House Facades

Mantova, Italy is a beautiful small city with a rich history and stunning architecture. As Manhattan decorator Irwin Weiner ASID notes in the following video of some of his favorite house facades, some city scenes seem to be straight out of Barber of Seville. While you may not want to turn your own home into an Italian palazzo, his point is to add interesting materials, good craftsmanship, and unexpected architectural details to give your home an enduring quality. And who knows - maybe one day in the future a film crew will want to stop in front of your home and comment on its design!

Sculptural Furnishings

Finding One of the secrets of good interior design is to add a mix of workmanlike furniture with a few pieces of high interest. What makes for high interest? Sometimes it's the unusual, the outrageous, or the unexpected, like the striking use of aluminum and fiberglass in Marc Newson's Lockheed Lounge chair, pictured above. But most often, high-interest pieces - what adds zip and juice to any space - consists of furnishings or lighting that is highly sculptural. Look at the beautiful shapes of objects and see how they tie in with the curves, straight lines, colors, and mood of a room. Start a conversation, wake up a sleepy space, and "go sculptural." Designer Irwin Weiner ASID shows you a few examples from a Milan store in the following video.

Update on August 23, 2010 by Design2Share

Super King Size Leather Beds: We just found a great collection of sleek leather bed designs. They add sophistication, whether your bedroom decor is traditional or modern.

Featured Project: DIY Painted Headboard

Now is the perfect time to think about freshening up your interior space. With a splash of color here and a new piece of furniture there, it's easy to redecorate. Here's a quick, budget-conscious DIY design idea to help get you started.

Paint Your Own Headboard

Chances are if you if you purchased your bed frame as part of a bedroom set, the headboard is already included. If you don't want to put forth the extra cash, especially after paying for a pricey mattress, no problem! Painted headboards are a great way to add a pop of color to your bedroom.

Step 1: Measure the width of the head of your bed and mark it with blue painter's tape from floor to ceiling. Now, choose your color based on your desired color scheme. You obviously don't want it to be the same shade as your walls, but it should complement that color.

Step 2: Once you have your color, paint the wall, staying within the blue painters tape. Once the paint dries, if you choose to do so, you can detail with paint or with some removable wall decals from a company like Blik. For as little as $40, Blik makes easily removable wall decals in fun shapes like bookshelves, chandeliers, birds, etc. If this sounds like too much work, don't worry and leave your wall a solid color.

Step 3: Simply position your bed up against the painted wall, prop up some decorative Euro pillows in coordinating colors and patterns, and you have yourself a headboard. You might want to take this opportunity to invest in a new comforter or duvet in fun, light, spring colors. You'd be surprised at what a little bit of paint and some new bedding can do for your space!

Update on August 23, 2010 by Design2Share

The Ultimate Home Cinema

Have you ever gone to the movies and thought about the many ways you could improve the experience? Those queues could be eliminated, and so could the attitude of the young kid at the door. It could be cleaner, the food is too expensive, and the only seat left by the time you get there is in the very first row where you strain your neck looking up at the screen. They call that entertainment?

The solution is not to go to the movies. Bring the movies home. Build the ultimate home cinema and make your home the place where all your friends come to for their cinematic enjoyment. If you’re making permanent changes to your home, just make sure you have some contents insurance, and a full refrigerator! The contents can be cold beer, chips, sandwich meats, or anything else you like to eat when you watch a movie. Ideally, you want to get a mini fridge to place next to your seat in the movie room. That way, you don’t need to move to get a refill of whatever you’re eating or drinking.

How do you begin building your home cinema? It starts with the TV. Ideally, a flat screen HD or plasma TV of 40 inches or more should be the centerpiece. Connect it to some external speakers and mount those around the room, creating a surround sound effect. You’ll also want a CD player and maybe a stereo receiver added on if you want to just listen to music. Finish it off with a gaming system of some kind if you’re into that type of thing, and you’ll be ready to start selecting furniture.

When you get to this step in creating your ultimate home cinema, you’ll need to assess the uses of the room you are working on. Will it be used solely for watching movies or is it going to double as a sitting room? Are adults going to be the only ones allowed in the room or should you also “kid-proof” it? Will anyone be sleeping in that room? Is it necessary to buy furniture that “converts” or “folds up” into something else?

The best move is to buy comfortable chairs for the principle residents of the house and then perhaps a sofa for when guests come over. If you’re going to be spending a lot of time in there, make sure the seats have good lower back support and that your remote controls are stored near your chair. You’ll want a universal to get the full home theatre experience, one that controls the TV, the lights, the stereo, and the game system with the click of a button.

The photos above show the glam home theater in the 2010 Hampton Designer Showhouse.

Feng Shui Areas

Finding out more about how your house and each room  orients according to the principles of feng shui - that's something that wouldn't be on the radar of some homeowners, but there are others who swear by the ancient Chinese practice. In this video, we show you how to locate the main areas of any room or of your house in order to optimize the chi or energy within and maximize your family's health and prosperity. Click here for some feng shui basics to help you get started. 

Ceilings Count

Our Design2Share decorating expert Irwin Weiner ASID showed us one of his favorite ceiling treatments - a clever seventies-inspired tiled entryway ceiling in beautiful Milan, Italy. His point is simple: don't forget to include ceilings in your decorating plans. Too often we ignore them altogether or paint them a default white color when the walls are a stronger shade. Of the latter, Irwin notes that "it looks like a white Tupperware lid slapped on top of your room." The room in the photo above, however, has a strong reflective high-gloss sheen that reflects the rest of the room and gives endless height to the space (see apartment therapy's article How to: Make Your Ceiling Seem Higher).