Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
Here is my confession (for those who didn’t already know this about me): I am a magazine addict. It is so difficult to walk past the racks of shiny new glossy magazines and resist their siren call. So you can imagine how difficult it is to hold out at an airport with all that time to kill before my flight!
To help my willpower and wallet (or not, depending on how you look at it) I subscribe to a lot of magazines. The rationale is that it’s cheaper to pay a reduced fee to have all the issues magically appear in my mailbox each month than to sporatically buy 3 or 4 issues a year at the bookstore/Target/Walgreens, etc. Then when I’m tempted buy a glossy magazine with pretty pictures promising me new design inspiration or the best burger joints in town, I can remind myself in my head that I have stacks of magazines at home waiting patiently for my attention. Usually that’s enough to help me walk away.
But then the flip side of that is that I do literally have stacks of magazines to be read each month. I get through most of them rather efficiently each month, but the design magazines always seem to have to wait a couple of months to get my attention. So when a new issue of House Beautiful arrived today I had a moment of joy when I spotted it’s bright, colorful cover amongst the pile of boring mail. Which was quickly followed by dread as I realized it would be ages before I got around to actually reading each article (skimming does not count for me).
Then I had a moment of brilliance. I should start a recurring column here that features my 3-5 favorite pages from the newest design magazine, which I will post THE DAY IT ARRIVES. Now do you see the brilliance? This will force me to stop, flip through the issue, and find great content to share with you while it’s still on the news stands and accessible. Since so many great design magazines have been forced to shut their doors in the past 2 years (House & Garden, Domino, Cottage Living, Southern Accents, Metropolitan Home - the design magazine I discovered at age 15 that got me hooked in the first place, etc.) it’s more important than ever to support the remaining design magazines. So keep an eye out for each new post since you never know what day I’ll get a new delivery of design inspiration in the mail. And if I cave in and fall for a gorgeous magazine at the book store, I will post that too (my weakness will be a gift to you).
I hope you all enjoy this new project along with me.
So here are the images that grabbed my eye in the September 2010 issue of House Beautiful:
Like I’ve mentioned in the past, a small bathroom can handle a bold wallpaper. I love how this marbleized paper was mixed with a 1940s French metal mirror and balanced by the paneled white walls and vintage marble sink.
The breezy, worn quality of this room is so peaceful. The texture of the chunky sisal rug against wood floors, old metal and worn wood is so visually interesting even though it’s a very monotone palette.
What caught my eye in this photo is the quatrefoil mirror over the bed. This would not be nearly as eye-catching if the designer hadn’t framed the mirror is a slightly darker paint color than the main wall color, and further highlighted it with a loose mural of ivy in off-white around the darker paint color. Not to mention the piles of books at the foot of the bed look so inviting in this cozy room.
What a bright cheerful room! I have always loved apple green and chocolate brown, and the designer handled these earthy tones with such a light hand that they almost feel breezy. All the natural light pouring into the space doesn’t hurt either. Don’t miss the free form pattern of lily pads and flowers painted on the white floors. A bold but fun choice.
Finally, I always think it’s fun to see how people really live. So this profile of designers and the sofas they own and how they live in them is fun. I think the black couch at the bottom looks just like one of Alexander Wang’s chairs in the Black & White color palette post. I love the high back and sides of the banquette in Liz O’Brien’s office with those colorful pillows. I sat in a off-white sofa upholstered in a fabric like sheep fur with a high back and arms in a showroom in Chicago 3 years ago and I still fantasize about it. There’s even a sofa that was originally from Crate & Barrel that was reinvented through reupholstery (I hope you don’t have to learn that lesson yourself: there is a reason some sofas cost more and last longer.)
Now go pick up your own copy of House Beautiful and find your favorite images!
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Tags: Bathroom, bedroom, chocolate brown, dining room, green, House Beautiful, living room, magazine, paint, quatrefoil, sofa, texture, white, Wood
Posted in Hot off the Press | 8 Comments »
Thursday, July 29th, 2010
I found myself craving Oreo cookies the other day, which is unusual for me. It’s not my usual cookie of choice, but cravings must be satisfied or they take on a life of their own. While enjoying a couple of DoubleStuf Oreos and appreciating their simplicity, it struck me that they were a great inspiration for the quintessential color palette combination: black and white.
