Tag Archives: Redesign

Brighten Up Your Winter with the Color of the Year!

Pantone

Each year Pantone, known as the global authority on all things color, releases their pick for the color of the year. The choice is meant to act as a trendsetter and inspiration for fashion, marketing, design, and other color saturated industries in the year to come.

For 2023, Pantone chose a bold, bright, energetic color for the year – Viva Magenta. They want the color to provoke feelings of strength, power, and a connectedness to nature. The tone originated from a carmine dye produced by the cochineal beetle, linking us to the exquisite elegance of nature, herself.

If you’re anything like me, you see a swatch of Viva Magenta and think, “how in the world am I going to incorporate this bright, red color into my life of neutrals and greiges?!” The genius of the color is it pairs beautifully with both warm and cool palettes, so we are left with an abundance of options to spice up our life with Viva Magenta!

Here are just a few ways to brighten up your 2023 with Pantone’s color of the year:

The Mercury Gallery

Add a splash of color to a monochromatic palette.

Burke Décor

Update your powder room with a bold wallpaper. Half baths are the perfect place to try out funky design!

Flor

Don’t be afraid to mix and match patterns and finishes!

Etsy

Find smaller pieces you can integrate into a neutral motif, such as vases, candles, or throw pillows.

Diptyque

Our Place

Love to cook? Add some color to your kitchen and enjoy the temporary beauty of Viva Magenta on your stovetop, with the safety of being able to tuck away the pan and pot when you’re finished.

Pantone

Target

In the end, you can always start small and add a cute coffee mug to your collection and call it a day! Design is meant for you to enjoy, so do what feels good and beautiful to you!

 

Guest Blogger: Katya Larsen, Stager, A Home Revival

 

 

 

Using Wallpaper as a Design Element

Photo credit: Homesandgardens.com

Wallpaper is all over the place these days and there are so many fun fresh patterns.  Plus with peel-and-stick, you can easily apply it yourself and not be tied to it for years to come.  Wallpaper is a very easy way to add some personality to your space.

Great spaces to try wallpaper for the first time are:

Powder Bathrooms: A small, safe place to do something different or bold!  This paper is from Rifle Paper Co.

Photo credit: Stylecharade.com

Primary Bedroom or Kids Bedroom: Less visitors in these rooms, so you can design more specifically to you or your children’s taste.

Photo credit: Thespruce.com

Laundry Room: Add some spunk to an ordinarily not-so-fun room.  Maybe you’ll enjoy doing laundry more!

Photo credit: Bria Hammel Interiors

Anywhere with bookshelves or open shelves: Try it just inside some open shelving for a peek of color or texture.

Photo credit: Decorpad.com

Great places to look for wallpaper are:

Good price point — Amazon + Home Depot + Etsy

Some of the prettiest, unique designs — SpoonflowerWallshoppe + Chasing Paper

Happy papering!

 

 

How to Create Balance In Your Room

In my previous post I started a ‘training’ session of sorts on how to create a well put together space in your home. I used to train and certify Home Stagers and many of the things I taught them applied to a home for living as well as a home for selling. My previous post focused on focal points (pun intended)! 😊 Now lets take a look at balance.

How do you create balance in a room? It can be done through the placement of your furniture, accessories or even with color. Many times it is all of the above. I really think balance is about the feeling you get when you are in the room. Balance does not mean you have all items perfectly symmetrical because you will never have the exact same items or size of items on both side of a room; nor would you want to.

 

 

A perfect way to describe a room out of balance is when all the large pieces of furniture in a room are set up to face the TV.  What happens is that all the heavy pieces get lined up on one wall and the TV sits alone on the opposite wall. The weight of the room literally feels like it is tipping to one side. You want to arrange furniture so that it is not all about the TV all the time, then use other furniture and accessories to balance the visual weight within the room.

 

 

There is also a sense of balance you get with bookshelves or the mantel of a fireplace. Again, you don’t want everything identical on each side but you don’t want, for example, all books on one side and all accessories on the other. The side with all the books would obviously feel too heavy. You want to disperse items amongst the shelves using varying heights to create balance as well.

 

 

Let’s take a look at this room below:

 

The chair floating to the left of the TV creates balance so that the right side of the room doesn’t feel heavy with the weight of the fireplace and chair. It also counters the weight from the other direction because if the wall had just the TV and fireplace it would feel light with all the heavy furniture on the other side of the room. Do you feel how that would be?

Also let’s take a look at the fireplace, there are not tall items on both the left side of the mantel and the right side. That can be done but it may also be boring. The tall vase with reeds on the floor to the right of the fireplace brings balance to the whole area. The floor lamp behind the chair on the left brings in height to counter the height on the right side. Do you see it?

So for me, I just did this without thinking. It is ingrained within me because it is what I do and do it all the time. It is just automatic and took me maybe 10 minutes to pull together visually. That’s me. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t get it balanced on the first try. Play with it, pull in things from other rooms and see how it feels, move things around, experiment. When will you know it is balanced? It will feel just right, like the Goldilocks nursery rhyme, you keep trying until it is just right. 😊

I hope you learned a little bit about balance and if you want to check out my previous post about “focal points” click the link. My next blog will be all about creating Continuity and Flow!