Furnishing
Your Home, Room By Room
By
Stacee Sledge
Log Home Living, February 2004
The anticipation is over
and you've finally moved into your dream home. Unpacked
boxes sit at the ready and your old furniture, which
doesn't seem to work as well in the new space, is strewn
pell-mell throughout the rooms. You thought the loading
and unloading was the difficult part, but now you're ready
to tackle the true work that makes a house a home:
decorating.
Take One Room at a
Time
When it comes to furnishing a brand-new house, few owners
find the process fret-free. The mountain of decorating
decisions can be overwhelming --
especially for log homes, which offer unique design
challenges. The best way to take on this job? Experts
suggest you preserve your sanity and your budget by
focusing on one room at a time.
"Tackling a project
room by room is a great idea for people who are working on
a budget," says interior designer Barbara Mullen of
Poss Interior Design in Aspen, Colorado. "It's nice
to be able to spread things out over a few months, or even
years, to make the cost more manageable."
But that doesn't mean you
should purchase easy-on-the-pocketbook pieces for every
room in the house. "I never recommend going out and
buying a lot of inexpensive furniture just to fill the
space," Barbara says. "I would much rather see
people buy a few really great pieces that they love and
fill in from there." Working room by room also lets
you make changes with fewer repercussions.
Designer Cheryl Larson,
owner of CL Interior Expressions in Coppell, Texas, always
advises clients to focus on one room at a time, so they
can be sure they like the design decisions they make as
far as style, color and furnishings. "If you decide
to change design directions mid-stream, you'll only have
to make changes in one room instead of several. Unsure
which room to work on first? Cheryl recommends one of the
main public spaces, such as the living room, dining room
or foyer. "This is like putting your best foot
forward," Cheryl says.
One final reason to focus
on one room at a time is that for people who have a hard
time visualizing what a room is going to look like from
swatches and photographs of furniture, focusing on one
space at a time helps divide the project into more
manageable stages.
Create Visual Interest
When you're ready to decorate your first room, where do
you begin? Experts suggest one of the most basic and early
goals when decorating a room is to create a specific point
of visual interest.
"Armoires are great
focal points," Barbara says. "Oftentimes a room
needs a large-scale, heavy piece of furniture to achieve
balance, especially when you have heavy architectural
elements."
Another option, suggests
Barbara: If you have the space, make your focal point a
table that you can circulate around. Then, hang a
chandelier above it or display a cherished accessory or a
fresh floral arrangement on it.
Wisconsin interior
designer Inge Winters likes to use furniture arrangements
to accent a room's focal point. For example, if you have a
fireplace in a room or beautiful scenery showing through
the windows, she recommends arranging the seating to
provide an unobstructed view. To further enhance the view,
Inge says, "Many times, usually as part of a seating
grouping, I place low upholstered benches closest to the
focal point."
The arresting
architecture of log and rustic homes often dictates the
focal point of each room, but balancing the architecture
with the rest of the room is key to a well-designed space.
"If you have a large architectural focal point on one
wall, then it's best to create a large focal point along
another wall with furnishings to balance out the
room," Cheryl says. For example, place wall shelves,
tall bookcases or other large, tall pieces of furniture
directly across from the large architectural focal point,
or use the wall space to display art by grouping the
pieces. "You can really highlight your collections by
pulling them all together and displaying them as a group
instead of scattering them throughout the room, where it
has a tendency to get lost," says Cheryl.
Furnish on a Budget
Not everyone can afford to lavishly decorate their home
without concern for cost. Thankfully, there are many ways
you can beautify on a budget and still create a decor
that's worthy of a magazine spread.
"One of the cheapest
ways to make a great impact on a home is through color and
fabrics," Cheryl says. "For instance, you may
have several different styles of picture frames that can
all be tied together simply by making them the same color.
You can make a beautiful wall display this way."
Also, you can refresh
functional but outdated furniture with a few simple
tricks. Cheryl suggests covering pieces with new
slipcovers or painting them to give them a refreshed look.
You can make a spectacular statement with minimum of
expense. You can also cut costs by acquiring one or two
new furniture pieces at a time. "When you add new
pieces to your freshly painted and updated existing
furnishings, you'll get a great new look for a minimal
amount of money," Cheryl says.
Another way to stay
budget-minded without skimping on special touches is to
select key pieces for a room and then fill the space
around them with plants and other accent pieces chosen
with care. You can upgrade later, giving yourself time to
learn more about what you love and what will work best in
that particular space.
Define Spaces
Defining a space with furniture arrangements is especially
important when working with the large open rooms common to
today's log and timber frame homes. You can create
arrangements in many different ways, says Inge. For
example, you could add a screen, a cabinet or tall storage
piece to cordon off a section of a room. You could create
a border for a space with an area rug. Even a different
wall color would give a space a visual boundary.
When designing large
rooms, as well as combined spaces where the living room
opens to the kitchen and dining room, Barbara suggests the
most important thing to think about is how to define each
space with the furniture you select. "Sofa tables
with lamps help to define a space by making an area more
intimate," she says. "The incandescent light
from a tabletop lamp helps to warm the space and it also
gives you room to place an accessory. In addition, if
space allows, it is much nicer to see a sofa table than
the back of a sofa."
Bring Large Rooms Down
to Size
Great rooms, with their rocketing cathedral ceilings,
present design dilemmas that you'll need to address to
make the space both comfortable and functional.
First of all, the
furniture's scale is important in a spacious great room.
It must match the size of the space. The sofa that looked
great in the small living room of your old home may not be
appropriate in an 800-square-foot great room, Barbara
points out.
To soften a large room
and give it a cozier, more intimate feeling, install
drapery panels on large windows.
One of the most important
elements in a large space is lighting. You might not think
of lighting as part of your furnishings, but it's integral
to defining furniture groups and the look of a room.
According to Barbara, if you want to create a warm and
inviting environment, you should use several different
types of lighting: architectural lighting; fixed
decorative lighting, such as chandeliers and sconces; and
floor and table lamps.
Inge suggests you include
suspended lights in a tall room so you can get light down
to the level where you need it for reading, crafts,
activities and the like. "Some light also needs to be
uplight to accentuate the beauty and warmth of the
wood," she advises.
Inge also recommends
using suspended track lighting with fixtures that can be
aimed up as well as down. And if the home contains
interesting masonry, she suggest "grazing"
lighting. This means placing the fixtures close to the
surface to highlight the texture of the stonework.
Both Inge and Barbara
suggest you work with a lighting professional, if you can
afford the cost. "A designer will be able to
recommend the light quality that best suits the
space," says Barbara.
Keep Sight of What
Really Counts
Finally, don't let yourself get bogged down by
stringent design dictums. Your goal should be to create a
comfortable and inviting space at your own pace.
Don't be afraid to mix
different styles and textures, old familiar objects with
new purchases and decorator-inspired touches with handmade
creations to create a warm, cozy environment that's all
your own.
Stacee Sledge is a
professional writer who shares her culinary opinion in a
weekly restaurant review column for the Bellingham
Herald, in Washington State.
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