So here are some of my favorite black and white rooms. I tried to find spaces that only used those two colors. It’s interesting to see how often people choose these colors for their kitchens and bathrooms and how well these colors work in both traditional and contemporary rooms.
This palette works well in any room of the house, even outdoors.
Alexander Wang, a successful product designer/artist, who tragically lost his life earlier this year (in what some believe was the result of his sleep disorder), created playful spaces with a unique mix of textures and forms in his loft in NYC (upper right picture). I love the black trim around the windows in the upper right photo. It’s a trend that’s been emerging over the past couple of years and it can really change the feel of a space.
The white on black paneling on the lower right photo adds a great graphic element. Most people would be terrified to have black walls, so they have guts.
The desk at right is another Alexander Wang piece. What an office that would make! All the other rooms have dark walls, but all of the white trim, artwork, magazines and other design elements create balance to temper the darkness. The dining room at the bottom has classic bones and proportions, but mixing in the contemporary chairs and art hanging over the table keeps it young and fresh.
This final group showcases the power of wallpaper. The graphic nature of these wallcoverings adds instant personality to each room. The background in the dining room in the middle of the top row is actually a wall of patterned curtains with a valance above, but it creates the same type of effect with such a solid wall of pattern. Powder rooms is a great place to experiment with bold colors and patterns since we spend so little time in them and they are small enough that no pattern will seem to go on and on. My favorite room is the dining room with the wall covering of a forest in black and white. I love the juxtaposition of it with the traditional moldings and chair rail and the completely funky dripping chandelier off a natural branch style form. And the table settings in black are so minimal and modern. Brilliant mix.
I love color. But the restraint of a limited color palette can push you in new directions that can be a fun challenge. Remember to include a variety of textures and shiny and matte surfaces. The eye needs visual variety, and if it’s not through color, make sure it gets it through textures and different tones.
Could you live with even ONE black and white room? Which room would it be?
Tags: Alexander Wang, Bathroom, black, contemporary, dining room, Kitchen, living room, patio, table settings, traditional, wallpaper, white
Posted in Color Pulse | 2 Comments »
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
So this weekend I was re-reading a favorite book for bookgroup, “Cooking for Mr. Latte” by Amanda Hesser. Amanda was a food writer for the NY Times for years, and the book chronicles her adventures in cooking, eating and relationships. Thank goodness she includes many of the recipes she describes at the end of each chapter or I would be a very hungry and frustrated reader!
What I love about this book is that all the recipes have a story behind them, which I think is true of some of the best recipes. Like the lemon bars my family makes that come from a cookbook my brother’s middle school put together of each kid’s favorite recipe. Fred Natkins will forever live on in our lives for his contribution of his mom’s lemon bar recipe. We never refer to them as simply Lemon Bars. Oh no, they are Fred Natkin’s Lemon Bars. I’m sure you all have similar stories about favorite dishes. And you remember who you served them to and how they fed the soul and stomach (if done right).
So what does that have to do with design? Well, it got me thinking about shared experiences, travel, and the objects we pick up along the way. When I travel I prefer to buy an interesting object for my home that I can look at and remember the trip. I’m not talking about “insert destination here” sweatshirts, spoons, shot glasses or fridge magnets. Though if that’s your thing, enjoy!
No I’m talking about that wall hanging I found in the little shop in the Gion district of Kyoto that has a giesha and a temple on it. And after I bought it we passed two maiko, apprentice gieshas, on the street.
Seeing the object pulls you right back into a moment, a story, a feeling. Or the 1890s German scientific print of different types of mushrooms I found in a vintage shop in Austin, Texas, that fits in perfectly on the wall of mushroom photos in my living room.
The mushroom photos always elicit lots of questions from visitors. It gives us the chance to tell them about our love of hiking and mushroom hunting, where I was inspired by the variety of mushrooms and colors and textures in the woods. Then we can show them our bags of dehydrated mushrooms as proof that I’m not just making this up.
