Interior design colleges face the same challenges as other art disciplines – the jump from school to real life where the desires of the customer and a strict budget can constrain even the most creative designers.
As one school showed however, getting students ready for these real life scenarios can lead to some pretty exciting (and fun) competitions where the sky is the limit and the budget is outrageous.
A contest designed by an instructor at a Chicago interior design college recently awarded students $2,000 for designing a penthouse suite. The interior designs weren’t for a real customer, but the students were given the chance to design the suite based on a lavish, $30 million budget.
Harrington College of Design instructor Constantine Vasilios challenged students to design the penthouse for the fictitious client according to the client’s own lifestyle and tastes. The imaginary penthouse had 14,000 square feet of floor space and the only limits were the budget and the imagination of the students who had to choose the lifestyle of their clients.
The interior design college student that won the first prize created more than 30 unique spaces, including an outdoor patio area, game room, arcade, and four bedrooms for the penthouse suite. There were three finalists in all that won the $2,000 prize.
While the multi-million dollar budget may seem like a vast amount of funding making it easy to create a limitless design, the project was really about how to make sure a design project comes in under budget. As far as penthouse apartments go, thirty million isn’t that much of a budget.
On the Harrington College of Design website, Vasilios said “Money is something we don’t always talk about in academia and the first component that students face upon graduation. Solving creatively within a budget is of paramount importance in real-world scenarios.”
