Fascinating Authors

Assignment made easy:  Create a warm and welcoming home
With or without the help of a professional

Your home should be your haven, your retreat.  A warm and welcoming home can be the ultimate escape.  Our lives are so busy these days, it’s easy to lose focus on our families and homes.  So, my goal is to get people back to what’s important in life – their home base.  My reasoning is simple:  Home is best!

With that goal in mind, let’s discuss how to get there.

When it comes to decorating, many people don’t know where to start.  I suggest getting in tune with your tastes. The first step is to determine your style, what I call the vision of your imagination. Think about the following questions: Are you simple and sophisticated? Does cozy chic define your taste? Would you describe yourself as trendy or traditional? How do you feel about retro? Perhaps you’re not exclusively one style or another (many are not), but rather a mix of several of the above.  Answers to these questions are a beginning to helping you determine into which category you fall.  But let’s go a bit further.

Look through magazines for ideas that you like . . . copy them. When a piece of furniture, a room, a color or a look appeals to you, clip the page from the magazine and make a simple notation with a marker. Once you have a pile of pages, your directives might read: “funky candlesticks,” “mixed pattern chair,” perhaps “oversized floral arrangement.”  It’ll be a mixture, that’s for certain; but here’s how to make order of this assorted jumble.

Create a file for each room. For example, your outdoor file folder might include garden boxes, barbeque grills and picnic items.  And your folder for a guest room could have a weathered nightstand, a black-and-white color scheme and an heirloom doll collection. You’ll probably notice that similarities will emerge. Typically you’ll find that you usually select the same colors and prefer the same styles, such as an attraction to green hues or perhaps a preference for antique furniture.

By now you should be armed with enough knowledge and information to tackle your first room, so it’s time to get going. Keep in mind that every room is distinctive — with a different purpose, for different people and with different considerations, some being substantial challenges. But look at each room as one challenge at a time. And think in three steps: color, texture and the unexpected.  By following the simplicity of this advice and adding a few new touches each month, it’s possible to have a beautiful home within a year.

But for those of you who remain overwhelmed, my advice is to consider working with a professional. However, first do your homework and make certain that whomever you select is a good match for you.  As a designer, my role is simple — to create your look, not recreate mine.

When you do seek the services of a professional, here’s a peek of what you should expect.  Consider the opening questions my designers typically ask. “What are your favorite colors to wear?” “What is your fashion style?” Formal? Informal?  Why are we interested in this information?  Because personal dress preferences provide clues to the interior design look that will feel most comfortable to you. They also ask about your style preference for the room, what feel are you looking to accomplish in the space and, of course, what is your budget.

If that budget needs to be stretched, work with a decorator who is good at “turning trash into treasure,” whether working with items found at a flea market, a garage sale, Target and your own attic. And think beyond their ordinary use.  Favorite examples of my design team’s creativity include transforming a weathered fence into a piece of mantle art, converting an old wheelbarrow to a planter box, replacing a headboard with a fireplace mantle and making a distinctive serving tray from an antique framed mirror.

As a designer I take pride in my client’s unique discoveries and the way they add interest to their home’s rooms.  I like things that create an unexpected surprise, items that are a bit off-kilter.  In the world of décor, my only hard and fast rule is there are no rules. Of course, there are guidelines, but sometimes the rules beg to be broken.

My final piece of advice: Be true to yourself and to your home’s style; and if you work with a professional, find one who honors you and your taste.

Now go, have fun and break a few rules in the process!