Here are some great gray colors and the places you can buy them.

SEA FOAM – For an ethereal look, coat walls in a frothy shade tinged cool blue. Winters Day D57-1 olympic.com. A very light almost white look.

SMOKY HAZE – Weathered furniture cozies up to this warm gray, ideal for both walls and floors. Nantucket Mist F15-4 dutchboy.com. A very light gray with a warm tone.

DOVE GRAY – this classic all-weather gray works well on walls in a monochromatic scheme or as a contrast with accent colors such as yellow, pink, or burnt orange. Gray Stone 517-4 coiceofcolor.com. A medium grey color, a little more bold.

CHARCOAL – Use this stony color to paint a dining table or bookcase. Add textural touches such as a wool throw to soften the shade. Rockaway Beach D36-6 acehardware.com. A smoky darker gray with a touch of green, best for a focal point wall or used on a piece of furniture.

MOCHA MIST – Dark gray-brown contrasts richly with creams. Try this hue on crown moldings and chair rails against off-white walls. Ebony Field 4004-2C valspar.com. Also great to use behind your bed for a dramatic headboard looking effect.

Relax at the beach, or explore the Aquinnah Cliffs, the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary, the Gay Head Lighthouse, the Vincent House Museum, or the Pagoda Tree.

A perfect Getaway in early fall to experience the beauty of the sea, the landscape and the serenity.

Think Facelift:

New kitchen cabinets can be a real budget buster. Instead of replacing, make over wheat you already own using a few coats of paint. While you’re at it, change out the old door and drawer pulls with new hardware.

Shop Smart:

Buying a sofa is a big deal. Buying a sofa in a bright color or pattern is an even bigger deal – especially if you’re the type who easily tires of things. Instead, purchase a neutral sofa and dress it up with bold pillows. You’ll thank yourself when the redecorating urge hits and you only have to pay for new pillows. White slipcovers work, too.

Play with Pattern and Color:

Why settle for white lampshades? With a couple of yards of decorative fabric and ribbon trims you can transform an ordinary white barrel shade into an extraordinary work of art.

All-Weather Wonder:

Fashionable, soft outdoor fabrics are supersmart for window treatments as well as indoor seating. Talk about sun- and stain-resistant!

Use just a Dab:

If the thought of painting a room Pepto-Bismol pink leaves you queasy, consider covering a single wall in a shocking hue as a dramatic compromise. It’ll direct the eye to the most important feature in the space.

Color your Closet:

Choose colorful bins and sorters in a closet. After all, don’t your clothes deserve it?

Go off the Wall:

Art doesn’t have to be the framed variety. Objects that highlight an interest, such as a surfboard, can also add oomph to a room.

HOT HUES THIS SUMMER:

Fiesta Pink

Jungle Vine

Sea Fare

Jack O Lantern

Happy Summer Everyone, and good luck with your decorating journey!

Angel @ Angel Home Services

-Putting home accessories in their place-

In my last blogs “Decisions, Decisions,” we talked about the importance of choosing and installing your background first, and adding accessories last. Remember, vegetables before dessert. Well, now that the furniture is in place, it’s time for dessert…..

HOME ACCESSORIES ARE LIKE DESSERT

-It’s not the first thousand dollars you spend that matter, but the last hundred-

THE OLD SAYING I’VE USED for the subtitle of this chapter has been around for so long that in the home design world the numbers are off. The “last hundred” refers to the money you will spend on the finishing touches. The perfect piece of art, the coffee table accessory, the lamp: These are the grace notes that are going to make the room.

A common mistake DIY decorators make is to accessorize too early. Because they’re affraid to make a big commitment to something like carpet, or drapes, or an armoire, they hit the default button and start buying picture frames, vases, and candlesticks. they hope in vain that these items will somehow pull the room together. But your love for a variety of random objects isn’t enough to unify them in your home. They won’t pull a room together any more than a necklace or purse will salvage an outfit that isn’t working to begin with.

If you’ve stuck with the program, and you’ve put your backgrounds in, dressed the windows, and selected and placed good furniture that will serve as your backdrop, you can now add pizzazz.

WHEN IT’S TIME TO INDULGE

“Did you hear about the new store?” the ladies asked in hushed tones. “Do you know when it’s opening?” a new home accessory store was opening down the street, and the neighbors were buzzing about it. Even as store workers stocked merchandise, women hovered at the door asking for sneak previews. I was happening by and thought I’d stumbled onto either a Brad Pitt sighting or a place handing out low-carb Danishes. The manager tuned the women away with a smile and told them to come back opening day.

I was conveniently having my hair cut across from the store the morning it opened, so i was among the first legitimate customers. I browsed. I drooled. I envisioned. I had a few all-out decorating fantasies. And I left. Empty-handed. My craving for an interior design fix was satisfied.

“I saw the new store,” I told one of my neighbors that evening.

“Good stuff?” she pressed.

I nodded.

“Did you buy anything?”

I shook my head.

‘Why not?” She sounded surprised, knowing how much my home could use.

“Not on my diet.”

“What diet?”

“Home accessories are like dessert,” I continued, tumbling into my two-cent philosophy. “They come after the meat and vegetables. I need drapes first, built-ins, more lighting, and a few more pieces of furniture. Then I can indulge in accessories. Plus, too many aren’t good for your home.”

“You’re probably right,” she said, sounding disappointed, as if I’d just told her the calorie count of cheesecake.

I learned such uncharacteristic restraint the hard way. See, I used to buy every home accessory that caught my concupiscent eye, until my home looked as if I’d run through the local home design outlet with a large butterfly net. I had candlesticks and picture frames, baskets and floral arrangements, vases, wall hangings, and sculptures. Visitors thought my home was the collection site for the neighborhood garage sale. So, when I moved into my new home, I tossed all but the most sentimental, which I put in a box marked “Trial Separation.” I started with a clean slate and more self-knowledge.

I had finally learned that home accessories – tempting as they are – must come last. And, like skipping dessert, the delay of gratification takes discipline.

I have another neighbor who’s like I used to be. She sees a home accessory she likes and buys it. But her home doesn’t have drapes, wall treatments, or the most basic built-ins. It has stuff but no soul. “My husband tells me to stop buying all these chatchkes and start decorating,” she confesses, “but decorating is so hard, and these are so fun.”

“I know,” I say, like a Weight Watchers counselor. “It takes more willpower than the dessert buffet.”

That doesn’t mean I don’t love to walk through a tasteful home accessory store, absorb the ambience of the well-appointed space, and envision such an aura filling my home some day. But I also love the virtuous feeling of leaving without buying a scrap, of practicing a monklike abstinence akin to passing on the chocolate eclair.

DECORATING THE COFFEE TABLE: THE PRESSURE IS ON

First I tried putting the candelabra on the coffee table with the bowl of lemons. That looked hokey. Then I tried the silk floral arrangement with the three glass paperweights on books. That looked worse. I tried a table arrangement using the lemon bowl with the flowers. No. Books and candelabra? Possibly. I had potential coffee table accessories all over the floor. I kept trying them out on the table, swapping them like partners in a singles club.

“What are you doing?” Dan asked on his way to surely something more meaningful.

“Creating a tablescape.”

“A what?”

“It’s an artistic composition, like a still life.”

“Looks like you’re putting a bunch of unnecessary stuff on that nice table.”

“We can’t leave it bare.”

“Sure we can. That will leave more room for food, drinks, and our feet. Anything else is just in the way.”

I went back to my arranging, which wasn’t going so well. I set a ceramic carousel horse beside a pair of brass candlesticks. Ugh.

Part of what makes accessorizing a coffee table so hard is all the pressure. Here’s this table, prominently positioned in the middle of the room, basically saying, “Look at me. I’m on display. Whatever you put on me is something you think is to die for.” It’s essentially your taste – or lack of it – in 3-D.

