Posts in color
Do-It-Yourself Multi-Purpose Cottage Style Furnishings

Jessica Ackerman - Cottage furniture is beautifully rustic and typically features many warm, wooden tones or may be distressed, have a crackled finish, or a white-washed look.  The furniture found in cottage style is many times repurposed for something altogether different than what the furniture was originally intended for.  The ideas that follow will help you to outfit your home in cottage style while reusing items that you might otherwise discard:                         

  • A discarded dining room chair can quickly be fashioned into a cottage style planter when you cut a hole in the seat and fashion a terra cotta pot inside. 
  • An old armoire can be used to hold a TV, computer, or even your collection of china or other type of collection.  As space permits, allow the doors of the armoire to remain open to display your collection, or better yet, use glass to replace the door inserts. 
  • An old potting bench can be repurposed to handily become a bathroom storage unit, a hutch for the dining room, a cottage chic bedroom bench, or as a baker’s rack in your cottage style kitchen. 
  • An old, weathered kitchen step stool can quickly become a cottage style plant stand, or it can be used as a place to display a particular item that you are fond of. 
  • Create the perfect desk for your home office or teenager’s bedroom by reusing an old kitchen table.  Beneath the table (or even on top of it) you can stack wicker baskets, vintage suitcases, hat boxes, and wire baskets to store various items.
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Last-Minute Scramble: Dinner Party Decorating

Sarah Van Arsdale - We’ve all been there: a dinner party is imminent, and yet the house looks like hell. The table is still piled with books, dishes, mail, and maybe the stray hockey stick. The portable CD player is still on the floor, where you put it only as a temporary measure six months ago when you lent the side table to your sister.

And then the phone rings, with the news that two out-of-town guests have made it after all, and the guest list has suddenly expanded from six to eight. You don’t even want to think about the mess that is your linen drawer, because you know you don’t have eight matching anything in there. Panic is setting in. How can you create a fabulous design under these conditions?

Plus, you’re up to your elbows in hummus, with a group of artists, writers, and scientists arriving in mere hours.

This was the situation on an April evening in the seaside split-level owned by a culinary whiz.

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Decorate with the Color of the Year

Sarah Van Arsdale - If one of the purposes of good design is to lift the mood, then the designer's job has become much more challenging in the past couple of years, with the bad economy dragging everyone's spirits down. Those of us in the design field know that a beautiful, well-lit room, furnished with harmonious pieces, awash with carefully-chosen color, will help cheer the heart and lift the soul.

So, when things are looking grim, we just need the right color to perk us up… Okay, it isn't really that simple, but we all know that color really does influence mood. And Pantone, the color authority, has announced its color for 2011, and it's one that's sure to lift everyone's spirits, if not their bank account balances: honeysuckle.

Pantone describes honeysuckles as "a dynamic reddish pink." It's got a tone deeper than pink, but brighter and paler than red. And yet, it isn't too sugary-sweet; honeysuckle is an intense, strong color—strong enough, perhaps, to cheer us up when we need it most.

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