Springtime Fancies at Burke Decor

Irwin Weiner ASID -- Spring is the perfect excuse to jazz up your home with some new life. Go to Burke Decor to bring some spring into your space. Browsing and shopping there will become a real guilty pleasure. This online boutique shop has great decorative home products, gifts, furniture, and other goodies to spice everything up a little bit more.

Browse by category or by brand. Burke Decor carries accent decor, bath accessories, bedding, candles, furniture, decorative garden decor, children's furnishings, lighting, mirrors, photographs, pillows, art prints, rugs, serving linens, trays, tabletop accessories, and wallpaper from a range of star designers and brands. You'll love the unique and extraordinary items they source for their appreciative customers.

Here are 10 items that really caught my eye during a recent run through their online store:

Bring spring into a kids room with these Chalkals "Hootie" set of two owls and two branches (below). Modern Dose produced these great wall decals that are easy to affix to any wall surface and remove without taking off paint. Best of all, these decals are great to write on with chalk and are easily erased and cleaned.

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Adding Color to Your Walls

Irwin Weiner ASID -- Color is very visceral. It's very emotive for people. Picture a white room or a black room -- people feel very different in different colored spaces.

One way to choose color for a room in your home is to follow the advice of master interior designer Samuel Botero. I was told by a friend that he led one of his clients to the refrigerator and said, "Alright, here are the vegetables. Pick your colors." And food in the fridge made up the colors his client chose: hot peppers, green peppers, butternut squash, etc.

Different spaces call for different colors, and even different countries and the quality of the natural light in different parts of the world often determines appropriate color palettes. England is often dark, gloomy, and gray, and the Victorians went with very bright colors for porcelain, paint, and accessories.

Scandinavia, with its relatively weak sunlight, inspired pale grays and whites in home colors (see photo below). By contrast, Country French has its palette inspiration from hot and sunny hues. Mixing up colors and appropriate connotations can be sometimes jarring, like having hot colors in Scandinavian interiors. (Although rules should always be broken!)

In times before the 20th Century, color pigments were very expensive. Cobalt blue was made from lapus lazuli. Turquoise came from turquoise gemstones.

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