Every decorating project begins with color!

Color is the most effective, least expensive design tool, and it provides a basis for everything else you are going to do in your home. Color creates the mood.

Many people are afraid of color, afraid that if they paint a room in a real color, as opposed to off-white or beige, they will tire of it. It is very important to select colors that are your personal favorites. Don't pick a color because it is this year's "House & Garden Color of the Year," because, guess what, you'll still be living with this color next year, and "House & Garden" will have new "Colors of the Year."

If you decorate your home in your favorite colors, you will never tire of them. Trust me, I know, because in spite of being a professional interior designer for over twenty years, and working with every color under the sun, I still love the blue that appears somewhere in every room of my home.

Legendary interior decorator Billy Baldwin once said, "No color you love is ever out of style."

Think of the colors that make you feel good. We wear some colors because they are becoming to us, they flatter our skin tones and make us feel radiant. Use these colors in your rooms.

Your home is your setting where you can control all the variables. It should be the place where you are shown at your best, where you feel beautiful, comfortable and in control. Use color that makes you feel your most gorgeous in your living room or bedroom.

Play with color. You have nothing to be afraid of. Remember, you can always try the color you are considering in one room, and paint it out if you don't like it.

Here's a trick of the trade: After you've primed your walls white, paint a four-foot square of your selected color on the wall that gets the least light, and another four-foot square on the wall that gets the most light. Live with it for a few days. If you love it, paint the rest. If you don't love it, paint it white and try again.

Aren't the Spring colors making you feel happy right now? Bring them inside and enjoy them all year. I'll bet you never tire of looking at your garden. That's a great place to select a color scheme. Look at the combination of colors that delight you the most, and make them your decorating palette. This is where we start.

Decorating your home should be fun, and a wonderful adventure.
In my interior design business, I am often asked if the same color needs to carry through the whole house. Here are some rules of thumb:

If your house has an open plan where you can see all the rooms at the same time, your color must flow through that open space. You can bring in various secondary and accent colors in the different areas, but the wall color and flooring should be continuous.

In most homes, however, where living room, dining room and kitchen/family room areas are separate, you can use a variety of wall colors. You will still want to have a color scheme and one thematic color that acts as a ribbon to connect the rooms.

For example, let's say you have always wanted a red dining room, but generally, blue is your favorite color. You can do the walls red in your dining room, and pick up blue as an accent color in a drapery fabric print or combined with other colors in an Oriental rug under your table.

Then, as you move into your living room, you can have blue as the principal color, perhaps with a lot of white, and an accent of red.

Your family room might tie yellow with touches of both red and blue in pillows, art, trim or upholstery or drapery fabrics. See, the blue acts as that ribbon of color that ties the rooms of your home together, still allowing you to have different colors in different rooms.

Remember, your home is your nest. Make it into a place you love to be, a place where you are proud to entertain and, ultimately, a place that nurtures your spirit.


Living room

We designed this living room for a family with four children. The adults needed a place to entertain when their children are entertaining in the family room. The room is not large but we needed to seat a number of people. The client wanted a formal living room that would still have an element of "fun" about it. We created an eclectic mix of traditional furniture using French, English and american pieces.

The wallpaper we selected really brought a happy mood to the room, but we had to take great care to make certain that the birds in the print would "sit" on the sconces and not be cut in two by the sconces. We decided to leave the panels over the mantle plain to reflect the painted panels of the fireplace surround.

Dining Room

This square dining room seats eight comfortably at its 66" diameter round dining table. We wanted this room to be very inviting, soft, and yet colorful, so we decided to do a monochromatic color scheme with accents.

The aqua/blue of the wallpaper is picked up perfectly in the chair fabrics and in the custom octagonal area rug, as are the accent colors of pink and red. Note that dining chairs have two alternate fabrics on them. Every other chair sporting the more elaborate coordinate with the one on either side of it in the simpler pattern. We felt that this added appeal and would bring the eye around the table, accentuating the beauty of the round seating arrangement.

The silk plaid of the window treatments was a wonderful find. It delicately blends all the tones in the room, and mutes the entire scheme, with its whisper soft shadings of the room's palette. The area rug grounds the color at floor level and completes the effect that the room is wrapped in blue.

Family Room

This family room and breakfast area has become the family's favorite room. Before we started, the space was dark and rather drab. The client wanted this room to be bright and happy, a "fun" room where the whole family would feel good. They report to us that we have accomplished exactly what they were after.

There are six people in this family, four children and two adults. The TV is on the right side of the fireplace, not visible in this view of the room, but totally accessible to everyone in the family as the four club chairs swivel. This arrangement, the four chairs around the large ottoman with the sofa at one end allows everyone to converse together, and games can be played utilizing the ottoman as a table.

The window treatments are particularly interesting, as the upholstered cornices are cut around the flowers on the print, giving the illusion that the flowers are growing right out of the top of the treatments.

The adjacent breakfast area has the same wall treatment and the same fabric as the family room area, but in a different style, a shirred, board-mounted contour valence with ball trim at the bottom. This room is the ultimate in "traditional with a twist"!