room cabinet, which instantly gave us a little extra storage to play with. With a few small extra touches - namely the addition of our large lounge chair, IKEA x HAY side tables and soft furnishings - the space was really coming together. 

The more we used the QLED the more we were benefiting from its usability. Take the Smart Hub menu system as an example: tying together all your apps and programming into one place, with the ability to find any programme within three clicks. Switching from terrestrial television to Netflix was as easy as the swipe of the remote's wheel.

One of the other handy features we've taken advantage of is the ability to turn your phone into a personal remote, using downloading Samsung Smart View app. Sweet for when you can't find the original remote, or want the ease of being able to queue up the next programme without disturbing what you're currently watching.

The third move for the QLED was into our recently-decorated front room. We kept it on its original stand, as we knew it would work perfectly against the dark navy walls, sat on our wooden sideboard. The almost bezel-free edges around the screen started to become really apparent in here - with only a couple of millimetres on show, maximising the potential of the screen space was clearly the designers' priority.

"...design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone
 in a civilized society"

- Walter Gropius.

Design will continue to play an integral part in making our house into a home, and as we start to experiment more with our interior design choices, the technology that we choose to fill our rooms with will run side-by-side with items which help keep us grounded.

Our partnership with Samsung has been very rewarding for us in terms of creativity, and it has given me a chance to share with my thoughts on a subject that often I've struggled to get across. The presence of Samsung throughout our lifestyle is evident, but connecting with someone on more than just a one-dimensional level is the key part they've managed to achieve.

For more information on the Samsung QLED collection visit here.

This post is brought to you in partnership with Samsung. Your support of the brands + businesses we work with helps make this blog happen.

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