No wonder it’s paralyzing.

Making matters worse, I had been so confident of my ability to arrange the living room coffee table that when the home was being built, I’d had the electricians put in a ceiling spot to focus on it and wash it – and the presumably tasteful art objects I would place on it – in gallery-style lighting. Once again, I ‘d created my own problem, then put it in the spotlight.

My oldest daughter came by, looked at the stuff all over the living room, and said, “I have more things for your thrift store donation.”

“This isn’t a donation. I’m accessorizing the coffee table.”

“Just throw some books and flowers on it. That’s what everyone else does.”

“It’s not that easy. You know how, when you’re wearing a dress, you change the necklace four times until you get just the look you want?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You need to hit the right balance of scale, color, texture, style, and relevance.”

“Whatever floats my boat,” she said, then breathed one of those only-my-mother breaths and left me to my obsession.

-Finding deals, insisting on quality-

“JUST BUY IT,” SAID MY OLDEST daughter, who thinks my purse taps directly into Bill Gate’s bank account.

“Not at that price,” I snorted.

She rolled her eyes. Boy, did that feel familiar.

We were browsing through a nearby furniture boutique, and I had found a sink vanity I liked. I love the look of those old-fashioned chests with the sink cut in the top. But I don’t always like the price. This one was a good antique reproduction; I had seen its likes in catalogs. It had a carved wood cabinet, claw feet, and a black marble top with an aged brass sink and faucet. It would glam up my powder room nicely, but it cost twice as much as I thought it should, which was why I was scoffing, and my daughter was embarrassed.

I flashed back to when I was a girl. My mother used to mortify me whenever she acted frugal, which was often. She was born in Scotland, so she came by this trait genetically.

“Forty dollars for an all-cotton blouse!” she’d exclaim in a voice that would turn my hair into porcupine quills. “It’s not worth two!” She thought nothing of saying to a store clerk, loud enough for everyone around to hear: “What a ridiculous price! I can’t believe the markup. I bet you only paid half that.” You would find me outside hiding in the hedges.

When she hauled me out, I’d plead, “Mom, don’t be so embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing! They should be the ones embarrassed, charging those prices.”

While Mom did teach me to question both price values and people’s values, I also learned that how much something is worth isn’t what matters. What matters is how much people will pay. A world of difference often lies between the two. Witness those $248 torn-up jeans at Nordstrom. “You’re kidding, right?” I hold up a pair of the holey jeans and challenge the unsuspecting Nordstrom clerk, as my daughter does a half-gainer into the nearby clothing rounder.

But back to the furniture store. A few months later, my daughter and I visited again. The vanity was marked down 30 percent. We were getting somewhere.

“See,” I told her. “It pays to wait.”

“So get it already,” she said, “then let’s go.” She wasn’t so eager to see the powder room furnished as she was to get me out of the store before I humiliated her.

“Watch this,” I said as the owner approached. She asked if she could help us.

“Not today,” I said. “But if you ever mark this down 50 percent, call me. I’ll buy it.”

I looked around for my daughter. Poof! She’d vaporized like a genie, as if I’d mentioned chores.

The gracious owner took my name.

I found my daughter crouched behind the ceramics: “Mom, you’re so embarrassing.”

Several weeks later, the gracious owner called. The chest was now 40 percent off. Tempting, but 50 percent off was still my price. Then I hopped online and found the same chest on Horchow. It was $500 more and didn’t have a faucet. The faucet cost an additional $430, and shipping was $115. Suddenly, 40 percent off with no shipping or wait time appealed.

I panicked. “What if someone buys it?” I worried out loud.

“No one’s going to buy it,” Dan said from behind the sports section. Dan can’t believe anyone actually buys furniture, since that’s the last thing he’d ever do.

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s been sitting there for six months.”

“But not at this price.”

I called the gracious owner back and asked whether paying cash would make any difference. She paused, then said she could take another 5 percent off. In a victory for cheapskates, I had my car in front of her store faster than you could say “It never hurts to ask.”

NOT THE CONFINEMENT STORE

Going furniture shopping with my husband is like going underwater diving without oxygen. He withholds the essential ingredient. “It takes money, honey,” I’ve told Dan more than a few times.

“Not if you just look.”

“What’s the point of looking if you can’t buy?”

“Then you’ll know what you want when you can buy.”

“And just when would that be? When the kids are out of braces and the college fund is full and the cars are paid off and I’m in a rest home where the furniture is provided?!”

“Something like that,” he says.

“Argh!!”

But I’ve learned, the one way to get this man to budge his billfold is to say the three magic words: It’s a deal.

Which is how I’ve come to love consignment stores. These are stores where people who are downsizing, divorcing, or tired of their furnishings – and really do have the money to decorate – bring their gently used stuff to sell. Inventory also comes from model homes that have closed and from overstocked or closing furniture stores. The consignment store sets the price and typically splits the proceeds with the original owner, who generally feels that this option beats donating the item, dumping it, or giving it to their ungrateful children.

“It’s a glorified garage sale,” Dan said the first time I dragged him to a consignment store.

Granted, these stores don’t have the cachet of stylized furniture showrooms, and some of the stuff I wouldn’t let my dogs sit on. But you can find some great bargains among the riff-raff if you know what to look for – and you don’t have impatient family members along.

“Not the confinement store!” my kids wail when they sense the car veering toward one.

They dislike furniture shopping even more than my husband does. In fact, sometimes, when my sadistic streak flares and we’re on our way somewhere they find fun, like a water park, I’ll say, “but first I want to stop at this consignment store.”

“Nooooo!” they protest.

“Just kidding,” I say, smiling.

Other times, when I do drag them along, I promise I’ll be quick and will buy smoothies all around when we’re done. This paid off last time. I scored a great dark brown leather ottoman with brass nail heads for the loft. It had come off the showroom floor of Woodley’s, a well-regarded maker of leather furniture, so it was practically new. I knew it had retailed for over $400, and it was only $195. I smuggled it home, hoping Dan would think it had been in our home all along, and that the kids, bribed with the smoothies, would consider it too boring to mention. If Dan ever does notice, I’ll tell him the truth: It was a great deal, plus we got miles.

BUYING FURNITURE ON CRAIGSLIST

-The Pain and the Glory-

We had come to a standstill. Well, one of us wasn’t standing. He’d fallen over. In an odd bonding moment, four of us – Dan; Tom, the guy we’d bought the secondhand desk from; me, superfluous bystander; and The Desk were stuck together like a blood clot in our basement stairwell. On the uphill end of the desk, Tom was holding up his end of the bargain – literally. As part of the sale, Tom had agreed, probably to his regret, to help Dan move the desk from our truck to the basement. As they lugged the monster downstairs, Dan slipped on the nylon sleeping bag that someone – that superfluous bystander! – had put down to protect the wood stairs. (Forget the people, don’t nick the stairs!) The desk was now on Dan. I pictured my husband, flattened like Wile E. Coyote at the bottom of a cliff beneath a boulder. I’d killed him!

A faint cry came from what sounded like the desk’s file drawer: “I could use a hand here.” I came to my senses and slid sideways between the stairwell wall and the desk, and hoisted the desk off Dan’s leg. The rest of him was lying headfirst downstairs. He got up, brushed himself off with his remaining dignity, picked the desk up again, and limped onward with Tom into his office. All because this was a deal.

Let me rewind. When not traveling, Dan works in his home office in the basement, which is newly finished, but, until now, unfurnished. My office is one floor up. Lately, when I would venture down to his office looking for a lunch date, I’d notice that he wasn’t working, but shopping on Craigslist for used office furniture.

“Hard at work, I see,” I’d joke.

“I’m working on working,” he’d defend. “I can’t get anything done until I get some furniture.” He was working on three folding tables, smothered in computer equipment, cords, and mountains of paper. Because I’m a fan of neatness, productivity, and shopping, I helped him browse.

