Georgia Interior Design

Sunroom decorating ideas-before and after

Here’s a fun before and after.  I want to show you how fun and easy it is to take a blah space and make it a vibrant part of the home.

One of our favorite clients had this mostly empty sunroom that was adjacent to the breakfast area and kitchen.  She wanted to furnish it in a way that allowed the room to be used on its own but also be able to accommodate an overflow crowd when entertaining.  She found a magazine photo that she liked which we used as a reference.  The photo had antique style occasional pieces surrounded by fresh and bright upholstery that kept the room from looking dated.  The client likes greens and golds with pops of red and these colors flow throughout the house.  Given the open nature of the floor plan, we had to select fabrics that would blend nicely with the nearby living spaces.

Suzanne, our design consultant on the project, suggested the bench seat in order to accomplish the goal of seating in the room that also allowed seating facing the kitchen during parties.  The paprika bench with barley twist legs is fun, functional, and does not block the view of the open room.  You can’t see the doors on either side, but the bench can be moved against the wall on the right, between the drapery and the door, if the client wants to open up the room.  Click here for a full size photo.

The rug is a banded grass cloth, which keeps the room casual and is consistent with a sunroom theme.  The lamps on the rich walnut console table are shabby chic, with distressed bases and contemporary brown shades.  The side tables are available for drinks or books and complete the desired eclectic look.  The client didn’t want the room to look “matchy matchy” (a designer term!).  The nonfunctional drapery panels are intended to add color and frame the windows without heaviness or blocking the view of the outdoors.  They are hung on wrought iron poles that bring in a touch of black but do not draw the eye up or conflict with the molding.  The chairs are covered with a large scale apple green contemporary botanical which also reinforces the sunroom theme.  Notice the little leaves?

The client is thrilled with the fun and casual yet elegant results, and come to think of it, the room really reflects her personality.

To learn more about Suzanne, click here.

Life stresses: Marriage, new job, choosing paint colors

The holidays are over and a new year is upon us.  Time to paint the walls, right?

Some people are surprisingly afraid to make a paint color decision and struggle with the weight of it all as if failure to choose wisely would lead to negative eternal consequences.  St. Peter at the pearly gates: “Well, I was going to let you in until you put Calico Cat on your ceiling…”

If you are planning to sell your house, slap a neutral on the walls and call it good.  Staying put?  You can pick up a copy of the latest home magazine brimming with advice on the hot new colors and bring it to your local paint store.  Or, heaven forbid, you can have a nice conversation with your spouse about paint preferences and see who wins. 

My wife, Judy, usually has a color direction in mind when she’s ready to paint a room, but makes the final decision by having a half dozen quarts of varying shades mixed with which she splashes the walls, creating large splotches like she’s covering graffiti, and lives with it until one of them speaks to her.  (Another way to do this would be to buy large pieces of white board and paint them with your alternatives rather than defacing your walls, but that’s one of those battles not worth waging and I don’t want to mess with tradition.)  But if you want your home to be warm, or bright, or make a statement, and can’t make a decision, call your designer.

There’s usually a reason somebody is really good at what they do and sometimes it goes beyond passion or desire.  Ted Williams, arguably baseballs greatest hitter ever, said that he could see the pitch so clearly he could tell you if he hit the ball on, over, or under the seam.  Pretty amazing when you consider the ball is traveling nearly 100 mph and is spinning.  Talented designers have a similar ability with color.  I’ve heard that they have highly active or sensitive cones in their eyes, allowing them to see color at a much higher level than us mortals which explains why I’ve seen designers return to our studio from a client’s house and pull their colors out of a paint palette with perfect accuracy.  Do you have any idea how hard that is?

So, why all the stress?  Certainly nobody wants to go to all the effort of painting a room only to be unhappy with the results.  It’s not always obvious to predict what will happen when an entire room is painted based off the color selected from a little sample chip.  I think that’s why some people are more comfortable borrowing colors they see on the walls of a friend’s house.  But that strategy isn’t always foolproof and the reasoning lies tangled in the web of color theory. 

Without getting all professorial, the same color can change appearance depending on its environment.  Did you ever do that experiment in art class where you took two swatches of the same color and surrounded them by two other colors, or black and white?  The very same color could be made to look remarkably different when given a new background.  They call this spontaneous contrast, I think.  So maybe your neighbor’s walls looked really cool painted in a crispy Pinot Noir, but that may have had something to do with the color of their furniture and carpet, the amount of natural light, the interior lighting, the shade of tinting on the windows, the window coverings, the wall color of an adjoining room, blah blah blah.  More stress.

Speaking of lighting, did you know that there are many choices of fluorescent lighting all using various combinations from the color spectrum?  We have some in our studio that seem blue and they match the color of natural light.  They use a different color at a butcher shop, probably with more red, to enhance the color of meat.  Seriously!

Oh, and the color of natural light in Georgia can be different than, say, Colorado.  In the summer the skies are white here and crystal blue there.

Back to your walls.  I haven’t helped much yet, have I?  If you are going to paint a room and not change anything else, your job should be easy if you are wide open to color selection because the right choices should reveal themselves when you look at the tonality of your carpet, furnishings, window treatments, etc.  A designer or an expert at your local paint store should easily be able to help.  The key is not to fall in love with a specific color and force it into your home, but rather to choose a general color and allow the room to determine its perfect shade and tone. 

If you are redoing a room, please fight the urge to start with the paint.  Paint should be THE LAST decision you make.  Moving into a new home and need to have fresh new walls to erase evidence of the previous owners?  I don’t care.  Arrange your furniture and then choose your paint.  If you have money to burn, go ahead and paint the house neutral, arrange your furniture and paint again. 

Many designers start a new room by choosing an area rug.  Can you believe that?  Then they choose the upholstery fabric, then the window treatment fabric, then the paint.  Why?  It’s easier to move in the ascending order of choices available.  What?  There is a finite selection of rugs, much narrower than upholstery grade fabric, so it would stand to reason that you would have better success finding a sofa fabric to match a rug than the other way around.  There are even more fabric options available for window treatments which make it easier to marry them to the new sofa.  Paint color options are infinite, which is why you should make that choice last. 

As my dad would say, “thus endeth the lesson”.

Suzanne

Working on a project with Suzanne is like spending a day with your favorite Auntie.  Thoughful, thorough, and always aiming to please, Suzanne leaves no stone unturned in her quest to find the perfect product for her clients.  Her years of experience are evident in her ability to easily come up with solutions for the design dilemmas we all face from time to time.  See one of Suzanne’s projects here.

Sixteen years of freelance interior decorating experience for clients in Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. 

Contact Suzanne at 770-622-5120 or johnscreek@luxemail.net