Tips For Painting Like A Pro
When looking for things to do during a pandemic, changing up your paint color isn’t as terrifying as cutting your own hair. With proper guidance and the right tools, you might fall in love with painting like I did, and that means you’ll be able to make big changes in your home whenever the spirit moves you.
Decorating In The Time of Covid-19
So you’ve been in your house for two months now. No doubt, you’ve been staring at some of your old and outdated furniture every single day and it’s grating on you like nails on a chalkboard. You promise yourself that “when this is over” you will do something about it. Aside from beginning the process of finding a designer to help you, there are a few things you can do on your own while you’re sheltering in place.
Quarantining In Style and Other Strategies for the Coronavirus Post-Apocalypse
Most of us have been trapped at home for weeks now in our sad, new reality shows and this has been a successful, or unsuccessful, endeavor depending on how well-suited our homes are for serious hunkering down. Since many of us had never even considered a long-term work from home strategy (never mind being quarantined) I can offer a few tidbits of advice for how to make your work space, and life, a bit better.
How To Pick The Perfect Paint Color
The truth is that I can’t pick the perfect paint color for you. What I can do is tell you how YOU can pick the perfect paint color, and it starts with looking around at the elements of your room and really thinking about your lighting.
When Should You Hire An Interior Designer?
Without question I can tell you that the best time to hire an interior designer is BEFORE you buy any new furniture. Some clients are looking for a refresh, some have a room that has given them trouble and they can’t seem to figure out what the layout should be, and some have empty rooms that house-shame them every day.
The Myth Of Perfection
One of the worst parts of my job as an interior designer in Westchester is to be the dream killer. Sometimes this happens when my client’s tastes exceed their budget, sometimes it’s the long lead times of the interior design project or the shock of shipping and handling fees, and sometimes it’s simply because what they want is impossible or doesn’t exist. I am here to tell you with 100% certainty that there is ALWAYS a tradeoff, and in the end, nothing is perfect.
Ode To The Shiny Red Baller
Is there anything better than an interior design client who is a quick-study, has a good eye, and understands what a realistic budget looks like? Yes - the shiny red baller. The shiny red baller is someone who possesses all of these qualities but also brings to the table the ability to see beauty everywhere they look. When the worst sin is that your client throws too many beautiful ideas over the fence and it’s making it tough to choose, you’ve found a shiny red baller.
Wear Protection
There’s really nothing worse than going through the time, trouble and expense of renovating or redecorating your home and then seeing your new things start to get dirty, come undone or lose their luster. Sometimes it’s just the living of life that does it, sometimes it’s the presence of young children as an accelerant, and sometimes it’s an ill-informed housekeeper. No matter the source, we all have a natural instinct to want to preserve our new things and protect them from ruin. This is where I pay homage to the old adage – an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
More Bigger
My husband and I recently went for a walk on a trail that runs through one of the wealthier neighborhoods in our Westchester county area and we couldn’t help but notice the scary hugeness of some of the houses. While I don’t begrudge anyone a big house, even if it is on the super size side, the weird thing was that most of these already enormous homes had new and glaringly bad additions. We couldn’t help but wonder what would warrant such a bizarre expansion but I’m sad to say that we came up short. It's obvious that we're just living in a time of more bigger.
Art - More Or Less
A fellow interior decorator put it best when she said, “No room is complete without art. It is absolutely essential – even the best rooms fall flat without it.” I couldn’t have said it better and have actually altered my process to start interior design projects with a discussion about art because it’s honestly that important. Art also has the added pleasure of being extremely subjective, painfully expensive, and it takes a REALLY long time to land. In other words, my beautiful yet difficult, uncontrollable, seemingly-endless labor of love. Multiply this by every project I work on and you are now in my nightmare.