As usual, we had different furniture agendas. He wanted a U-shaped desk, with lots of cabinetry, for under $1,000. I wanted a traditional, Old World-style desk to go with the room’s coffered ceiling. He was shopping Craigslist, because you can zero in on local sellers. Craigslist is the world’s biggest online virtual garage sale. I was leery, but Dan insisted it was a great way to buy furniture.

Postings ranged from hideous to hilarious and showed that more people should take photo classes. Weeks passed. We found a desk we liked, but it sold in three hours. We resolved to pull the trigger faster next time. Then a desk that seemed perfect appeared: cherry, U-shaped, with a hutch, excellent condition, for $1,000, and it was just twenty minutes away. A quick online search revealed that the same desk new would have cost $3,000. We were there within the hour. After a brief negotiation, Tom lowered the price to $850 and threw in the black leather office chair. Score!

Because we wanted a record of the business expense, we wanted to pay with a check. Tom, understandably, wanted cash. So we agreed to drive him to our bank, where he could cash our check, and, since we’d be near our house – how convenient! – he could help us unload. He looked as if he could move the desk alone with his jaws. This is how the four of us got into the stairwell jam.

That night I surveyed Dan’s injuries: cuts on his elbow, two goose-egg bruises on his leg, and a welt on his back the size of a crow’s wing. “Are you sure this was worth it?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he said.

CATALOG VICTIM

I come down the stairs in what I think is a pretty cute new sweat suit. My unsuspecting family is gathered around the breakfast table, which is what they do when they hope something to eat will magically appear on it. I’m hoping they’ll notice the outfit, say something along the lines of: “You look nice. Is that new?”

“Where did you get that?” my husband asks.

“From a catalog,” I say, twirling so all can admire.

“You paid money for that?”

I look down at the gray pants and matching jacket and reconsider.

“Lupe has an outfit just like that,” my youngest daughter adds sweetly. Lupe is our dear, lovely housekeeper, who happens to be a grandmother. “Older housekeeper” wasn’t the look I was going for.

“Maybe she’d like another one,” Dan adds.

“It looked cute in the catalog,” I say, feeling deflated. Then I get an unpleasant deja vu feeling. How many times have I been hoodwinked by seductive catalog portrayals of fashion or furnishing only to be sorely dissapponted when the items arrived? And when will I stop falling for this trick?

Before the sweat-suit mistake, it was the mirrors. I’d ordered two, one for over each sink in the master bath. When we were building this home, I told the builder not to install the flat plate production mirrors because I wanted to find my own. Along the way, I’ve learned two facts about bathroom mirrors:

1. An easy way to make a bathroom look more personal and custom is to replace production mirrors with handsomely framed ones.

2. If a functional mirror is over the sink, my husband won’t see the need to replace it. So it’s best to do without until i find the mirror I want.

We went mirrorless for months while I shopped. Unfortunately, the mirrors I finally picked were poor reflections of their catalog-stylized selves. Plus, they fought with the fixtures. They were too small. Their frames were too thin, the detailing too decorative. They just looked scrappy.

“They’re fine,” Dan said, grateful I’d finally put up something he could shave in.

“I blew it,” I said.

“How could you blow something you spent three months shopping for?”

“They looked great in the catalog! Those catalog companies conspire to defraud people like me all the time,” I huffed. Dan rolled his eyes in the all-wrong mirrors.

I can still see that beautiful mirror in the catalog picture, hung artfully among other items that were in proportion, were the right motif, and didn’t compete: an antique buffet, slender side lamps, and crimson wallpaper. I think back to the sweat suit model, six feet tall and waiflike. She’d look great wearing a potato sack. What was I thinking? I can’t pull off a gray sweat suit no matter how fashionable my shoes and earrings are. On me gray sweats just look dowdy. And my bathroom, I now see, is not the place for delicate, gilded mirrors. Unfortunately, as with the sweat suit, in a fit of optimism I’d thrown away the packaging, so there was no easy way to return these blunders.

The mirrors are in the garage with my growing collection of catalog casualties – that too-fake ficus! That too-small table! And Lupe has herself a new sweat suit.

QUALITY IS WORTH THE WAIT

Regardless of whether you’re buying a dining room table, a bed, or a chair, or whether the piece you’re purchasing is new or gently used, take a lesson from the French: Buy furniture as if it were going to be an heirloom. Sometimes that takes patience, and delay of gratification, as Dan and I learned recently when pool-table shopping.

We were in this pool-table store getting that uneasy feeling you get before you make a big purchase. Now that we had a home with a basement – currently finished but not furnished – Dan was jonesing for a pool table. He’d been going around the house playing air pool all week, shooting phantom cues.

We’d been to three billiard stores and seen tables ranging from $1,500 to $10,000. Though all tables have six pockets and do the job, they differ in expensive ways. Some are made of high-end mahogany, others from veneer-covered particleboard or vinyl. Some have rail sights made from inlaid mother of pearl, others use pressed-on mother of plastic. Dan had decided on a lower-priced table, on special, and had moved on to selecting pool cues. He was also planning a neighborhood billiard party for Saturday.

“Way, way, wait a minute,” I said. “Not so fast.” I’d gloomed onto the store’s interactive video game of “Build Your Own Table” and found many features I liked – and that of course doubled the price.

Dan sighed and found a place to sit.

A salesman hovered nearby but wisely kept his mouth shut. Who needs a salesperson when you have me?

“So, basically,” said Dan, “we either get the table that’s perfectly fine and on sale, or pay more than is comfortable and get a fancier table with features that won’t make any difference when you’re sinking a billiard ball into the corner pocket.”

“When we’re old, feeble, or gone, our kids are going to get stuck with this pool table. If we buy a cheap one, they’ll have to sell it in a garage sale with the rest of our cheap stuff, or keep it as a reminder of how tacky we were. A nice one will become an heirloom, and our grandchildren will play on it and our grandchildren’s children.”

“How did a trip to pick a pool table turn into a discussion about our children’s inheritance – or lack of it?”

“That’s not how the French think.”

“What do the French have to do with this?”

“Betty Lou says.”

“Who’s Betty Lou?”

“She wrote all those gorgeous French design books: The French Connection, Unmistakably French….. and she says the French are patient and buy quality furniture that will become heirlooms.”

“So because of the French we’re not getting a pool table?”

“Yet.”

-Dealing with furniture mistakes and deaths-

TO KNOW MY MOTHER-IN-LAW is to know her red sofas. For six months they were all she could talk about. Every conversation led to them:

“So have you been exercising?”

“I would, but these sofas have been so consuming. What color could I put on the wall to make them work?”

Or: “How’s your daughter’s new boyfriend?”

“Fine, he came for dinner the other night, but we couldn’t sit in the living room – with those sofas.”

Talking to her is like talking to someone in a doomed relationship: “Do I just live with them? Try to make them work? Or dump them and move on?”

Buying a sofa you regret is a drag, much less buying two, and especially in her case. Like many devoted mothers, my mother-in-law put decorating on hold while she raised five kids. Now that they’ve moved on, the living room, like her, is tired and deserving. She chronicled her sofa saga in a string of e-mails to me:

WEEK ONE

“I ordered new living room furniture, a cranberry couch and love seat. Do you think two couches in that shade will be too dominant?”

What can I say? She’d ordered them. Though I’m thinking, The only place two large cranberry sofas belong is in a bordello, I write: “They’ll be fine.”

THE NEXT DAY

“After I placed the order, I didn’t sleep. The gal at the store says they’ll be great and even made suggestions for drapes and wallcoverings.”

The “gal at the store” is a salesperson. She’d never been to my mother-in-law’s home, which has Wedgwood blue carpet, off-white walls, and entryway tile in French blue and marigold. Cranberry? What was she thinking? I reply: “I’m sure she’s right.”

