Archive for January, 2012

Pantone Loves Tangerine Too

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

In case you haven’t been reading the blogosphere fanatically, you might not know that Pantone has unveiled their Color of 2012.

Tangerine Tango is the Color of 2012, and I couldn’t be happier.

Last year’s Honeysuckle was alright, but Tangerine Tango fits in with all the color trending I’ve been seeing the past year.

You know I’m a fan of orange, and this is just the deeper orange range I prefer to play with. No apricot or peach tones for me. Deep saturation? Yes, please.  This is more in the direction of the persimmon color I’m planning to paint my front door this summer.  (I hinted at this in a post about front entries this summer.)

My favorite boxes for stashing supplies are a bold orange.

Boxes by Stockholm from The Container Store.

I just tried to create an image of my house with the updated paint color with the Sherwin-Williams Color Visualizer program, but the color rendering was terrible because it layered the color selected over the existing color which dramatically changed how every color looked. Bummer.

Here is one of their stock house photos with the door “painted” SW 6881 Cayenne. I think it would actually be deeper than this.

So I guess this is the closest I can get to showing the paint color ideas I have in mind.

The top color is a deeper persimmon with more red in it.  The middle is closer to the Tangerine Tango. I was doing this in photoshop and couldn’t find quiet the right shade yet.  The gray at the bottom is representative of the direction we headed for the main house color. Right now it’s a sage green the previous owners painted it, which is better than the baby blue it was before that. The majority of the front of the house is brick and the side of the house has a large expanse of white siding, so we have to work with all of that when selecting colors.

Okay, the idea of you picturing a really red brick with this color combination was enough to get me to do more tweaking to an image of the front of my house to get closer to a decent visual of the color palette.  I don’t want my front door this bright, so you’ll have to mentally combine the images to get the right look.  But you can see the gray may end up more gray with a hint of brown in it.

Okay, well you get the idea. I’m happy with Pantone’s color choice and I’m planning on bringing more orange into my life in 2012. Of course trends are trends, and I was already planning on using orange anyway, but it’s fun to see your favorite color get recognition.

Are you an orange fan?  What color do you think should be the 2012 color of the year?

 

 

 

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Sneak Peak: Wall Mural in Progress

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Since last July I’ve been working on designing a room in the 2012 ASID Showcase Home with my partner in crime, Jennifer Horstman of Sky Flower Designs.  We’ve been having a blast and the homeowners were giddy with glee when we showed them our concept for their Gift Wrapping/ Sewing Room at the end of August. It’s been a fabulous experience working with such creative clients who like going outside the box and think our crazy ideas could always get even crazier.

Our final design is pretty close to the original concept, and while I’m not going to give much away yet, I wanted to share a sneak peak with you of the mural we designed for the room since we’ve spent this week laying it out and starting the painting process.

This is what the corner of the room looked like the first day we visited back in July.  This is the definition of raw bones. An ability to visual the finished space is key for a designer in moments like this.

 

Months later the walls are up and painted our base color so we met with the homeowners on site to finalize colors for the custom rug and the wall mural.  (It was a working lunch for the busy homeowners.)

Since large scale graphics like this are hard to translate from paper into 3D, we figured the best way to layout the exact design was to work together to draw it out on the wall using pencil.  (He doesn’t have 4 arms, those are my arms blurring behind him.)

Thanks to a construction light, our trusty tape measures and a lot of pointing and gesturing, we were able to come up with an outline for the overall design that we all were excited about.  Then we had to make sure to tell the painter NOT to paint over our crazy pencil lines on the walls!  This is our “Charlie’s Angels” in action photo.

This week Jennifer and I started bringing the full graphic to life. We began by using Frog Tape to lay out the outside lines.  Then we used lengths of tape to design the varying widths of each stripe in each section until we felt it had a dynamic balance overall. Not nearly as easy a process as you might think.  The hardest part?  The optical illusion of lines carrying across all the planes on the door and trim.  Jennifer was a rock star and adjusted each line section by section until it looked “right” from across the room.  I’d say taping took about 4 hours that day. If one of us had tried to do it alone?  I’m sure there would have been tears and maybe even a temper tantrum. I’m just saying… don’t attempt this alone.

