I'd like to find some people to bounce ideas off of, share ideas, etc. I find the decorating messageboards are a bit too elitist and cliquey for my taste.

Hi Wheetsin,

Your style is pretty close to my own, I love the iron look too.

I think the first thing I would do is change you fire place color.

When I decorate I only buy the things I really really like. When you put them all together....That becomes your style.

My walls are light and dark tans . My sofa and chairs are all a solid cream color. I like to change my colors often . The way I do that is by changing out the pillows and pictures , ect. I like to bring in colors that really pop.

Just go with what you love and when people walk into your room....they will see your personallity.

I hope this helps. Have fun .

I am with crazycat. Though we have very eclectic furnishings and a lot of rich colours everything goes together and this is because I have only bought things which I like. Buying only stuff which you are nuts about guarantees a consistency in your palette. We have painted the walls in a number of our rooms fairly dark colours in order to anchor our colourful and eclectic mess. This works really well for us.

Ho, ho, ho. We don't have any codes in the county here. I can set up a junk yard and no one except the neighbors will care. I think I'll go for the drain but it will no doubt cost the earth. I'm also getting news windows the house since the current windows have to be propped up if I open them. But thanks for your help.

Ok I'll tell my style if you tell yours!

Trying to redo my living room, which is hard because the focal point of the room is the raised hearth fireplace. And IMO it's an eyesore. First, when we built this house, they wrote down the wrong wood stain (umm... and wood too). Everything was supposed to be done in clearcoat, and instead they did it in Fruitwood, which is a bit garrish orange, if you aren't familiar with the color. So the mantle & surround color screams "I have jaundice... and diarrhea!" Then the surround tiles we selected, based on the assumption that they would be up against clearcoat hickory, look horrible next to fruitwood pine. *sigh*

My style is a bit hard to describe. Ecclectic, but not gypsy ecclectic. Rustic, but not "lodge" rustic with moose and plaid all over the place. Maybe a little country, but nothing like anitque douche cans for flower vases and pig-themed kitchens. More like a Spanish rustic, but not santa Fe. I lurve handcrafted things, but not the primitive dolls with barbed wire hair stuff.

My house has a lot of Spanish style recycled hand-blown glass, lots of wrought Iron, several pieces of Mexican rustic (chunky pine & iron style) furniture, distressed leather, I love apothecary style pieces. A touch of arts & crafts, but I'm not a true devotee. Lots of Pottery Barn older style, like the Madison line of occasional tables, pub mirror, etc.

I don't do a lick of modern. I dont' like really light wood. I don't like really dark wood. I don't like formal lines or finishes. Yeah, I'm pretty picky.

We had new sofas delivered this week and I was hoping to have a painter in to get the family room painted before they arrived, but I didn't make it. On two counts. One was the painter was already booked, and two was that after a year I still haven't picked a color (I'm currently torn between benjamin Moore Yorkshire Tan or Lenox Tan. I have Olive Branch sampled on the walls, and it's a beautiful color, but the room doesn't get enough light to pull it off).

BTW, can I say that fabric is $^% expensive? I ordered some Covington linen for new bedroom panels. 11 yards. At 40% off, I still paid over $400. I'm still trying to convince myself they'll be so perfect I won't mind... I'm not winning so far...

:faint:

If you are in the mood for a bit of work, I'd try stripping and re-staining the fireplace. Or painting it, if you aren't in the mood for a bit of work. Your house sounds gorgeous. I'm not personally into chunky pine, but the rest sounds very interesting.

Seriously, though, I would start with the fireplace, since it is the focal point. Nothing else will look right until you get that looking the way you want it to. Once you get that done, choose a paint color, and just go on from there. Do one thing at a time, until you are happy with the way the entire room looks.

Oh, and my ideal house would be a classic Craftsman bungalow, with all the characteristic wooden accents and built-ins. I like medium-toned to darkish wood, but still natural-looking. No reddish cherry or light maple or yellow pine for me. Beautiful, wide-plank wood floors, lots of authentic detail, that kind of thing. I want a modern kitchen, though, but not super-modern. I HATE extremely dark or light granite; I prefer tan/brown/gold granite. LOVE colored glass tile, especially in greens, aquas, and reds. I really want a professional stove and oven. Hell, I could EASILY spend $50k on a kitchen, if I got everything the exact way I want it.