TEN WEEKS LATER

“Sorry if I seemed out of sorts last night. the sofas arrived. I went to bed with a migraine. In the small sample, the color looked ok. Should I go to a lot of trouble and make everything conform to the color scheme they dictate?”

I have no words except: “See a professional – as in designer, not salesperson.”

TWO WEEKS AFTER THAT

“I talked to a decorator. She could try to make the sofas work, and if I still didn’t like the room, she would consider buying them for model homes. But I’d still be paying to decorate around sofas I may not keep. If I could just sell them without losing so much money, I would start over.”

“Recover? Consign? Donate?”

ONE WEEK LATER

“I inquired at the consignment store. I would take a big loss. Our couches cost $3,000. If I sell through consignment I would get $500, tops. Recovering them would cost nearly what I paid.”

“The sooner the sofas are out of your house, the sooner you’ll stop flogging yourself.”

ONE MONTH LATER

My mother-in-law flies in from three states away, ostensibly to see my daughter, her granddaughter, perform in the school musical, but I suspect my father-in-law shipped her off because he was tired of hearing about the sofas.

“Do you think if I kept one, it would be okay?” she asks. We’re standing in my kitchen staring at her swatches.

“If the sofas are wrong, half of wrong is still wrong,” I say. Then I break it to her and tell her what I would tell anyone I care about who’s struggling to end a bad relationship: “Let go.” She hangs her head. After a respectful pause, I try to change the subject. “Your hair looks nice. Who’s cutting it lately?”

She pats her hair absently. “My hairdresser once bought a sofa she couldn’t live with.”

“Oh?”

“She gave it to a person she couldn’t live with – her ex-husband.”

SIX MONTHS AFTER ORDERING THE WRONG SOFAS

“I found a sofa I like. I’m just waiting for the designer to go with me to pick out the fabric. The thrift store truck comes for the awful red ones next week.”

“Great,” I reply. I don’t say: NOW CAN WE CHANGE THE SUBJECT?

FURNITURE FUNERALS – WHEN TO LET GO

The funeral was a long time coming. For ten years, these two domestic servants had served useful and productive lives. But now the large stuffed chairs, both white in their prime, needed to go to chair heaven – a peaceful place where no one sits on you in a wet bathing suit.

“But they’re so comfortable,” my family whined each time I brought up the need to replace the chairs. One sat in the office, and the other, the more popular of the two, in the family room.

“And the dogs love them.”

“Which is halt the problem,” I said.

Ten years ago, when I decided to buy two pristine white chairs, I could not have foreseen the havoc that two kids, two poorly trained dogs, ten years of compounded newspaper ink, seventeen bouts of flue, and 2,957 cups of coffee would wreak. I have had the chairs professionally cleaned, but the remaining stains resist like cellulite.

The family room chair even had an ink stain where someone, who refuses to step forward, sat with a black felt-tip marker, then thoughtfully poised the pen so it bled into the fabric, leaving a Rorschach-like inkblot.

“It’s a cat.”

“No, a key.”

“I see a new handbag.”

“You’re all wrong. It’s the Dow falling.”

Besides the stains, the fabric was so worn that feathers fluttered out whenever you sat down, as if you’d landed in a goose nest. I’d considered slipcovers, but it would have creeped me out to sit down and think about what might be growing underneath. Meanwhile, I’d tossed throws over the chairs, so I wouldn’t have to look at them, and pinned “Do Not Resuscitate” signs o them while I searched for replacements.

Dan didn’t see the need for replacements. To him, the chairs looked as fresh as the day they arrived. He’s the same way with his shirts and shoes. I’ve come to see this as a positive trait in a man. I figure if I look just as fresh to him as the day we met, well, I’m not messing with that.

But chair death must be reckoned with. I’ve overheard that the average life for moderately used upholstered furniture is seven years. After that, it’s probably time for rehabilitation or euthanasia. After learning my options, I chose to replace the family room chair and have the office chair slipcovered.

It’s the weekend – time for a break- I will continue on Monday, May 12th. 2008 with “Bargain Hunting.”

-Why furniture shopping is so hard, and how to start-

I’M HAVING LUNCH WITH several women from the neighborhood. As often happens among women, the conversation turns to home decorating.

“Do you have your dining room set yet?” One neighbor asks Lisa. Lisa hangs her head shamefully and stops eating her rigatoni.

“No,” she says to her plate. “I couldn’t decide.”

We all give a moment of respectful silence. Who hasn’t been there? Paralyzed into a state of indecision while a room lays bare.

“We may never have dining room furniture,” she continues, as if exposing a deep character flaw. “It’s just such a big decision.”

Like the rest of us, Lisa has swallowed society’s dictum that home is a mirror of the woman within, a sword we live and die by. What’s more, thanks to years of indoctrination by Hallmark specials and Better Homes & Gardens, we all have a vision of the ideal dining room. This is the room where memories will be made. The table will serve as centerpiece during celebrations of holidays and family milestones: graduations, engagements, releases from jail. If the table isn’t right, the occasion and all those potentially warm memories will be marred by bad taste.

In other words, this is not just a table. It’s The Table.

“I finally find a table I like,” Lisa continues, “but I don’t like the chairs. Or the table doesn’t have the leaves and I want leaves for my grandchildren.” No one points out that since her kids are only four and seven, grandkids might be a while.

“I know what you’re going through,” one neighbor says. “Legs straight, curved, carved, or tapered? table round, rectangular, or square? Glass, wood, or iron?”

“And the style?” chimes another. “Contemporary, traditional, French, or Italian? The chairs? Ladder-back, Windsor, Parsons, Chippendale, or Queen Anne? It’s enough to make a woman eat standing up for the rest of her life.”

We shake our heads in collective understanding. Indeed, these decisions do seem momentous. I envy those homes where you sit at a table and the hostess says in passing, “Ahh, yes, this was Grandma Jacobs table. All us kids used to sit around it in our high chairs with matching hand-loomed bibs.”

The only story I know about my grandma’s dining room table – and who knows where that wound up – was that all her kids were born on it. How about that for a conversation booster between the salad and the main course? “Oh, little Nancy popped right where you’re sitting.”

“My husband doesn’t know what’s wrong with me,” Lisa continues. “Every day he asks, “Why don’t you buy some furniture?” I feel so inadequate.”

I nod sympathetically, though I can’t recall a moment in my marriage when my husband ever said, “Why don’t you buy some furniture?” That would be rather like letting a bear loose in a butcher shop. Instead I flash on the two long years our living room remained unfurnished, unless you count the Barbie Jeep and the fake ficus.

“It’s so embarrassing,” I said back then to my husband. “People think we have no money.”

“They’re right,” he said. Sometimes his realism really bugs me.

True, in some homes, rooms lay bare because the couple has the money but not the inspiration, as in Lisa’s case. Other’s have the vision but not the dough. We often lack both.

CHAIR SHOPPING

I was on mission impossible. My about-to-be-thirteen-year-old daughter wanted a bedroom chair for her birthday, a chair she “could chill out in.” While I pictured her curled up reading Little Women, she envisioned herself wearing headphones and listening to the newest Weird Al Yankovic CD. That was clue one that our tastes were on a collision course. Shopping was painful.

“How about this one?” she said, heading for an enormous overstuffed chair, right for, say, a country club lobby.

“Too big. You couldn’t walk around it.”

“I’ll just climb on the bed and jump to it,” she said, confirming my suspicion that my kids are more closely related to the apes than their parents.

“How about this one?” I redirected her to an antique vanity chair with a carved wood back and a velvet cushion. Her nose wrinkled up like a straw wrapper. “This one:” I pointed to a lovely rattan sun chair with a floral seat cushion.

