Decorate Your Home or Room

Thing No. 1  

Steal this look. 

Sounds easy enough but you can’t imagine how many people have not a single idea of what they like (especially those X chromosome challenged among us).  Is there a room you like anywhere in this world?  A picture? A hotel you once stayed in? Grandma’s house?  The easiest thing in the world is to identify that room and knock it off.  If you’re doing a whole house, please do embrace the idea of some consistency.  We’d really rather you didn’t have a Moroccan living room and an American Colonial kitchen – that is not “eclectic” that’s just ugly.

Thing No. 2  

Color Me Mine.

Once you have some idea of a style that you’re going for, you need a color palette.  The style, to a certain degree, might inform your palette.  Your palette is not just paint but the palette for the entire room (or house as the case may be.)  Accent colors may boil down to a few pillows or a vase.

Go to the paint store and get yourself a fan deck and a pile of paint chips that you like.   Paint chips are free and we’ve been known to take 50 of them (trust us, nobody cares.) Don’t forget the paint strips with multiple shades. And, invest in a fan deck – should set you back about 25 bones, sherwin-williams.com.  Spread the paint chips out and start shuffling them around in combinations that you like.  If you have one color that you really like, find it in the fan deck and look for related hues. If you go up the fan deck (away from your hand) these will be lighter “tones” of that color.  If you go forward or backward and remain in the same position on the card, these colors have the same “value.” Nowadays, everybody has these fancy interactive palette tools.  We gotta’ admit these things are fun, but beware, we’ve been known to lose hours playing with them.  Try Color Smart @ behr.com   Better yet, if you’d rather not have your soul sucked out into the computer monitor, let Martha do it for you.  She has assembled coordinating colors on single chips.  The lady may not be so slick when it comes to insider trading, but boy, she sure knows what she’s doing in the decorating department. marthastewart.com .  If you like having your soul sucked out, still more fun to be had with interactive room visualization tools @ lowes.com and homedepot.com

    A. You need a background color – if you’re into blue, go for the one right in the center of the strip.  This is the most neutral.  

    B. The shades around this color (both up and down and across) are a nice way to start building your palette.  

    C. The key to working with neutrals is to add contrast.  We like one neutral, one light shade, one dark shade, one white for trim and two complimentary accent colors per room – these are the punch.  If you look at a color wheel, the colors opposite each other (diagonally, horizontally and vertically) are complimentary colors.

Thing No. 3  

God is in the masking. 

Yeah, we know, you’re a great painter right?  Everyone thinks they are and very few of you really are.  There’s a lot more to painting than painting. Like sanding, patching, masking and priming, not to mention super crisp, clean lines, types of paint and number of coats.  If you insist, at least get yourself one of these Pro-Trim gizmos www.asontv.com  BTW Leonardo, walls are flat, trim is semi-gloss or eggshell.  Finally, most paint stores sell sample size jars.  Do get some up on the wall before you commit.

Thing No. 4  

Approach the project in layers. 

Christopher Lowell (christopherlowell.com ) wrote a book about all this stuff and we thinks it ain’t too shabby of an approach. 

Two other important elements to manage are:
•    Space planning: It’s important that everything fits in the room comfortably and allows for good traffic flow.  If you don’t posses an intuitive sense of these things then might we suggest investing in a little board game: spaceplanning.com.  If you’re pressed for cash, you can always mask off furniture pieces on the floor of an empty room.  
•    Scale:  You’re going to have to balance the scale of things.  A huge, overstuffed sofa paired with a dainty little coffee table is going to look, well… stupid.  

Thing No. 5  

Don’t decorate.

Curate.  Nobody ever listens to us when we say this because everybody’s always in such a damn hurry but…take your time.  Find pieces that you love.  It’s bad cosmic energy to grab a bunch of furniture and jam it in.  Larger pieces should be more plain – insert your favorite word – classic, simple, timeless.  You can set these pieces off with smaller, more distinctive, pieces.  Besides, the really good stuff is going to take at least 12 weeks and if it’s coming from Europe and the month of August is involved; you’re talking 16-18 weeks.