makeovers

Help! I Need to Rearrange My Furniture!

Written on February 3, 2010 at 4:44 pm
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

Written on February 1, 2010 at 1:12 pm
By Candace Ord 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

Written on January 15, 2010 at 3:00 pm
By Candace Ord 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

Written on November 23, 2009 at 1:52 pm
By Candace Ord 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