“Eeww,” she said, then made a beeline for a chair the size and shape of a satellite dish with a cushion that resembled a dog’s bed.

“Perfect!” she declared.

“When you have your own place,” I said. And so we went. She wanted a big and stuffed; I wanted feminine, small – and cheap. That was the other hitch. Decent upholstered chairs sell for between $750 and $1,500, but my birthday chair budget was under $300. Like I said: mission impossible.

Which is where Kobe Bryant came in with a game-saving three-point shot in the final seconds. It was the eve of Paige’s birthday. A clerk at the local Pier One store, who was trying to close and was legitimately worried that I might never leave, suggested I try a store called The Chairman. The next day, an hour before I was to pick up Paige from school, I went, knowing I had about a 2 percent chance that this store would have The Chair.

“Moving! Everything 50% off!” said the heartening sign on the window. (I later learned the same sign had been in the window for years.) Inside, chairs were everywhere, hanging, stacked, knocked over. In one room, 100 or so upholstered chairs were piled like cars in a junkyard. “Just got these in,” said a man who looked as if he’d crawled out from under one. The price tags said $100.

“Only $100?” I asked.

“The hotel was getting rid of them.”

“What hotel?”

“The one where Kobe Bryant stayed and wished he hadn’t.”

“The Lodge at Cordillera? Where he was with that woman?”

He nodded. The upscale lodge is just outside Denver and not far from my home. Having lived most of my life in Southern California, I was used to odd brushes with celebrity, but chairs with a past?

“You mean one of these might have been in Room 35?”

“Might have.” I had just read in the newspaper that the lodge was undergoing a $5 million makeover, so the guy was probably telling the truth. Whether the remodel was because notoriety had attracted a surge of visitors, or because management wanted a new look to erase negative associations, wasn’t clear. But either way, I’d stumbled on a bargain.

Then I saw it. It had a rose background with cream lattice print a touches of green ivy. The fabric perfectly complemented Paige’s room. Though fully upholstered, it was small, bedroom size. I loved it, but I was suspicious.

I decided to give it the Paige test: I took off my shoes, stood on the chair, and bounced. It was that kind of place.

“The frames?” I asked.

“Solid alder,” he said.

“The fill?”

“Down-wrapped poly.” My favorite. Pure down you’re always plumping and all foam is so hard.

“Spring construction?”

“Eight-way hand tied.” He pulled the bottom cover off one chair to prove it. “Wholesale these were $600 new,” he said, “double that retail.” I believed him.

With the chair in the back of my SUV, I headed to school. As Paige flung open the back hatch to toss in her backpack, she stood stunned at the chair facing her. Then she cracked a huge smile, jumped in, and plunked down as if at a tailgate party. I smiled, too. I’d gotten it: the chair we thought didn’t exist.

Finding a Leg to Stand On

Much of what I’ve learned about home design, I’ve learned by eavesdropping. And so it was with furniture legs. I clearly remember the day in the model home. A decorator was talking to another decorator about legs. The two were tsk-tsking about the number, style, and color of legs in the room, as if the situation were an atrocity on the scale of Chernobyl.

When I first heard this, I wanted to go check into one of those hospitals that keep you from hurting yourself. Just when I thought decorating was doable, the game changed – again. I was just getting the hang of color, texture, and scale, and now I had legs to worry about. At times like this, you just wish someone would throw you a life raft. I made mental design note #897: Beware of clashing and numerous furniture legs. This notion came back with searing clarity as i stood in my office gazing at a just-purchased chair. I realized I had made the dreaded leg mistake.

After months of looking for the perfect chair to replace my dead chair in my office, I finally found it. It was a steal. the furniture store was going out of business, and the sign in its window said, “Everything 70% off.” I was lured like a gambler to a casino. However, the sign also said, “All sales final.” So I considered the chair carefully. The color was right – a sage chenille with a thin black stripe, dark mahogany wood. The style was right – classic, not too formal, not too bohemian. It sat well and passed the scoot test. It seemed to be the right scale, and the right price! I hauled it home, single-handedly, because everyone knows the same woman who can’t open a jelly jar suddenly acquires Herculean strength if it means acquiring new furniture. At the right moment, I can also lift a sofa over my head with one hand.

I heaved the chair into the family car, then into the house and into my office after heaving the old chair out. I stood back to admire my acquisition, then winced. Something wasn’t working. My ten-year-old stopped by and swiftly observed: “The chair looks fine from the doorway, but when you walk in the room, it doesn’t go with everything else.” This is evolution at work. She could instantly finger what I couldn’t.

That’s when I remembered the leg lesson. My desk is a French writing desk, with a medium brown curved carved leg. The chair’s legs were slightly curved, but smooth, and a darker wood tone. the chair sat only a few feet from the desk, and the legs argued like my children. You could hear them.

“I was here first, and I don’t like your legs.”

“Hey, I didn’t ask to be put next to you.”

“Get lost.”

“You get lost.”

See, the old ousted chair was upholstered to the floor, and as conservatively dressed as a Primitive Methodist. The new hussy chair was upholstered on the back and seat, but it had legs. Legs that didn’t belong. Then another thought came back to haunt me: All sales final.

That night I dreamt of armies of spiders on stilts. I awoke, frustrated once again at what designers know that I don’t. So I could learn from my mistake, I asked my interior design friend James Charles to give me a leg lesson. He assured me that the question was good, the problem common.

While I had intended this new chair to replace my worn-out office chair, I fortunately, had another old chair in the family room that also needed to retire. There the new chair worked. “Sometimes you don’t see these things until a room is put together,” said Charles, trying to make me feel better. “The pros won’t admit this, but it happens to all of us.”

“How do you do it?” I plead. I’m on the phone with Evan Farmer, host of TLC’s While You Were Out. I’m torn between begging for advice and giving him a piece of my mind.

While some say these shows inspire people, they make me feel inferior, because the smallest home improvement at my house takes ten times as long, costs ten times as much, and looks half as creative as the projects on these shows.

“You spent as much on our living room drapes as these guys spent on a whole living room,” Dan will point up.

“Why did our bookcase take, like, half a year to finish?” My daughter wonders. “Theirs only took an afternoon!”

Besides the warped sense of time and money these shows portray, the flamboyance factor creates more problems: “Why can’t we wallpaper the wall in feathers?”

Hold me up to one of these shows and I come away looking like an unimaginative, disorganized spendthrift.

For instance, in one episode, the While You Were Out crew completely redid one couple’s master bedroom. They tore out carpet, installed hardwood floors, added white wainscoting, sewed curtains and bedding, built and mounted shutters, beefed up moldings, painted the walls and trim, built a bed, refinished the armoire and dresser, and, oh, cooked up homemade spa products to adorn the master bath – all in two days for under $1,500.

That’s when I picked up the phone and got Farmer on the line.

“So, Evan,” I say and launch into a tirade of questions.

“Well, we do have a few advantages the folks at home don’t,” he confesses.

“Cough them up.”

First, the show’s designer gets a three-week lead to check out the room and design a solution. Then, the day before the shoot, the whole crew meets, sizes up the project, and goes shopping. All that happens before the two-day clock starts ticking. At show time, a whole team of pros works at once. This kind of teamwork only happens on reality decorating shows and sometimes at NASA – like when those rocket scientists brought Tom Hanks and Apollo 13 safely back to earth using only the supplies in the conference room. Anyway, real people like us have the electrician in, then wait two weeks for the carpenter, then wait two weeks for the tile guy, and two more weeks for the painter.

The TV crew is also fully equipped. “Our truck has every tool we need in easy reach, so no three day trips to the hardware store,” says Farmer. “Plus, we have a clean-up crew.” At my place, we are the clean-up crew.

