Top Tips for Beautiful, Comfortable Living Areas for Less

04 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by melissaoconnor in Everyday Design, Guest Posts, Leo Parker

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Bed Sheets, bedroom, color, comfortable living, cushions, decorating, Explore a Theme, Focal Point, furniture, Headboards, interior design, Knick-knacks, living room, paint, pillows, rugs, Statement Lighting, swivel uk, throws

Give your living space a whole new lease of life with these easy and inspiring ideas.

Statement Lighting
Create dramatic, contemporary interiors using statement lighting. Lighting is the key to creating the right ambience and mood in a room. Opt for a large floor lamp to illuminate your living space, pulling everything together and giving the eye a focal point.

This super chic Arco Lamp replica, based on Achille Castiglioni’s iconic piece takes its inspiration from street lamps and the long stem enables the lamp to project light up to 8 feet from its sturdy marble base. A fantastic example of affordable designer lighting.

Create a Focal Point
Make one wall a feature. This rule can apply to almost all rooms in your home but works extremely well in the bedroom. By painting one wall a vibrant color and the other white, this creates a focal point in the room. Add to your focal point with some well-chosen designer furniture.

Place your bed up against this wall to create a modern and stylish look. Alternatively use wallpaper to exaggerate space, making it lighter and brighter, due to its reflective qualities.

Bed Sheets
For a modern, fuss-free and sophisticated bedroom opt for crisp white bed linen as your bed is the focal part of the room – an easy way to update a drab interior. Add cushions, plenty of pillows and throws for a more lavish look.

Lick of Paint
To create a calm and relaxing boudoir, try your hand at home decorating using soft pastel colors to achieve this effect. This creative process can be very therapeutic so will set the tone for the room from the beginning.

Headboards
If you are not enamored by traditional wooden headboards, a fresh take on this would be to make your own. A painting or photo collage is a great alternative and will create a bespoke, modern mood in no time.

Knick-knacks
Surround yourself with things that make you happy – old photos, books, inspirational objects to create a really homey feel. Not only will it make for a more cheerful living space but will feed into your subconscious which in turn will lead to a happier you.

Rugs
Add a bohemian element to your home with a rug. Bright colors, bold patterns and interesting textures are great for injecting a new lease of life into a living area.

Explore a Theme
Explore different themes and tie together a room by adopting this theme throughout the whole area. An example of this would be a quirky, retro sixties vibe. Mix bold geometric wallpaper with funky details with an Eero Aarnio Ball Chair replica for a cool look.

Written by Leo Parker

Guest Post: Tints & Tones-Brilliant Colors that Work for Every Room

30 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by melissaoconnor in Everyday Design, Guest Posts, The Home

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bathroom, bedroom, color, decorating, design, home, interior design, kitchen, living room, open colleges, tess pajaron, tints and tones

One of my favorite parts about starting a new decorating project, or moving into a new home is picking out the color palette. Color has an instant effect on how we feel every time we step into a space. They can help define the mood in the room and can even have an influence on how we act. Each room, however, is different. In some rooms, you want to sleep in a relaxed and peaceful environment, while other rooms are made for spicing up your life with some culinary excitement. Because of this, your color scheme will change depending on which room you are decorating.

If you are starting a new design project, or moving into a new space, here are a few tips to get you started as you choose your colors and make your home your own.

Kitchen
The kitchen is one room where you spend a lot of time whipping up delicious meals for you, your spouse and your friends. In this room, the senses are generally very fine tuned as you smell your food for the perfect spicing, sip your wine as you cook, or listen to your favorite music to make you feel at ease. This is the room where people also head to fit their cravings, and painted with the wrong color, all of this can go awry.

Red and yellow are two of the most popular colors in fast food chain logos. The reason for this is because they inspire hunger and action. While it is true that you head to the kitchen to make something to eat, having your kitchen painted the wrong color can actually affect your appetite and cause you to eat more than you should. These are two colors to steer clear of.

In the kitchen, keeping colors that allow you to unwind while you cook are a much better option. Take a cue from nature and use the psychologically calming color of green. Green kitchens offer a great place to unwind after a long workday as you prepare a culinary delight as they lend themselves to feelings of relaxation. For a touch of sophistication, add deep purples. Not only do these colors go well together, but the touch of purple will inspire just the right amount of creativity you need to make each meal extra special.

