How to Decorate your Home
Determining your style and color scheme are key elements in any room. These will help you set a direction and keep you on track in making choices. You can get interior design ideas from magazines, internet sources, online furniture stores, and from other people’s homes. Make mental notes about what you specifically like and dislike. As you look in furniture stores and online, be sure to make mental notes about the prices of the things you like. This will help you to determine a budget for your project. When you are unsure about what colors will go well with the interiors of your home, you can begin small by experimenting with a pillow, rug, towel, a painting, a tapestry etc in various shades. You can select three to five colors and use articles in these colors to be kept in different rooms of your home. (more…)
If the Jetsons lived in a California ranch home, it might have some features like these:
Ten-foot doors that slide into the walls, opening the great room to the back deck. Windows that turn from clear glass to opaque with the click of a button. A touch-screen panel that pipes music through speakers throughout the house.
Meanwhile, robotics mop the floor, vacuum the carpets and mow the lawn, while George sips coffee and checks the stock market on what looks like a decorative ball.
Next week, the public will need go no further than Alamo to see for themselves how it all comes together at the first House of Innovation. (more…)
What a shame it is that the New Urbanists have adorned themselves and their nostalgic, reactionary neighborhoods with that snappy, forward-sounding label, because it’s architects like Ray and Mary Johnston who actually deserve it.
Over the past eight years, the Johnstons and their small Seattle firm have quietly designed a succession of small-scaled, intensely urban townhouse developments that point the way to an urbanism that’s not only refreshingly new but also gentle and humane. They haven’t resolved all the issues of compacting more and more people onto ever smaller lots, but they have tested a number of ideas that deserve an appreciative look. (more…)
Sloth, gluttony, covetousness … those seven deadly sins are so over. According to the Bishop of London, what’s really wicked now are holiday flights and gas-guzzling cars. But Lucy Mangan has other ideas
It is a sin to cause misery to others, you would agree, yes? And yet I bet that at this very moment you are sitting on a train or in an office where people can clearly see your – jeez, I dread to think – snub nose? Crow’s-feet? Spludged thighs? Small tits? I’m sorry, I can’t go on, I’m feeling quite sick.
Sicker still when I think how easily this could all be remedied, how swiftly the aesthetic suffering of multitudes could be alleviated by just a few surgical procedures or voluntary ingestions of poisons, if you would just summon the necessary moral fibre – and £10,000 – to erase these hideous signs of human variation and imperfection. (more…)
Some interior designers think of neutrals as comfortable, safe and soothing. Darryl Savage uses them for drop-dead dramatic effect.
“I get tired of color,” he says. “I love white. It’s very crisp. You can always change things up by adding flowers or pillows. Or add a little bit of black for punch.”
A decade ago, Savage’s parents bought a small 1950s rancher on the Severn River to use as a weekend house. They couldn’t have dreamed that when they sold it to their son after his divorce, he would transform the simple structure into a combination art gallery, stage set and rustic lake getaway. (more…)
