Home Design Ideas

Your friends and family keep you on your toes and often unwittingly provide great fodder for blog posts!  They also cause a scattered examination of conscience.  Two recent questions about my blogging ( I have a painting blog and a home decorating blog) got me thinking about my purpose and audience, and the time I invest in this activity. This post is about Designing Home blog Audience   I am happy to report that people do indeed read Designing Home blog. Since I began it almost three years ago,  I've had over .25 million page views.  That surprised even me because I originally began to write this blog with a local audience in mind.  I couldn't be further from the mark.   My readership is 6 times larger in the United States  than Canada.  Canada, Great Britian, Australia and Germany are almost tied in interest.  Only a small percentage of readers are actually from Newfoundland.  No doubt it is a global village. Topics I am glad that...

This must be aqua week! I am noticing it everywhere.  After writing a post yesterday about aqua, I opened one of the blogs I follow this morning to be greeted by a lovely room make -over by Kelly Porter of Color Sizzle and the walls are painted aqua. The accents are red.  I wanted to share this lively combination.  While it is too much colour for me, I know it will appeal to lots of my readers.  Pillow and lamp love on my part!  source And another living room with the same colour scheme, but the colours are used in a very understated way. It is all about the intensity of the hues. Which room would you be most comfortable in?

Although I am interested in the latest colour trends in home decor, I am not a slave to them.  I choose gray as the neutral in my house in 1986 and it wasn't a  growing trend until 2011!  It will still be my neutral ten years from now because I feel comfortable with gray as a backdrop.  We should all choose colours for our homes that we like.  My first order of business in a colour consultation is to determine what kind of colours a client really likes.   Next I check the room's light  orientation and lastly I look at the furniture and art in a space. I just went through all my pins on  my colour inspiration board on Pinterest to look for trends in my own pinning.  I have quite a few with aqua.  I do not have aqua in either of my homes, but I am obviously attracted to it  because I love blue greens.  How about you? Aqua is a versatile, fresh colour as you can see from the interiors below.   You can use it for an ...

I find beauty in imperfection and impermanence.  It's all over my art.   The petal that is captured as it starts to decay,  the rusted objects found in debris, the peeling layers of wallpaper in old homes,    and objects no longer needed for their original function, the list is endless. Accepting  transience and  imperfection (flawed beauty) can also  relate directly to your living space.  The Japanese world view/aesthetic of wabi sabi   acknowledges three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. Wabi Sabi  reveres authenticity. When you look for authentic furniture and objects for your home you will rarely find them  in big box stores.  Natural materials predominate in wabi sabi homes: paper, aged wood, linens, cottons, etc. Look for anything that celebrates the  marks of time , weather, and  the effects of loving use. This graphic is a good summary of the ch...