Bedroom
The bedroom is your haven to relax and get your much needed rest before heading out into the hustle and bustle of the world again. Because this is your place to escape, you will want to feel at ease as soon as you enter the space to relax and go to bed each night.

The best color to do this with is blue. Blue inspires a natural feeling of serenity. The color of water and nature, this hue can help you feel as though you are mentally washing away the troubles of the day and going to sleep each night ready to be refreshed when you awake. Studies have shown that people who look at the color blue have actually experienced a slowing of their blood pressure, respiration and heart rate. All of these bodily functions inspired by the peaceful color of blue create an optimal setting for rest.

To use this color right, it is best to avoid blues that are too light or too dark. Lighter blues can give the room a cold and unwelcoming feel, which is the opposite effect of what you want in your bedroom. Dark blues on the other hand can inspire sadness – a feeling no one wants to be surrounded by. Using blues in the middle is the right pick for bedrooms.

Living Room
Your living room and family room are the opposite of your bedroom in that they are places to socialize and converse. When you bring people together in your home, you want to create a warm area where people feel at ease and able to be themselves.

The best way to create this space is with a combination of colors. To start by creating a warm feeling, using neutral colors is best. Whites, tans and greys are perfect colors to use on the walls as they inspire a feeling of calm. To peak conversation, however, using red and yellow accents can brighten a space and make people subconsciously want to converse. This hue helps to boost your heart rate, making it a good color for night time conversations and parties where people stay late.

Bathroom
The bathroom is another very serene room as it is a place generally only used in solitude. For this reason, you should consider the place where you feel most serene. For many people, this is the beach. Using teals, sea foam green and tan colors paired with white towels and accents can make your bathroom more inviting and reminiscent of your favorite days on the beach or in the calming air of nature.

For many people choosing a color scheme is done based on gut reaction. But before you pick your colors for your next home or project, think also about the effect they will have on how you feel.

Tess Pajaron is part of the team behind Open Colleges. Her background stems from her exposure to their family-owned construction business. She is a lover of minimalist modern designs and architecture. On her spare time, she loves to travel.

Home Sweet Home: Living Room Redesign

09 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by melissaoconnor in Everyday Design, The Home

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blues, brown, gray, home, interior, living room, neutrals, redesign, white

This is the second post for my Home Sweet Home series. If you haven’t checked out the last one, you can read it here. This time I will sharing our final design for the living room of our new home. I love how the space came out and am very excited to show it to you all. Transforming the room took a series of steps and even though it was hard work, it all paid off in the end.

Here is what the living room looked like before. It was dingy, musty and the beautiful characteristics were almost unseen.

The first step was to take the rugs up. Dan gets all the credit for this one. He took up all the rugs in the house by himself! Once they were up, the room was able to finally breathe.

The second step was the painting. The main issue we had was the walls. The previous owners liked to add layer upon layer which was a pattern we saw throughout the whole house. So, underneath the paint was wallpaper. Because of this, the walls were cracking and peeling. Since we didn’t have the funds to replace the walls, I used textured paint and went over the bad spots to make them even. It didn’t come out 100% but it certainly helped.

You can see the worst spot in the room to the right of Danny. What were these people thinking!

After the walls and moulding were painted, the room was starting to look like I had envisioned. I wanted a calm and peaceful space that was a combination of our favorite styles; industrial and country with vintage and crafty touches. First, we placed the furniture and hung up the curtains and blinds.

Then added all the details and brought it to life. Most of the items in the room we already had. We just bought new covers for the couches, a new coffee table, a small recycled jute rug and textured curtains which was a great buy. It’s cool how the stuff you may of had for years looks take on a new life in a new home.

We stuck with a cool palette of blues, grays and whites with a touch of brown here and there. All neutral colors that bring a soothing and airy feel to a space. This is my favorite color scheme of all. It makes the room feel fresh, clean and comfy. With the addition of all the plants, its a haven of the earth.

I must say the living room is my favorite space in the house because it is everything I wanted it to be and more. It’s a room where people can gather to hang out, Dan and I relax and introduces guests when they enter our home. It speaks of comfort and peace and has an inviting feel. We LOVE our new living room!