Seriously, though, I love color. Nothing bores me more than a house that is entirely neutral. A house NEEDS personality, and if it can't get it from the architecture, it needs to get it from color. Glass is a major fetish of mine, although I can't have much around with cats who seem to thrill themselves with intentionally knocking stuff off of shelves. If you ever want to see me practically have a public orgasm, take me to a Dale Chilhuly exhibit.

I don't like wall-to-wall carpeting, but I love oriental or other old rugs on wood or stained concrete floors.

You might like my house, laurend. It is a large Edwardian house with lots of plain style wood trim. The Yuppies who renovated the house opened up the living room and the dining room in order to make this one large room. One wall is exposed brick. We have wood floors and lots of Oriental carpets, some of which we have bought on our travels. We also have a number of masks, some African, some Indonesian, some Mexican, and some from Nepal. We also have quite a few ethnic carvings and pieces of furniture as well as textiles and ceramics. And then there are the 11 bookcases and my own paintings which are very colourful. We even have a kangaroo skin.

My husband used to be into a beige-brown palette until he fell into my hands. I really love colour and now he is a convert. The house is a real nasty bitch to dust, however!

You might like my house, laurend. It is a large Edwardian house with lots of plain style wood trim. The Yuppies who renovated the house opened up the living room and the dining room in order to make this one large room. One wall is exposed brick. We have wood floors and lots of Oriental carpets, some of which we have bought on our travels. We also have a number of masks, some African, some Indonesian, some Mexican, and some from Nepal. We also have quite a few ethnic carvings and pieces of furniture as well as textiles and ceramics. And then there are the 11 bookcases and my own paintings which are very colourful. We even have a kangaroo skin.

My husband used to be into a beige-brown palette until he fell into my hands. I really love colour and now he is a convert. The house is a real nasty bitch to dust, however!

I bet I would LOVE your house. I really like ethnic art, so your house sounds very interesting.

My style leans towards minimalism, but not the completely bare, unlivable form of minimalism -- simple and modern, but intersting. Louis Kahn, Tadao Ando, Christain Liaigre, Toyo Ito. Recently I've really been into mixing baroque/rococo with modern minimal -- taking an industrial loft space with simple modern furniture and throwing in a rococo sofa. Less IS more. But nothing at all is just that.

Unfortunately, most of my clients are nouveau riche and they want tacky tacky tacky. They all think they are "zen" and "minimal" and then half-way through the project they drag me in to look at overzealous silk rugs and matchy-matchy fabrics. But it keeps me in business, so I can't complain.

$50k for a kitchen? That's nothing. One of my clients just dropped $180K on a kitchen and that was JUST for the cabinets. People are crazy.

The Donald comb-over nouveau Napolean style is the most fun of all, sez Green. *malicious snicker*

$50k for a kitchen? That's nothing. One of my clients just dropped $180K on a kitchen and that was JUST for the cabinets. People are crazy.

Holy cow. Some people go WAY overboard. But, I'm sure a lot of people would think $50k would be going way overboard, too. I want LOTS of counter space, real wood cabinets, nice granite counters, a professional gas stove and oven (preferably double), giant fridge, etc.

It KILLS me to watch shows about flipping or remodeling houses, where the people doing it totally RUIN the house. My mom and I sit there and bash the idiots. These people will buy a gorgeous (or potentially gorgeous) old home and then go in and rip out all of the characteristic architecture, the authentic tiling, etc. You know, the stuff a lot of people are willing to PAY for. All for making a cold, modern house. And some of the stuff they do, you KNOW a straight, colorblind man designed or picked out, 'cause it's absolutely hideous.

This has happened a lot with the old houses in the core of my city. There are a lot of Victorian and Edwardian houses which became very cheap as they fell out of fashion during the 40s and the 50s. Immigrants bought them and then began grafting their own and very alien aesthetic on them. The Greeks, Italians, and Portuguese who tended to work in construction were especially fond of doing this. The result is houses which have been uglified beyond belief but the workmanship is magnificient. The real estate people refer to these houses as "nationalised."

The houses which survived were the ones which were turned into rooming houses during this era and simply allowed to run down. Now folks want to live downtown in these period houses and they are being fixed up by Yuppies. I am lucky in that I live in a house which was mostly fixed up by a Yuppy couple. Unfortunately their marriage crashed before they got to the kitchen. This remains the most dysfunctional kitchen in the universe because I have been too lazy and too neurotic to deal with reno and workmen. About a third to a half of the houses on my street have been nationalised.