Published by: Julia
Kelly Wearstler´s interior design masterclass is not to be missed. In it, you learn about space, scale, color, texture, materials, lighting, furnishing and much more. It also provides a fascinating insight into the world of interior design.
Who is Kelly Wearstler?
Kelly Wearstler is an award-winning designer, who now focuses mainly on interior design. Over the years, her work has won numerous awards. She is also the author of several best-selling design books and was a judge on Bravo´s Top Design show. This innovative designer is credited with playing a significant role in transforming the way modern boutique hotels look.
She also creates her own lighting, home furnishings, Objets d art, and jewelry. At the time of recording her Masterclass, Kelly was designing interiors for the Proper Hotel Group.
By the way, we recommend purchasing Masterclass for more than just one single course. The value comes when you take several. If you want to read our review of the whole platform, check out this Masterclass review article.
If you want to just find out what some of the best masterclasses are, this is the article for you.
An interior design masterclass that everyone can learn from and enjoy
Kelly works primarily with commercial clients, or the rich and famous. So, as you would expect, her masterclass also provides you with an insight into those two worlds.
Yet, Kelly has gone further than that. Somehow she has managed to create a course that anyone who is working in the industry or is a student of design, can benefit from taking.
Yet, she has not forgotten people who want to learn how to create beautiful rooms in their homes. Somehow she has succeeded in bridging the gap and has provided an interior design masterclass that practically everyone can enjoy and learn from.
Where to find inspiration for your interior design projects
Without inspiration, no interior designer can succeed. Fortunately, everything you come across in your life has the potential to inform and inspire. You just need to learn how to take notice and capture those insights and thoughts.
Kelly starts by sharing some of her inspiration sources. Many of her ideas come from the world of fashion. Surprisingly, materials, like stone, also seem to act as a creative spark, for her.
The right way to start any interior design project
When you begin any interior design project, you ask a series of questions. But, they need to be the right ones. Kelly shares several ways you can reliably discover what your customer is looking for.
She quickly goes over several examples of her work to demonstrate this part of the design process. In each case, Kelly explains what the client told her and how she used it to come up with her design. Hers is an enlightening approach, which I enjoyed watching and found to be very easy to follow.
Understanding and working with space
It is important to maximize the space that is available. Kelly is the master of taking a small area and turning it into something special.
I particularly liked the bar she created for one of her clients. Most of the time it is folded away under their stairs, hidden from sight. When guests arrive it can be folded out. Revealing a fully stocked bar from which to serve everyone.
It looks fantastic and is much better than keeping your drinks in cupboards. Everything you want is visible and easily to hand. It is pure brilliance.
This lesson is packed with information like that. During this section, Kelly also explains all of the following:
- how to make a small space feel larger
- how to make the most of existing architectural features
- how to give a space a new spirit
- using mirrors to open up and transform a space
- why you need to occasionally break the rules
- how going back to the original architectural detailing can inspire you
- understanding scale
- how to create a dialogue between your interior and what is outside the window
I really enjoyed this section. Although I admit that, at points, Kelly lost me a little.
For example, I could not really understand what she meant when talking about bringing a new spirit to a room or building. But, as her masterclass progressed, this became clearer.
Being a good designer is about visual trickery.
Kelly Wearstler Teaches Interior Design Masterclass
Kelly Wearstler´s design field trips
Using my all-access masterclass pass, I have been able to take more than 40 of the 80 odd classes that are available from masterclass.com. Importantly, I was able to do so for what I would have had to pay if I had bought just 2 individual courses.
All but, a few of those courses, have been excellent. Over that time, I have noticed that the most effective teachers incorporate plenty of examples into their classes. When I see what I have just been taught put into practice, more of it sticks in my mind. So, I was pleased to see Kelly doing this too.
She uses what she calls field trips. During them, Kelly takes her students to the Downtown L.A. Proper Hotel she was working on while creating her course. Once there, she further explains the various aspects of interior design. Here are the main subjects that she covers using this format:
- Working with space
- Experimenting with colors
- Pulling everything together
Getting the most out of the materials you work with
Learning how to use different materials and textures in interesting and innovative ways is important. Kelly is known for her creative use of the following:
- Wood
- Stone
- Tiles
- Metal
In this part of the course, she explains how to create what she calls a “vibe tray”. It is a genius way to experiment until you get the combination of materials just right.
Kelly also takes samples of the tiles, plaster, paint and fixture materials and places them side-by-side in trays. Every element of the room is covered. I have seen people do something similar with paint, wallpaper, and fabric samples. But, Kelly takes things that bit further by including the tiles and wall finishes. An approach that I can see working really well.
