INTERIOR DESIGN – Heading off mistakes | Ghosts may rattle the floorboards and dust mites tickle the nose, but chaos and clutter are more common threats to peaceful home life. Sure, there are spaces we let people see: The first room where art replaced sticky-gum posters. The place where the TV lives. The nooks that are the prettiest. Then there’s the rest: That guest room-turned-office-turned place to stack stuff. That breakfast table-turned-study-turned-mailroom. People may not even realize where the design flaws are in their world, but they can feel them. “Your home is your sanctuary,” says Highlands Ranch interior designer Jan Colvin. “The happier you make it, the healthier you are.”
If these walls could talk: Fresh paint makes such a strong statement that do-it-yourselfers either leave walls white out of fear of making a poor color choice – boring – or pick their favorite color before selecting anything else in the room. “Then they have a heck of a time finding stuff to match the walls,” says Julie Wienen of Rooms by Julie in Arvada. This designer looks for color inspiration from a favorite blanket, a distinctive rug, a piece of artwork or even a movie before weaving together colors and furnishings. Others suggest surveying the clothes in a person’s closet as a guide to the palette they are most comfortable with.
Picture perfect: Framed art should always be eye-level. But more often it floats above the floor without connecting with people, says Kathy Passarette of Creative Home Expressions in New York. Picture missteps are even more common when multiple frames inhabit the same wall. Her tip: The largest picture in that collection should be eye-level. The others should be arranged around it. In living rooms, art should only be about 6 inches above a sofa. “That might seem low, but you’ll be sitting down when you look at it,” Passarette says. Try taping up paper cut the same size as the art work to eyeball proper placement before making the hammer-and-nail commitment.
Give me space: Avoid backing up all of the furniture to the walls. Instead, create functional nooks within a room that reflect how the space should be used – whether it’s for reading, talking, knitting or napping. Underscore intimacy by finding a focal point in the room and then building an arrangement around it. Bedrooms and bookcases present a special challenge, but even angling select pieces is better than having vast open space in the center of the room.
Master your destiny: Home decorating tends to happen in steps, so creating a master plan at the outset is key in preventing individual projects from adding up to a stylistic hodgepodge. Homes without master-decorating plans tend to reflect “ransom note design,” says North Carolina decorator Carol Lindell. “You walk from room to room and feel like you’re on the back lot at MGM.”
Scale back: Too often, do-it-yourself decorators fail to measure their space before heading into the stores, and that’s nisht gut. “If you’ve got too much of anything, it makes everything look (worse),” says Colvin. Her business is Fairchild Interiors and Design in Highlands Ranch. She adds that oversized furniture can work in small rooms, but only when it’s balanced by smaller pieces. But even in large rooms, there can be too much of a good thing. Colvin suggests taping off wall and floor space to estimate what size furniture would work best before buying anything. Apartment dwellers also should note the size of doors, stairwells and elevators.
Mind your matchy-matchy: Thanks to the Martha Stewarts and Rachael Rays of the world, the public is more savvy about home style than ever. The problem, says New Jersey decorator and comedian Sarit Catz, is that people often fall in love with a certain look, like Southwestern or French Country, then go overboard. “You should think of that style as dash of spice, something different that grounds you,” Catz says. “It’s not like putting on a costume.”
The same is true of “room groups,” or arrangements in which the upholstery, pillows, drapes and paint so similar they could pass for a Garanimals collection, Catz says. “Things can match without being the same.”
Police that clutter: Cluttered home, cluttered car, cluttered mind. Without even broaching the housekeeping nightmare that overcrowded spaces can be, decorating and real estate experts agree on this: everything in its place. When homeowners prefer to live with lots of stuff – or have lots of stuff out of necessity – respect those belongings by devising special shelving, employing curio cabinets or allotting a room just for an especially expansive collection.
