Form VS Function: Which Is More Important In Your Home?

A lot of people seem to struggle with turning their home into the kind of place that they really want to spend their time. Much of the time the best that they can manage is making it fairly nondescript, the kind of place that could easily fade into the background of your life.

This is often because very few people are aware of the fundamentals of design, and what could be more fundamental than the age old question of form VS function.

Thinking carefully about this question you’ll not only come to understand many design concepts more clearly, but you’ll also gain a much greater idea of your own style that you can then bring into your home.

Form

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Form is essentially the pure aesthetics of something. You might say that a painting like the Mona Lisa is something that is all Form since, other than being beautiful, it doesn’t actually “do” anything. Without an eye to form when you’re decorating your home, things are going to become incredibly stale with little to no personality whatsoever.

However, there is, as with all things, a limit to this kind of design. Vintage homes tend to cause a lot of issues in this regard. Sure, you home might look absolutely fantastic on your Instagram feed, but elderly appliances and rusty pipes are going to make actually living in it much more difficult than it needs to be.

Function

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Function is what an object actually does. One of the most popular design movements that is almost entirely based around this idea is the Bauhaus school. The idea of Bauhaus design is that the function (ITALISJFODSJHGK) is the form. A chair is beautiful because it is well constructed, sturdy, and functional.

While it might seem a little restrained on a design level to a lot of people, this kind of thing can be incredibly useful on a day to day level. Folding drying racks might not be quite as aesthetically pleasing as their more traditional, hanging counterparts that you might see in a vintage home, but they are much more convenient for people living in smaller homes. These kinds of design ideas are key to focusing on function over form. The things that you have in your home should have a clear use, and if they don’t, then there is very little purpose in their existence.

Of course, it hardly takes a genius to see the flaw in this design idea. It can be incredibly difficult to give a home any sense of personality within these constraints. To do so, you would have to adopt a very specific, minimalist style that is not suited to everyone’s taste.

While there are clearly a lot of pros and cons to building your home around either form or function, it should be relatively obvious to just about anyone that the very option is for you to try and maintain some kind of balance between the two. That way you can avoid your home becoming dry and boring while making sure that you’re not constantly coming up against little inconveniences that make life more difficult than it needs to be.