Sarah Van Arsdale - The watchword in real estate has always been: location, location, location. Anything else about a home can be changed: a bedroom can be added, a kitchen renovated, a garage torn down to make room for a garden. But you can do precisely nothing about the number of miles from the nearest grocery store or blocks to the library. And the surrounding neighborhood will make the value of the house plunge or skyrocket, regardless of the square footage.
This year, the watchword in home design seems to be: the economy, the economy, the economy. We're all feeling the percussive echoes of the crash of two years ago, no matter what field we're working in. And the tighter times are affecting not only how much we're spending on decorating and designing our homes, but also the choices we make about how we're decorating—everything from color to furnishings.
To get a sense of the design forecast for 2011 in three different areas of the United States, we talked with three design companies, one each in Georgia, Nevada, and Washington, DC
Irwin Weiner ASID -- Color is very visceral. It's very emotive for people. Picture a white room or a black room -- people feel very different in different colored spaces.
One way to choose color for a room in your home is to follow the advice of master interior designer Samuel Botero. I was told by a friend that he led one of his clients to the refrigerator and said, "Alright, here are the vegetables. Pick your colors." And food in the fridge made up the colors his client chose: hot peppers, green peppers, butternut squash, etc.
Different spaces call for different colors, and even different countries and the quality of the natural light in different parts of the world often determines appropriate color palettes. England is often dark, gloomy, and gray, and the Victorians went with very bright colors for porcelain, paint, and accessories.
Scandinavia, with its relatively weak sunlight, inspired pale grays and whites in home colors (see photo below). By contrast, Country French has its palette inspiration from hot and sunny hues. Mixing up colors and appropriate connotations can be sometimes jarring, like having hot colors in Scandinavian interiors. (Although rules should always be broken!)
In times before the 20th Century, color pigments were very expensive. Cobalt blue was made from lapus lazuli. Turquoise came from turquoise gemstones.