Category: DESIGN TIPS

HOW TO PICK A PAINT COLOR SCHEME FOR YOUR HOME

If you want an inviting comfortable home, nothing perhaps is more important than picking the right color scheme. Finding the right paint colors for your home is a source of great frustration to many. It’s the question I get asked the most, so I thought I would take you through the process I use when I pick a color scheme for an entire home or a color for a room.

I’m revamping our Swedish house this month, and needed a new color for our TV room, so I will use my home as a guide. Here is a process I use to come up with a color scheme.READ MORE HOW TO PICK A PAINT COLOR SCHEME FOR YOUR HOME

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My favorite Designer Secret

This blog is about curtains. If you’re eyes glaze over about the un sexy topic of curtains I apologize.

But I really feel the need to share this.

Curtains are the one thing I continuously see ruin so many peoples interiors. I often see lots of money spent on a nice big couch but the windows are often overlooked. They are left either uncovered, or with some flimsy kind of curtain that’s often the wrong size for the window and let’s in teh wrong amount of light. The lack of thought on the windows always cheapen the look of the rest of the design. Period.

Therefore I always encourage my clients to have custom curtains made. The luxurious look you get is generally worth the cost. However the hefty price tag for well made custom curtains with pinch pleats can easily run up the budget quickly if you want to make them for all your rooms. So I needed to come up with a solution. This is the main reason I started designing and developing the best kept designer secret I know – our simple well made pinch pleat top Regency curtains. I use them for so many of my clients and they are always thrilled with the quality of the look yet for half the price of custom made drapes!

The only problem I don’t have a store so people can see them in person. The photographs we have on the site simply don’t do them justice!READ MORE My favorite Designer Secret

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Decorate with nothing new – our Livingroom

Moving and decorating a new place can be a very stressful AND expensive process.

Since the real estate market was “on fire” in LA it became impossible for us to find a house to buy, so instead we had to look for a temporary rental. Thanks to my broker Henry Dodge and my friend Julie in LA we found an cute bungalow just a few days before the moving trucks arrived. That gave me only a couple of hours to plan a design for a place I had never seen in person. And this had to be done without buying anything new AND leaving our house in Virginia perfectly staged to sell.

Here is a step by step SIMPLE & QUICK guide how you can decorate with nothing new!
STEP # 1

TAKE PICTURES OF THE NEW SPACE

As soon as you have secured the new place, bring paper and pen and a camera to the space. Take one picture from each corner of the room. And one picture from each side of the room. This gives you an excellent overview when you come home and start to work on a design. At this point also take notes as to what the landlord needs to do.READ MORE Decorate with nothing new – our Livingroom

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Living with White walls AND Color

If you have followed this blog for a while you might be familiar with my line “Life is too Short for White walls”. Well ironically, or perhaps to test myself (?) the bungalow rental we are in for the next few months has…yes…only WHITE walls. After living with a kaleidoscope of colors in our old house it felt at first refreshing with stark white walls. But walking through our Virginia house (soon no longer ours…) via Skype yesterday and seeing all the pretty colors – I suddenly felt deprived! Sorry but I really love color!

But looking around there are some cheerful spaces out there created with an all white backdrop. For all renters out there, or white-wall-lovers-but-want-a touch-of-color-people, here are some ways to add color to your space..READ MORE Living with White walls AND Color

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DIY Design tips for your home

n the mood for a DIY?

I spend a lot of time answering questions and giving design tips to different magazines or websites. I love giving advice and I love inspiring people to go improve their homes. Spring is finally here, and if you are anything like me you are probably itching to fix things up, clear things out, or redo something that has been sitting around bothering you for a while. So I thought I would share some of these simple design tips I gave to Refinery 29 last year.

Perhaps some of you saw the article, so sorry for posting. But some of these easy tips might come in helpful or might inspire you to go do what you’ve been putting off over the colder months.READ MORE DIY Design tips for your home

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Create a home with character & personality

When I’m designing for a client, I spend a lot of time really listening to them to understand what they love, how they want to live, and how they want to feel in their home. I listen to their lifestyle desires, dreams and really try to get inside their head. Nothing is worse than a professionally designed home that lacks the personality of the owners! I know a lot of designers read this blog, and I think you would agree.

When you use a designer the result should be your dream home, with your personality and ideas aided by the vision and experience of a designer whose esthetic you share.

I’m a big believer that things in your home should be meaningful, so I never create a design plan overloaded with “fill up the space” accessories. I incorporate most of the clients existing inventory of beloved pieces in to the design plan. I also think there should be some space left for future treasures the client might find as they go through life. A home is always evolving.

Using my own home as a guide, here are some thoughts I have on creating a space that has character and your own personality.

READ MORE Create a home with character & personality

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Inexpensive design trick- adding wood overlays to my office desk!

You might have heard of this clever company My O’verlays already. I’ve mentioned their great products on the blog a few times and they’ve been written up in a ton of places. Overlay’s are chic wood overlays in different patterns that you simply just glue on your furniture to give them an instant and dramatic makeover. They make a plain Ikea piece look like an expensive piece of designer furniture. Danika and Cheryle are geniuses in coming up with ways to beautify just about any space in your home with them. In my case I decided my Parson’s West Elm dining table that I use as a desk in my office needed a makeover. I don’t like to have what everyone has so I needed to give it it’s own spin. Here are some snap shots from makeover.READ MORE Inexpensive design trick- adding wood overlays to my office desk!

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