As you can imagine, Kelly has thousands of material samples available. These are all kept in trays. I would have arranged them all primarily by color. Instead, Kelly arranges all those samples by material type and finishes. A sign of just how much she prioritizes texture and materials. She really does have a different process, which is one of the reasons I am so confident those people who take her course will learn a lot.
This is an excellent course, but, it is quite short, so some things are skimmed over more than I would have liked. You see an example of this at this stage. When she calls her team in they start to look at a 3D mock-up, of the room. But, how you take things from the vibe tray to that stage is not mentioned.
Working with color
To some extent, color perception is subjective. We all see it in slightly different ways. But, there is no doubt that human beings are deeply affected by color. If we were not, advertisers would not use it to sell us stuff.
It can have either a positive or negative effect on our mood and performance. When 71 college students were given a red, green or yellow test participant number. Those with the red numbers scored around 20 percent less than the rest. Yet, when athletes are shown red during training, they generally over-perform. Colors are powerful, they move us, and they can also be used to radically change the way spaces look.
Understandably, color is a subject that Kelly covers in quite a bit of detail, during her masterclass. I promise you that when you take her masterclass, she will open your eyes to a whole new way of seeing and understanding color.
Her tip to look in your closet when deciding what to use in your home is just one example. A simple approach that I can personally vouch for.
Adding interest using texture
Texture is something the vast majority of us almost completely ignore when transforming a room. But, we really shouldn´t. This is another section of Kelly´s masterclass that proved to be an eyeopener to me.
She shows you that texture can be tactile or visual. Sometimes both. It is in this video you also learn how telling a story, having a theme can help you to pull things together. Kelly also explains how materials have a scale and how to use that to avoid trying to marry together things that crate or clash.
Look at the material. Also, look at the scale of the texture and you can create a beautiful landscape.
Kelly Wearstler – Masterclass.com
Mastering patterns
Kelly is well known for using bold and, often, unusual patterns in her interior designs. She uses them to add energy to a room and give them more character.
I found this class to be particularly fascinating. It is truly amazing how different the same pattern can look when you simply use a different color palette. Even more startling is the way the medium it is printed onto affects the way it looks and feels. Using several examples, Kelly shows you how to recognize this and use it to create the look you really want.
How to use lighting to enhance any space
When it comes to interior design, lighting is everything. If you do not get this right, it does not matter how good the rest of your design is. At this stage, Kelly explains:
- how to work with natural light
- how to use dimmability to create a mood palette
- choosing the right light bulbs
- how to use accent lighting to add fun
Using furniture to create a well-balanced and comfortable room
Using her own living room Kelly demonstrates how to make the right furniture choices. She explains how to choose pieces that are the right scale for the room. As well as how to create symmetry.
Perhaps the most important part of this video is the bit about choosing a sofa. I really wish I had heard Kelly´s advice before buying my latest one. If I had, I am pretty sure I would be a lot more comfortable than I am as I sit here writing this article.
Using art and other objects to enhance any room
Most of us love collecting and displaying objects. But, we tend to take quite a haphazard approach. As you can imagine as an interior designer Kelly´s approach is a little different. But, surprisingly, not as much as you would think.
She loves to collect as much as we do. But, unlike most of us, Kelly knows how to showcase what she, and her clients, own. Over the years, she has come up with some truly unique ways to incorporate all kinds of objects into virtually every type of space. You will be surprised and delighted and I think you will find this to be an inspirational part of the course.
This section of the course also deals with creating a focal point. She also blows some of the most common decorating myths out of the water. For example, not all focal points have to be large.
Kelly Wearstler interior design masterclass downloadable PDF
Every masterclass comes with a downloadable PDF in the form of a workbook. I quite like them. But, annoyingly, masterclass has recently changed from a one-page layout to two pages that are displayed side by side. Unfortunately, with my eyesight, this format is too small to comfortably read. So, I have to zoom in, which means having to use a mouse on a laptop to swipe the page from side to side to read the entire text. Hopefully, masterclass.com will soon change back to their previous format.
But, I digress. If you are using it on a device, like a tablet, that you can easily read it on, Kelly Wearstler´s pdf is actually very good. There are some nice images in it. But, she has not made the mistake another designer may have made and relied on images alone. Her interior design workbook is not just a glorified coffee table book. It really is instructional. For example, she provides an effective glossary of terms as well as details of where to find out more.
Most importantly of all, it has primarily been written to encourage and enable you to take action. So, when you take the course, be sure to download and use it. I promise that it will make you think and look at things in a different way. If you don´t believe me flick through to the pattern colorway page and you will soon see what I mean.