Home Decorating with Pantone's Emerald Color of the Year 2013

Irwin Weiner ASID - Companies like Pantone create standardized colors that help extend our color vocabulary across a variety of artistic industries. Two of those industries are fashion and interior design, and they're interconnected.

Pantone selects a color of the year - this year it's Emerald 17-5641 - and this and related colors are used to tell stories and create moods that will soon determine what we'll be wearing and what home fashions will be popping up in stores, from decor items to appliances. We've selected four items that could help you tie Emerald, and related shades of green, into your design scheme.

CB2 works in Emerald shapes down the center of their sassy Totem Rug

Design Within Reach offers this green version of Flemming Busk's Twilight Sleeper Sofa

Love the green metal frame and legs on this Serpentine chair from Ligne Roset

Karim Rashid's pops green accents on his Ottawa Collection pieces for BoConcept

Don't go overboard decorating with any trendy color of the year; adding pops of current on-trend colors won't hurt anything, and you can use them to help freshen up your existing design scheme. Click on a product photo for more information.

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Make Way in 2013 for the "New Pastels"

Irwin Weiner ASID - Are you ready to embrace 2013's new colors of the year? I'm always concerned that my clients will get too caught up in all the "Color of the Year" hoopla that paint and color forecasting companies promulgate each year. Colors don't drastically change from year to year and consumer tastes aren't necessarily wearing thin on this year's top colors, but what's constant is the design industry's need to create fashion trends and rally around so-called experts who like to tell us what's trending.

If you listen to Benjamin Moore, the paint manufacturer, you're going to go for the palette cleansing, refreshing (almost there, almost not there) color Lemon Sorbet. It's viewed by the company as a way to usher us out of our current state of jewel tones and saturated colors and into a land of fresh, light pastels. Today's featured video describes Benjamin Moore's color trend analysis, and in the next few posts, I'll go through some of the other colors of the year (see our D2S banner for the top three annointed trendy hues, and scroll down to the bottom of the page for links for more information about the three featured 2013 colors).  

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7 Quirky Chairs to Hail in the New Year

Irwin Weiner ASID - It's more than just sitting pretty. A good chair is functional, combining comfort and good design with a sculptural significance that makes it stand out in a crowd. I've selected seven chair favorites for their quirkiness, like the Grillage chair by François Azambourg for Ligne Roset (above) to tout as we ring in 2013. Here's hoping you and yours have a happy and healthy home in the new year!

David Lynch's Wire Chair for Silencio

FRAChair armchair (as in "fracture" - inspired by shattered glass) by Paul Sandip

Maximo Riera's Elephant Chair from his Animal Chair collection

Maria Westerberg designed this award-winning Rag Edition chair made of T-shirts for Green Furniture

Christophe Pillet's Video Lounge Inox lounge chair and ottoman

When Jim Relaxes arm chair and ottoman by Matali Crasset for Domeau and Peres 

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Dial Your Next Party Up to "Special"

Irwin Weiner ASID - Jay and I love to host parties. We hope you do, too. If you enjoy interior design and creating a lovely home, then the natural extension of "home love" is to share it with family, friends, and neighbors. Entertaining is an art, and if you don't do it very often, it can be a chore. But if you keep with it, and mix parties for a small group with bashes bringing in a larger crowd, you'll feel right at home being sociable. The slideshow above show scenes from a small dinner party we threw this Christmas Eve. Total attending (including the two of us): 11.

We hand-selecting international dishes for their "yummy" factor and festive colors (the slide show contains a menu), and we began by serving Admiral Russell's Christmas Punch, a big hit and so festive and tasty! I went to a local Walmart and selected holiday ornaments to fill four footed bowls running up and down the table, we added madcap color-changing electric candles in votives, and I bought coordinating fabric and made the tablecloth and napkins (are you impressed?!). And we did fun things we'd never tried before, like using wooden paddles to hand-roll individual balls of butter and printing out our menu and putting it by each place setting on little snowflake placeholders. It was lots of fun! As we approach New Year's Eve, everyone at Design2Share hopes you have an amazing 2013, and your home is filled with the sound of entertaining, good parties, and celebration. (And a big thank-you to the amazing Jana Kolpen for taking the photos in the slideshow.)

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