Archive for July, 2010

Color Inspiration for Your Whole Home Remodel

Color_InspirationNothing determines the personality of a room more than the paint colors you choose during the design phase of your whole home remodel. Working with a professional designer, you will explore many options for expressing your unique personal style with color.

Before you meet with your designer to talk color, it’s a good idea to do some research on your own to find inspiration and ideas. Here are some places to start:

Benjamin Moore: Personal Color Viewer
This interactive tool is a fun way to experiment with color and visualize what different hues will look like in your home. Choose from an array of room photos and then instantly apply color from hundreds of swatch choices.

HGTV Designers’ Portfolio
There’s a lot of great content on the HGTV site when you are planning your whole home remodel. We love this particular function, which allows you to browse photos by the color of a room. You’ll find hundreds of inspiring photos in a variety of styles.

Frazee Paints: ColorLife
At the Frazee Paints color chooser page, you will find ColorLife, where you can explore an amazing amount of information about the world of color, including color analyses, trends, design ideas, the “color of the day,” and a virtual decorator (registration required.)

Pratt and Lambert Paints: Personality Quizzes
These simple quizzes (one for the interior and one for the exterior) ask you a series of questions about personal preferences. After you submit your answers, you are given a suggested color palette that “matches” your personality.

Choosing a color palette should be one of the most enjoyable phases of a whole home remodel, but there are so many options it may sometimes seem overwhelming. Take the time to assess your current home’s aesthetic – what do you love and what don’t you love? Do you want a subtle change or something dramatically different? What mood do you want to create in your home? How would you like visitors to describe your home? Do you have important pieces of art or home furnishings that you want to complement with color?

Explore all of the possibilities and open your imagination to the trends and products available today. With your ideas captured and the help of a professional designer, you will create a home where every room welcomes you, your family and guests with color that expresses your personal vision and lifestyle.

Where to Find the Best Inspiration for Wall Art

July 14th, 2010
Posted in Art and Decorating, Design | 2 Comments »

ChooseArtIt can be much easier to decide that a room needs to be remodeled than to pinpoint what should be on the walls. Finding the right inspiration is often a matter of perspective, and depends to a large degree on the decorative style of the rest of the room. After all, it would look odd to have one style of décor in the room, and then use wall art that is an entirely different style altogether.

The first step is choosing the basic décor of the room. This does not mean that everything in the room has to match identically. One very common misconception is that all of the pieces in the room must be one color, or a combination of colors that match very well. Although very common, there is no real rule that states that rooms must match perfectly to be stylish. As a matter of fact, combining patterns and styles that complement each other is a modern and sophisticated trend.

Make the décor work for the room, instead of trying to adapt the room to the décor. Finding the best inspiration for wall art depends on the wall. Obviously, the bigger the wall, the more that can be done with it, but smaller walls can be fun to decorate as well. Wall decor art can be a great way to express some individuality, and is a primary means of making the room feel more like a home.

Let the room inspire the wall art, unless something has already been purchased that will influence the rest of the décor. This can be tricky, but is definitely doable. Most professionals will agree that sometimes finding the perfect wall art piece is a matter of chance for most rooms. For example: finding a great mirror at a yard sale, or an awesome wine wall art. These are things that are very rarely planned in advance.

Allow even the most unlikely places to inspire wall art. Wall art is not confined to mirrors, pictures, and sconces. In our grandmothers’ time, there were only limited options to what was acceptable to hang in a specific room, even in a personal space such as the bedroom. These days, it is much more common to see shelves with all sorts of things standing on them – decorative wall grilles, tropical wall hangings, pictures that are much more creative and/or interesting, on any given wall.

Letting the wall art take the room by surprise can be fun, too. Choose a piece that may not necessarily blend with the style of the room, but says something about the personality of the person or people who live there. An illustration of this is a modern and stylish room that is decorated in neutral colors featuring wall art that is bright, colorful, and cheerful. Again, patterns and colors do not have to be identical, or even similar; they just need to add to the flow of the room itself.

Wall art is an interesting and creative means of expressing personality and individuality in every room of the house. Pieces should be tasteful, but style can be found in almost any color or size. It depends mostly on the rest of the room, and the inhabitants of the room itself. People are mostly limited only by a lack of imagination.