The layout with different size and shape frames in an asymmetrical arrangement is more dynamic and allows us to add to the collection easily over the years. In fact, we’ll probably change out the mushroom photos for pictures from our trip to Japan next. That will provide new stories to tell, and different memories to enjoy. And when we tire of those photos, we will have other photos from other adventures with which we can replace them.
I think using objects and photos from your travels and adventures (even if they are local) is one of the best ways to ensure that your home is a reflection of you and your life. Grandma’s hope chest or the lamp from your childhood bedroom can also serve as mementos (not to be confused with Mentos, the freshmaker).
What objects do you have that have special meaning and history behind them? Where did you find them or who passed them down to you? Do they have pride of place in your home or are they mixed in and require exploration to notice?
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Tags: cooking, Cooking for Mr. Latte, japan, mushroom, photos, travel, vintage, white
Posted in Design & Home Living Tips, Reading List | No Comments »
Thursday, June 17th, 2010
For the past year or so I’ve been loving all the new wood finishes that have a more matte, greyed tone. It’s the rustic, well-worn Belgian farmhouse floor in a waxed finish. Let’s call it: rustic sophistication.
It’s the classic Alex Vervoordt room that features his perfect blend of Belgium antiques and soft wall finishes that makes you want to exhale slowly and luxuriate in the calmness.
Or a classic white kitchen with mile long wide floor boards in a bleached finish. Even though it gives it a well-worn, lived in look, it still feels fresh and modern.
But why limit your use of this beautiful material to the floor?! This living room definitely isn’t your typical ’70s panelled rec room! What a great way to add interest and bring in strong horizontal lines in a room that looks like it has higher than average ceilings. The large scale color block art on the wall would be easy to recreate as a quick DIY project in your favorite color palette.
This grey barn board style wall treatment, which also works as a really high headboard in this narrow room, makes my heart skip a beat. The brown, white and grey of the bedding is a warm but low key balance to all that color and texture variation on that wall. It may be a bit much for the typical bedroom, but why not go bold in a guest bedroom where no one will be living with it for long periods of time? It’s like the powder room principal – go bold because this small and infrequently used space can handle the excitement.
Or if the light wood beams is a bit too rustic for you, what about this amazing wood wall that functions as a banquette on the dining room side….
And as the wall and headboard on the bedroom side of the wall. The area under the bench in the dining room was even utilized as storage for the bedroom! Brilliant! Impressive that this was all done by the homeowner (though it did take a long time to complete the whole project… definitely not a quick weekend DIY!) And don’t forget the great end cut wood dining room table he made (in the first photo).
And now that I have a client who is interested in using reclaimed wood for their kitchen, I have an excuse to delve even deeper into the range of gorgeous wood finishes available. Take wood beyond the floor and typical applications.
See this stunning example from Dwell magazine that inspired us:
These were made from a single tree. LOVE LOVE LOVE!!! You wouldn’t believe my excitement when they showed me this photo as their dream, since I’d been drooling over it ever since my husband brought home the magazine for me. (It’s a kitchen special issue so he knew I’d love it.)
Now the question is: how do we want to recreate this feel without copying it directly? The ideas are swimming around and around.
Can you see this new (resurrected) style of wood in your home? Maybe as a table top? That’s another obsession of mine that we’ll have to save for another post.
Image sources:
1. Axel Vervoordt: Timeless Interiors
5 & 6. Apartment Therapy Presents: Real Homes, Real People, Hundreds of Design Solutions
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Tags: Axel Vervoordt, bedroom, chocolate brown, dining room, Grey, Kitchen, living room, texture, white, Wood
Posted in Design & Home Living Tips | No Comments »
Thursday, May 27th, 2010
Rather than move to a new home, more and more people are investing in their current homes. The classic conundrum is whether to design with a neutral palette to make sure that when the client is ready to sell it won’t scare off potential buyers, or to design without thought to a future owner and just do what makes you happy.
I’ve always subscribed to the philosophy that it’s YOUR home NOW, so enjoy it while you live in it!