So that’s how they save time, but how about money? The $1,500 budget. Farmer insists, is real. Sort of. His team goes to Home Depot and pays the same price as anyone else, even though Home Depot is a show sponsor. Other companies, however, particularly fabric or accessory sources, donate merchandise in exchange for the exposure on national television. Ahh, I’m beginning to see how this works.

Of course, having all the tools and receiving donated items save a lot. But the real reason these show makeovers sound so cheap is that nobody adds in the cost of man – or woman – power. If they did, the budget would go way over $1,500. Labor, industry experts say, can account for 30 to 60 percent of a job’s cost. On top of that, big-ticket items, like sofas or dining-rooms sets, the show throws in as a quiz prize, which also isn’t included in the $1,500. The couple wins this prize if they correctly answer some obvious questions – like, What’s your address?

So see? I feel like saying to my family. “I’m feeling better,” I tell Farmer as we wind up my peeve session. Then he gives me one more reassuring dose of reality. He’s remodeling his own place, he tells me, a 286-square-foot apartment in New York City. “I have no budget. That’s the luxury of living in a closet. I’ve been at it a year and I’m still not done. I work you know.”

I do know. That’s reality.

RIP-OFF SOURCE #4: COLOR FORECASTS

If You Feel Manipulated, It’s Because You Are

I first noticed that lime green was back without apology two springs ago. Clothing, tableware, wallpaper, iPods, even parking tickets were suddenly all coming out in that citrusy green. The color was everywhere – except in my closet. Which meant one thing: This color was IN, and my wardrobe was OUT. I immediately bought a skirt, capris, T-shirt, blouse, two sweaters, and sandals in varying shades of this had-to-have color. I hadn’t been this green since I was pregnant. My husband said i looked like a parakeet.

Once again, I’d fallen victim to the Palette Patrol.

When I first learned about this small but influential group who knows what colors I’ll be wearing, decorating with, and driving in before I do, I felt as if I’d seen Santa take off his beard. Hoodwinked. The last time i felt like this was when I learned that movies splice their films with subliminal ads. A frame of an ice-cold soda flashes on-screen, and viewers head like sleepwalkers toward the concession stand. We’re all being manipulated. Don’t believe me? Remember all the combos of dark brown and silvery blue that suddenly started appearing in every home and fashion magazine and store a while ago? It’s no accident. The Palette Patrol controls the interest rates of hue like the Federal Reserve controls the interest rates of money.

Here’s how the color conspiracy works. Every year a dozen or more hoity-toity designers meet in New York, sequester themselves in a stark white room, and determine the IN colors for the next year. To do this, they talk about what’s going on in the world and how those events translate into colors people will want. Meanwhile, they throw darts at an elaborate color wheel. Conversations go something like this:

“What are people into these days?”

“A lot of people are drinking Starbucks.”

“Put coffee brown on the list.”

Darts fly at the brown section of the wheel.

“What are people talking about?”

“Global warming.”

“We’ll need a spate of solar oranges with some balanced greens.”

Darts hurl toward these color sectors.

“What’s happening in Hollywood?”

“Angelina Jolie’s lips are everywhere. They stay in the room five minutes after she’s left.”

“Let’s bring the lipstick shades out of retirement, but give them a new name.”

“How about the Collagen Collection?”

“Perfect.” Darts fly.

“What color is the bird flu? Anyone?”

And so on.

Then, the folks who make clothing, household goods, and cars get the group’s color forecast and join in lockstep to create everything to match.

“I don’t believe it’s a conspiracy,” says Margaret Walch, director of the Color Association of the United States, which has been furnishing color forecasts for nearly 100 years. “We don’t dictate what colors will be in so much as we foresee what’s coming.”

This gets me thinking of that chicken-and-egg riddle until my brain hurts. Either way, these forecasts have a big upside. Sure, new colors in the marketplace make us buy more stuff, but the fresh shades also satisfy our craving for change. Aren’t you glad you’re not still wearing those emerald greens, royal blues, and fuchsias from the 80s? Think how boring life would be if colors didn’t cycle.

Also, because manufacturers are in cahoots, when you’re remodeling you can find fabric that goes with your new carpet and wallpaper; plus you can find a laundry basket, towels, a sweater, and nail polish to match. But good luck trying to match a ten-year-old bedspread.

Finally, color cycles help certain stodgy types to bust out of their ruts. Those still living with avocado green appliances and rust shag carpet will eventually have to replace them. And, thanks to the Palette Patrol, they won’t be able to buy anything new in an out-of-date color. This alone provides an important public service.

To those who pooh-pooh all this and say they don’t care about color trends, Walch has a few choice words: “If you don’t have relevant color, you don’t have a relevant space.”

And your belt’s ugly, too.

-What to take away from home magazines, TV shows, home tours, and the color conspiracy – and what to ignore-

Rip-Off Source #1: Looks from Books

I OFTEN SPEND MY LUNCHTIME flipping through gorgeous home-design books and magazines while eating my well-balanced lunch of nonfat yogurt and peanut M&Ms. I ooh and sigh over decked out kitchens, master bedrooms, and great rooms. It’s my guilty pleasure. House porn I call it, because these publications always stir feelings of desire mixed with hopeless longing. I’m hooked.

“Why do you keep looking at those?” Dan asks.

“For the articles,” I say defensively. He knows they demoralize me. The reality is, much as I look, and much as I would like to copy what i see, I’ve never lifted a look from a magazine page and applied it to my home. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Plus, I lack two key ingredients.

First, I know that much of what succeeds in these stylized rooms has to do with context. No one item – lamp, rug, sofa – makes the room. If only it were that easy. What makes the room is the fact that these items sit in a Tuscan villa, or a $4 million cottage in the Hamptons, or Oprah Winfrey’s penthouse. Picking up one or two accessories like the ones you see in the photos won’t transform your place any more than getting a new shade of lipstick will make you look thinner.

Second, these featured homes involve money. Lots of it. You get the definite sense that the owners furnished the whole place without borrowed money or bounced checks. Everything in the house is paid for, as is the home itself. What’s more, the owners still have money in the bank and time on their hands. I never see a place like mine: a newly built house that has a big mortgage; needs furniture and paint; and has more unrealized dreams than a Little League team.

So why drool over homes you can never have? Beyond the fantasy factor or the voyeur factor, glossy shelter publications must offer more than frustration. But what?

Studying the Sources

For answers I call Betty Lou Phillips, of Dallas, who has written seven gorgeous home-design books, including Inspirations from France and Italy, which I lust after, and I ask: What can the average person take from the pages of the books like hers and really use?

“Imitation,” she insists, “is not the sincerest form of flattery. Home design books should urge readers to create their own dazzling empires.”

“But how if you’re not starting with a handsome eighteenth-century chateau, or a fabulous vintage farmhouse?”

“Train your eye so you look beyond how to copy a room, and instead study why it’s working,” says Phillips. “If you can master the why, not the what, you’ll be on your way to doing something fascinating yourself,” she promises.

Separating Fact from Fiction

Even though these design tips give me a big leg up, that doesn’t change the fact that when I flip through the pages of home design magazines I still feel like Hobo Kelly standing on the threshold of the Ritz-Carlton. All those pictures of perfectly decorated rooms alongside that fluffy copy make me want to eat Tums by the roll. The stories usually start out something like this: “When Christie and Rich Perfect first laid eyes on that five-acre parcel in Martha’s Vineyard they knew in the very marrow of their bones that this would be the place to build a modest 18-bedroom ranch home, where they would nurture and adore their three Yale-bound children, who are also Ralph Lauren models, and their eight Dutch Warmbloods.” I think it’s hopeless.

Well, several years ago I started writing for some of these shelter magazines. I learned firsthand why you can’t take these books too seriously.

