makeovers

designer visions

By Amy Bleier Long

The proliferation of the Internet, social media, apps, and online collaboration has prompted a handful of interior designers to offer their expertise online at discounted rates, the caveat being that you do the measuring and the shopping. But that means you can set the budget and timeline, and have a little fun!

So far I haven’t come across a service that is as much of a bargain as Designer at Home. And if you haven’t yet used an interior designer—or are on a budget—this might be for you.

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Arkansas Traveler: Antiques & Design

By Candace Manroe

Copper: All that Glitters Isn’t Gold

By Candace Manroe

Copper is one of those good things I only came around to later in life. As a kid, it was my favorite crayon in the jumbo box (so sparkly!), but the metal itself was something better left on the wrists of arthritic grandmas. Even as a young home design editor, I didn’t quite get it as a decorative element outside the context of an Arts and Crafts house. But after neighbors installed copper gutters, I had to do the same. What previously had been bland conduits for channeling water away from the house suddenly weren’t so boring. They were jewelry. New, they glinted in the sunlight, but without any brashness, as though rose petals had softened their complexion. Then they weathered to that subtle verdigris patina that suggests the character of a house well-lived. I was smitten. A recent project of Des Moines interior designer Kabira Cadogan (www.iN2iTDesignStudio.com) reminded me that copper’s possibilities as a pick-me-up for the home aren’t limited to exteriors. In her vibrant design of a new house for a young family in an historic neighborhood, she turned to copper as an accent material and instant gratification for warmth, color, and character.

The designer’s use of copper becomes a transitional tool, weaving the rooms together. She decorated the dining room with a copper chandelier, then repeated copper in the kitchen.

How Color-Confident Are You?—Lessons from the Old World

By Candace Manroe

I’ve always admired the Europeans for their bold confidence with color. (Eighteenth-century English country houses equal sunshine-yellow walls, right?) Fast forward to today’s offerings of raspberry, fuchsia, acid green—nothing meek about these hues, yet  Europeans love them. And not the way we do in America. For example, the French, English, Italians, and Spanish don’t confine these fresh-to-brazen palettes to their teens’ rooms or to modern-only spaces. Or even to a single space in need for a swift kick of coomph, as we Americans tend to do.

That’s what so great about how the Old World embraces color. They have no problem upholstering an 18th-century French settee in an up-to-the-minute fuchsia or grape.

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Help! I Need to Rearrange My Furniture!

By Rebecca Christian

Arranging someone else’s furniture is like poking your fork in someone else’s plate: You have to know them really well. I have a friend — let’s call her Karen since that’s her name — who will occasionally leap up in the middle of a conversation at my house and move my furniture around. Sometimes she just tweaks the angle of a chair so that it looks caddywanpus to me until I get used to it. Sometimes we do The Harlem Shuffle, complete with oaths and grunting. She always improves both the room’s look and functionality. Read more

Paris Window Shopping

By Candace Manroe

Just returned last week from the big French furniture and fabrics market, Maison de Objet, in Paris, overwhelmed by so many gorgeous products I think you’ll love. I’ll be posting in multiples, with pics…way too much to share in a single blog.

First, I want to show you the coolest thing I saw OUTSIDE the showrooms. It’s art displayed in the window of an antiquarian book shop in the St. Germaine area, near our hotel.

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Free Pass for All Us Pack Rats

By Candace Manroe

Every time I start to houseclean before a party, I’m confronted by my collections. The dust they gather. The clutter they might represent to a more detached eye. The statement they haunt me with—you know, that one about hanging onto baggage and what-not.

But the fact is, I love them. The old black-and-white family photographs in Victorian seashell frames or in smaller micro-mosaic frames collected from travels in Italy (first trip, first frame, trip to Rome with Mother when I was 14; Mother’s been gone 9 years, I still have that first frame) and to antiques shops and flea markets everywhere else; all my books—antiquarian full-leather-bound and otherwise (just short of trade  fiction), that  started as gifts from both grandmothers and have grown to a houseful since—every room book-lined,  each with a different category of books: poetry in entry, family room, and master bedroom; history and art in living room; crime novels, first upstairs bedroom; and so on); my father-the-painter’s brilliant art; turn-of-the-19th-century whimseys (I’m like an ostrich: anything that glistens, sold!); seashells, especially cowries; Victorian seashell boxes and art; Staffordshire; ironstone; etc.

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My Magical Ceiling and Floor Makeover

By Candace Manroe

I’m the first to admit I’m not much of a DIY-er. Not that I lack the desire; it’s the ability part that escapes me. But I do have to share a couple of makeover products that make it look easy even for someone with two left hands like me. How do I know they work? Because I had them installed in my home—so quick and easy I MIGHT have been able to do it myself.

The first is my new white-painted WoodHaven Laminate Ceiling Planks from Armstrong. My 1960 walk-out ranch still had its ugly, light-absorbing popcorn ceiling. In two days, start to finish, installers laid the Armstrong planks directly over my old ceiling. I would have been skeptical of such a major transformation occurring in such a short time had I not witnessed it firsthand. Read more