If a future homeowner doesn’t like your style, they can change it. Frankly, often the potential buyers don’t like the overly neutral spaces that are devoid of personality, and they’ll want to change it up when they move in anyway. Certainly it’s possible to go overboard and make a home so custom that it will be a challenge to find a buyer that fits it as well. But there is a lot of ground in between these extremes.
Products that are installed in a home tend to make people especially cautious. But injecting personality doesn’t have to overwhelm a space if there is a good balance established between pattern and solids.
For example, this is a bathroom shower that I worked on with Mercury Mosaics recently that achieves that balance well.
Here is the Before condition. They have since ripped out all the tile and tub (the previous tile installation was bad and the walls are falling apart behind it) and built a new shower in the same location.
We started with elevations in AutoCAD for each wall and surface in the shower to show the client how the tile would work around the existing glass block window.
But let’s be honest. With a shower as complex as this, it’s hard for most people to visualize how all these pieces would look put together.
So we created a special perspective rendering of the shower in SketchUp so we could show the client what the shower would look like from several angles.
Now isn’t that easier to understand?!
We even did a version with the glass walls and shower door so that they could see where the glass would be placed in relation to the tile design on the top of the knee wall.
Now comes the fun part where you see how pattern vs. solids, colors vs. neutrals plays out.
Here are some shots of the tiles laid out and ready for the tile installer to pick up. All the mosaics are mesh mounted for easy installation.
Here is the tile which will run over the top and down the front of the knee wall. The gap in the middle is where the two planes of the wall will meet, so they were about to add edge glazed tiles to the end of the top surface where they would be exposed.
Here are the three sections of Bubbles that will wrap around the main walls of the shower. Don’t you love that bold mix of colors that wind like a river through the riverbed of darker tiles?!
And a detail of the bullnose half Bubbles created for the ends of the walls to correspond to the bullnose edged field tiles that will surround the band.
Here is a shot of two pieces of cove base molding with edge glazing for the bottom front corner of the knee wall. This is the color of the main field tile in the shower. This is the level of detail required on a project like this to make it really work smoothly for everyone involved (especially the installer).
Excited to see the final installation shots? So are we! Once we get photos I’ll be sure to share with you.
Now the final question to mull over is: is this design bold enough in personality to make the homeowner thrilled without being so overdone that it would scare away potential buyers if they ever decide to sell? (But why would they want to sell with a bathroom like this?!)
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Tags: Bathroom, Bubbles, color palette, Mercury Mosaics, shower, white
Posted in Design & Home Living Tips | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
We are now only four days away from the opening of the 2010 ASID Showcase Home Tour opening to the public! This has been such a fun, challenging, rewarding process and I’ve really enjoyed working with all the team members. The staff at Vujovich Builders was a pleasure to work with, as were the staff at Mpls.St.Paul magazine. It’s amazing to see how much work everyone has put into making this house and the condo amazing over the course of five months (plus months of additinal preplanning).
This is what the bedroom looked like before I got my hands on it.
It was the older sister’s room, and she has very different interests than her younger brother.
He likes sports, sports, sports.
So the challenge was how to create a space for a 12 year old boy that likes all different types of sports, that can evolve with him as he gets older, and doesn’t become dated or too young looking.
Solution #1: A sophisticated masculine color palette of grays, deep indigo blue, crisp white, and accents of orange to keep it light and playful.
Solution #2: Incorporate art that references all his favorite sports, without utilizing posters of specific athletes. Large wall stickers, custom framed vintage baseball card art, and a spot for a rotating display of his current favorite athletes achieve this goal.
Aren’t you excited to see it?! I know I can’t wait to hear what everyone thinks of the finished product.
Be sure to get your tickets soon so you can be one of the first to see all this great design 26 interiors designers created in two different homes (available at lots of area retailers as well as on the Mpls.St.Paul magazine’s website).
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Tags: art, ASID Showcase Home, bedroom, Blue, blue zones, Grey, orange, white
Posted in Industry Updates | No Comments »
Colleen Fox Slack | email: colleen@colleenfoxinteriors.com | phone: 612.868.0348
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