Here’s how they operate. These magazines tease you with photos of gorgeous interiors. The writer interviews the designer and owner (often one and the same), who gush about how easy the project was, how the flow of both inspiration and funds were endless, how everyone involved got along like honeymooners, and how their only regret was that the project had ended, because it was so much fun. (Pass the barf bag.) The narrative also lures the reader into believing this look is attainable. the copy is just nonspecific enough that that impressionable readers will get hooked on a dream and then have to seek out and pay experts (read magazine advertisers) to really get the job done. This is how the magazines stay in business.

However, these magazines are to reality what politicians are to truth. What they will never tell you about are the hiccups in every project: the tile mason with the drinking problem, the carpenter who only showed up every third Thursday, the landscaper who left the country with the owner’s five-figure deposit, the kid who rebelled because she wanted to put a climbing wall in her bedroom, the stratospheric costs that exceeded the initial quote exponentially, and the shipwreck of a marriage left at the end. Now that would be a good story.

That, dear readers, is reality.

Just for fun, I asked Renee Aragon Dolese, former editior in chief of Colorado Homes & Lifestyles magazine and now a freelance editor for shelter publications, if the homes she features really are that gorgeous. “Good design is good design, but how a room is photographed makes the difference between a nice-looking room and one that takes your breath away,” she said. “No home gets shot as is.”

When she shoots a house, she brings an art director, a stylist, and a photographer. Bigger magazines have even larger teams to direct a shot’s composition, lighting, and styling. But once again, I’m encouraged. I believe, at least for the moment, that with just the right light, from just the right angle, with just the right props and a great photographer, any one of our homes could look gorgeous. “Remember,” says Dolese, “our job is to sell fantasy and inspriation. We’re given a look, but we create an image. “So books and magazines offer one source of inspiration, but nothing quite illustrates good or bad design better than seeing it in three dimensions….

Rip-Off Source #2: Home Tours

-The Allure of Seeing the Bad, the Ugly, and the Dated-

“You’ve got to see this house,” my friend said. She was on the phone telling me to meet her quick at a rundown multimillion dollar house that was so dated it belonged in the 70’s wing of a museum. “It wouldn’t be any fun to see this place if I didn’t have anyone to dish with,” she said. Well, she called the right gal. I never turn down an opportunity to see bad decorating. It’s the only kind of decorating that makes me feel better about mine.

The home tour was to preview a house that designers would soon transform to benefit the local Junior Symphony Guild.

Two-inch shag carpet, with yarn thick as earthworms, covered the floors, and some walls, and even crawled up the deck surrounding the Jacuzzi tub. The carpet was mostly an earthy sage, but you could tell from the few unfaded spots where furniture had been that it was once a brilliant avocado. That was in its heyday, a day when Gloria Gaynor was topping the record charts (remember records?” with “I will survive.” But this decor did not survive.

“Can you say “gut?” my friend whispered.

“I feel like I’m having a bad flashback.”

Later, I did a little digging to find the scoop on this place. As I expected, the former owners were members of high society. When they built the house, they decorated it with first-class style du jour. With that task off their list, they busied themselves raising a family, tending business, traveling, and entertaining the well known and well to do.

By the time they looked up again, twenty-five years had gone by, and their home, once a showplace, looked as dated as a macrame plant hanger. These owners had now moved on. And the 5,000-square-foot house was ready for a change as well.

As my friend and I were touring and gasping, design teams were working every room, tearing out mirrored bars, three-pinch pleated curtains on traverse rods, and disco-style light fixtures. Each crew had a vision, and one design diplomat had the delicate job of coordinating these visions to make sure they would flow together while keeping each designer’s ego intact.

“He’s putting purple feathers next to my leopard print!”

“Her pomegranate paint is clashing with my tangerine.”

A few days later, I told Gary Gibson, my Los Angeles designer friend, about the house. “Where do you begin in a case like this?” I asked him.

“If you’ve let your decor go that long,” he said, “I’d do as these designers are doing and strip the house back to its bones.” Then I asked the better question: How do you avoid having a dated home to begin with? Most of us can only afford to decorate once or twice in our lives, so timeless design is partly about economics.

Snooping – Voyeurism Has Its Place

“The lights are on at lot 47,” my husband announces. I race to the window and see he’s right. We share a look. We know what we must do.

The timing is perfect. It’s our date night. The sitter is here, and I can’t think of a better way to start the evening than by scoping out how our soon-to-be neighbors have decked out their home.

The front door is unlocked. We enter like sleuths, slip off our shoes, and head in different directions to explore. This would feel criminal, except that the new owners don’t technically own the house yet; it belongs to the builder until escrow closes. And the neighbors did this to our house. I know because shortly after I moved in and met my first neighbor, she told me how much she loved my entryway light fixture.

“When did you see it?” I asked, realizing I hadn’t yet had her over.

“Oh, I looked, before you moved in. We all did.”

As it turns out, snooping is common sport in our developing neighborhood. We’ve all been in each other’s bedrooms, but most won’t admit it. When almost everything is in the home except the new owners and their stuff, the builder leaves the lights on. Lights are the builder’s way of guarding against vandals. But to the neighbors, lights say: Open House! Fortunately for us spies, those who work on these homes never lock the doors.

Besides checking out finishes and fixtures, these sneak previews give us insight. Are the new folks modern, old-fashioned, sophisticated, or rustic? How much did they upgrade? Did they spend more than we did? Did they copy us? Do any of their windows look into ours?

After all, it’s human nature to yearn to know what our neighbors have that we don’t. Okay, maybe not for Gandhi or Mother Theresa, but I said human nature. I’m curious. I want to know if I still like my choices better than theirs. Whether relieved or jealous, I always leave these self-conducted tours feeling that i know the new owners a little better.

Take the people who moved in to lot 53, another home we previewed. The decor was mountainy. The owners had selected bath tiles with fossil-like impressions of elk and bear. The kitchen cabinets had pinecone pulls. These people, we correctly deduced, were liberal naturalists who had more than one dog and ate a lot of whole grains.

“I feel like Gladys Kravitz,” I say, recalling the snoopy neighbor on Bewitched, as i tiptoe past Dan in the hall.

“Be glad you don’t look like her.”

The to-be owners of lot 47 have chosen white travertine floors and black cabinets. I sense New York, or possibly Asian roots, definitely sophistication. Whatever, I feel relieved they are decorating in a different vein. The secondary bathrooms at lot 47 are finished with ceramic tiles in Dodger blue and black, which tells me their children are boys. The upgrades are minimal, not over-the-top like the empty nesters on lot 27, who actually have discretionary income because their kids are on their own. Nope, like us, this family is starting with the basics.

Upstairs, Dan and I meet briefly in the master and momentarily covet the city views. Our curiosity satisfied, we start to leave. Just then I hear the front door open. I consider the possibility of slipping out another door, but what about our shoes? My heart beats quickly. I hear voices, a man’s and a woman’s.

“I think someone’s here,” the woman says nervously.

I come out, feeling as if I should put my hands over my head. When the other couple sees us, we laugh. It’s the neighbors down the street, of course, doing the same thing we are.

I will continue with this blog and chapter of Rip-Off Source #3 and 4 on Wednesday, May 7th.2008.

-Furnishing your home: Copying good looks, using what you have, finding what you need, getting deals, buying quality.

So you know your design style, and you have a plan. The backgrounds are in. Next on the divide-and-conquer approach to home design comes furniture. Your design plan will dictate the style of furniture you’re looking for, which should be the style that will best suit you, your lifestyle, and your home. By keeping in mind whether your look is traditional, Old World, country, modern, ethnic, or a careful blend, you will give your shopping focus.

If you’ve moved furniture from another home, you probably already have many key pieces in hand. Don’t be too quick to toss what you have; not only is it a reflection of your taste, it also reflects your past. (Of course, if it truly is an albatross, put it on the curb.) The best home designs evolve over time.