By the end of day 1 of taping and painting (I started painting while she finished taping that darn door), we have this dramatic beginning!  Of course it would look even better if I hadn’t gotten confused while painting around all those angles and started painting the wrong section green at the left end. Oops. Oh well, it’s just paint.

Speaking of which, we’re using Benjamin Moore Natura paint for this project, which has been wonderful because it has no VOCs, so there are no fumes to give us headaches as we work.  The home is going to be MN Greenstar certified, so when you add up all the decisions like this (which paint base to use) across the whole remodeling process, you can see how they make a difference for the homeowners and their health.

Here’s how it looked with the door open.  The room beyond is seasonal storage, so it won’t need to be accessed often.  But just in case, the design still needs to look right!

And after a couple more coats of paint the colors are looking more saturated and the weird double green band has been painted the proper shade of gray.

We still have plenty of work to do on this, getting full saturation on the colors, removing the tape and cleaning up all the edges, and painting the white and gray stripes in between.  But we’re so excited to see it this far, and we can’t wait until it’s done and the rest of the room is furnished and everyone gets to see it in May.  But regardless of what the general public thinks, the homeowners are already thrilled with it and the rest of the design, so that’s all we need.

Set your calendars for the 2012 ASID Showcase Home this summer, open to the public May 18th – June 10th, so you can experience this dynamic Gift Wrapping and Sewing Room in person.  The home is located on Lake of the Isles and the homeowners are doing an amazing job turning a large old home with traditional details into a home for modern living that embraces the past and present all together.  You’ll have to see it to understand what I mean. Look for the preview of the whole project in an upcoming issue of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.

 

Photo credits:  Photos 2, 3 & 4 were taken by the homeowners. The rest were taken by Fox Interiors.

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Gold is Back!

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

I find that once I start noticing a new finish or color around me, it suddenly starts appearing everywhere I look.  The latest instance of this? Gold. Not 1980s brass gold that feels cheesy. No, now it has a shimmery sophistication that I’m open to for projects.  To show you what I mean I’ve gathered a few pieces to highlight how this trend is popping up throughout the interior design world.

First up: Lighting

Here are three examples of chandeliers that embrace the gold trend in a modern interpretation.  The one on the left would fit in well in a mid-century modern home or a transitional home with a youthful attitude.  The middle one could be a nice addition of texture and playful shapes to an entry way.  The pendant on the right references the traditional shades of Morocco but would be totally appropriate in a sophisticated downtown condo.

 

Here are a few tile samples and accessories I pulled together that highlight how metallics are  popping up across multiple categories in fresh new ways.

I’m loving the large format tiles with raised honeycomb and ovals patterns on top of solids with a bit of color variation to them (hard to see in these photos).  Imagine a whole bathroom wall in the honeycomb pattern with a floating white rectangular sink in front of it, stunning!  The long narrow tile would be a great accent between solid large format tiles to add punch and glamour to a minimal modern space.

The small square dish is from West Elm and is currently being used as a key tray on my sideboard. I love the abstract pattern and how the gold lines aren’t solid everywhere.

The stag ring is in a bronze finish, but I still consider that part of the new metallic trend. A fun find from Target, I love the surprise looks I get whenever I wear it.

The cream crackle finish tile and small crushed glass accent tile could be combined to create a sophisticated transitional back splash without reading as gold, but coordinating well with gold accessories nearby.  In fact, here is an example of the tile used in just that way on a recent project to update a standard builder kitchen in a condo and inject the home owner’s personal taste without going too flashy to turn away future buyers.

 

 

While gathering fabrics for that same project I found all of these great examples of modern textures and patterns in metallic tones that would fit right into this sophisticated urban condo.  Against the deep espresso stained bamboo floors we installed, these gold accents are really going to pop.  The bronze fabric on the lower left has a great tone on tone pattern that doesn’t really show up in this photo unless you study the lower left corner of the sample. Another example of a traditional pattern made modern by stripping it down to it’s basic form and doing it in one color instead of lots of colors.

Now I started gathering images for this post back in October, and in the months since others have noticed the trend too.

I spotted this gold wallcovering in the December/January issue of House Beautiful.

And in December, Elle Decor featured Gold in the Trend Alert column.

Gold’s resurgence is going to continue in upcoming seasons according to the trends spotted at High Point  Furniture Market this fall and the forecasts I’ve received from trend spotting experts. So keep your eyes open and watch it start popping up more and more.

 

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