To realize your dream home, you’ll probably need to acquire a few pieces. Consult your room files to see photos you’ve pulled from magazines that feature rooms you like. Study the furniture in them that gives them the look you love. Remember to consult your furniture layout to get the right sizes. Don’t forget to figure in how high the furniture should be as part of the equation.

This part of my blogs will help you use the furniture you have to decorate a new home or redecorate your existing home. The goal is to add pieces that will work with what you have. We’ll explore how to mix furniture successfully and how to find amazing deals and still keep our eyes on quality. Don’t get hung up on the accessories yet. We’ll get to that next.

WHAT DO-IT-YOURSELF DECORATORS DON’T GET

-Basic design advice from top pros-

ONE OF THE PERKS OF BEING a design journalist is that if you have a burning curiosity about something, you can get paid to ask people at the top of that field about the subject, using as your entree that you are going to write a story. Such was the case several years ago when I asked one of my editors at the Los Angeles Times if I could interview some of the area’s best designers to find out the answer to this question: What is it that do-it-yourself home decorators don’t get? In other words, what do these top designers know that I don’t?

Great-looking rooms look as if they somehow came together effortlessly, but we know that’s not true. I’ve tried, and made my share of decorating blunders. I once bought an antique armoire that looked fabulous in the furniture showroom, but it didn’t fit up the stairwell when I got it home. I once chose paint for my office in what I thought was a subtle shade of mauve, but it morphed into bubblegum pink on the walls. I’ve witnessed beguiling swatches of botanical print fabric grow into a jungle of despair on a sofa.

Meanwhile, I learned this: Unlike a fashion faux pas, which you can shed at the end of the day, decorating disasters tend to be big, expensive, and in your face for a long time. Which means that the seemingly simple task of picking a new chair can stymie the best of us. The decision involves a perplexing tangle of style, fabric, fill, stain, and size decisions. All of which just make me want to swallow a handful of Advil.

Adding to the pressure are home-decorating magazines, where the featured homes seem so perfect. Why does my house always fall short by comparison? I can’t blame my limited budget. Many people furnish rooms beautifully on less than I spend a year on manicures. But as I kept looking at and analyzing the beautiful homes on home tours and in magazines, the same nagging question kept coming up: what is it we do-it-yourself decorators don’t get? So, with the Los Angeles Times assignment in hand, I called some top designers and asked.

Get the Size Right

At first, each designer said the same thing: “Scale.”

They weren’t referring to the bathroom scale that ruins your day, but the scale of furniture proportions. I flashed on my last house. We had a painting that we had moved from our previous house, where it seemed huge. When I hung it over the fireplace in the new living room, which had a 20-foot ceiling, it shrank to the size of a postage stamp. I tried “enlarging” it by putting candlesticks on the mantle beside it, but then it just looked small and cluttered.

So I cried. “What’s wrong?” Dan asked.

“Nothing fits anymore.”

“But you wanted a bigger house.”

“The only possession we have that’s the right scale is Bogie,” I said, clutching our beloved and since departed French sheepdog.

“If you’re lobbying to buy furniture, forget it.”

I cried some more, but the truth was, I wouldn’t have known what to buy if I did have the funds. It’s one thing to see a problem, quite another to know how to fix it. So we rattled around in a big house decorated with doll furniture, until we s-l-o-w-l-y filled the gaps. We moved the painting to the master and got a larger painting for the living room. We didn’t eat that month.

“What’s for dinner, Mom?” the kids asked.

“Why, this lovely painting.”

So I was reassured to hear that I wasn’t the only plagued by the problem of scale.

Matching is for Amateurs

After addressing scale, the chief advice from top designers – besides hire a designer – was to be perfectly imperfect. Easy shmeezy.

Beverly Hills designer Luis Ortega, whose work has graced many architectural magazines, said, “I’m always looking to make the layout simpler, to make the approach more welcoming. I want to take away color, pattern, and the number of pieces.” But the best rooms aren’t perfect, he added. “There’s an art to being off on purpose.”

Well, that’s a relief. But how off?

“A room looks better when colors don’t match but blend,” agreed Tom Allardyce. “One sign of an amateur is someone who makes everything match. House and rooms should look as if they evolved over time.” Whew! Our house is definitely evolving over time, since we can only afford about one lamp a month. We’re on the ten-year installment plan. And at the rate things fade around here, soon nothing will match.

Gary Gibson said that most people don’t understand that what they’re after is not perfection, but ambience. “A great room is about the essence that happens when things get put together.” And just what would that essence be when you blend a frugal husband, two slovenly children, a pair of overindulged dogs, and me, a mildly obsessive domestic maven with the creative courage of the census bureau?

In addition, said Gibson, whose more illustrious clients have included Paula Abdul and CBS President Leslie Moonves, DIY home decorators need to think outside the box more. “Don’t get locked into your home’s format. I’ve made living rooms dining rooms and dining rooms living rooms.” Throw away borders and design with your needs in mind.” Well, we’ve done that. Take our bathroom. To some who live here, it’s the library or the dog-grooming parlor, and for me personally, it’s a phone booth with a lock.

Here is what the experts said to consider when evaluating proportions:

TEST-DRIVE A FLOOR PLAN. Create a room’s furniture layout by making a poor man’s floor plan, said West Hollywood designer Kevin Kolanowski. Cut newspaper in the shapes of the furniture you’re considering, lay the pieces on the floor, and walk around to see if the furniture fits and the rooms flows. You might want to warn your family though. The first time I tried this, my husband thought he’s stumbled onto a crime scene.

VISUALIZE TRAFFIC FLOW. Don’t create an obstacle course, said Newport Beach designer Sheila Perrone. Make a scaled furniture layout on graph paper. Draw arrows on the floor plan to indicate how people and pets will flow. Don’t make people walk into the backs of furniture or maneuver around pieces. Never mind that certain inhabitants at my house like having furniture in their way: My youngest, a gymnast, thinks every piece of furniture is either a balance beam or a vault, and my two bichon frises use the house as their agility course.

VARY THE HEIGHTS. A room where all the furniture is one height lacks interest, according to Tom Allardyce, of L.A.’s Hendrix/Allardyce, who has created dream homes for Rod Stewart, Kenny G, and Sugar Ray Leonard. He likes to vary furniture heights to fit the archictecture and especially likes higher backed sofas. Los Angeles designer Reg Adams, who has created residential ambience for Marlo Thomas and Chevy Chase, offered this rule of scale: if you have 8-foot ceilings, don’t use high-back dining room chairs. They’re more comfortable in homes with 10-foot ceilings. Use low-back chairs in rooms with 8-foot ceilings. Likewise, if you live in a small bungalow, don’t buy a huge sofa. If you live in a starter castle, go ahead and get an armchair that would befit Goliath.

SPREAD THE VISUAL WEIGHT. If a room in your home feels like the entry to the Knott’s Berry Farm’s house, so lopsided you almost fall over it, you probably have too much physical or visual weight on one side, said Dolly Chapman, a Los Angeles design veteran. Imagine a seesaw in the center of the room. If one side gets weighed down, add something to the other side to pull the eye over and even out the room. Try a piece of furniture, a large wall hanging in darker colors, or a large dog.

MIX UP SHAPES. Don’t make all the pieces in one room the same basic shape. If all pieces are square or rectangles, said Interior Designer Gary Gibson, of Los Angeles, throw in an oval.

REMEMBER: LESS IS BEST. When placing accessories, the biggest mistake amateurs make is having too many that are too small. It’s far more appealing to have a few substantial, well-chosen accessories on a mantel or shelf than to have fifteen small pieces that collectively look like clutter. When in doubt, Perrone said, it’s better to scale up (get something too big) than to have something too small.

SCALE PIECES TO YOUR PLACE. Of course, you always need to consider the size of your home when accessorizing. A 15-inch crystal vase may be perfect in the entry of a small apartment but could look ridiculously lost if displayed in a large home.