New Landmark at Night

Joelle Lifestyle 

Irwin Weiner ASID - Daylight brings out the beautiful cast iron surfaces of the relatively new Ian Schrager prestige residential building at 40 Bond Street in Manhattan. Sunlight also dapples the graffiti-inspired cast aluminum sculptural wall that fronts the building - so glamorously Gaudi.

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1980s Hollywood Glamour

J. Robert Scott - Adam Tufted Sofa

Irwin Weiner ASID - There are few purveyors of fine furnishings left that show the "maker's mark" as well as J. Robert Scott. Their wonderful take on 1980s Hollywood Glamour has triumphed over the original 1940s HG look, thanks to the steady hand and design leadership of Sally Sirkin Lewis. I love their purely American design take on classic art deco; it's especially fresh and fun right now, and the pieces endure because of their high quality and close attention to manufacturing detail. Our video interview is a great look at their NYC showroom and its many showcase pieces. A big thanks to Sally and her NYC showroom manager Gregory Marshall for showing Design2Share their classic J. Robert Scott hospitality.

 

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Websites Devoted to Color

 

Irwin Weiner ASID - Color is a gut-level, highly personal experience. I recommended "green" for a client's room, and saw his face turn into a contorted mask. "No way!" he said. "Anything green reminds me of hospital walls." One person's calm, energizing, positive color experience will mean disaster and horrors to another. When decorating, please yourself and choose colors you can live with day in, day out. But don't feel you have to stick with what's on the walls or in your furnishings. Some tips:

• Seasonal changes: Decorate with two color palettes a year - a spring/summer and a fall/winter scheme. Choose colors for furniture slipcovers, pillows, lampshades, and area rugs that give a lighter warm-weather feel and a darker, comfier cold-weather feel. It's good to shift the color palette and mood in your home.
• Wall impact: It's an old chestnut, but it's true that paint is the quickest way to decorate. You'll get huge impact if you paint your walls with color, color, color. I'm not a huge fan of accent walls, however. They tend to shrink the room and remind me of amateur room makeover shows on TV. Here's a lengthier blog post I wrote on Adding Color to Your Walls. Enjoy!
• Ceilings, too: I hate white ceilings in rooms with low ceilings and brightly painted walls (like putting a Tupperware lid on the room); paint walls and ceilings a unified color for bigger impact. Go a few shades lighter for the ceiling versus the wall color, but keep it unified and you'll be happier with the end results, I promise you.
• Love of color: There are blogs and other websites devoted to specific colors! If you're a fan of black and white, for instance, then go to Black and White Delight for inspiration! House of Turquoise may be your best bet if you're a fan of turquoise and all shades of blue. Go to the Decor by Color site, and you can select colors that suit your taste - or explore colors you may be timid about - in blogs and stores devoted to inspiring interior design based solely on color. This is a great way to get decorating ideas.

Enjoy this video of talented designer Karim Rashid talking about color - he's a huge fan of pink! - from TheHome.com.

 

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Ultimate Bird Feeders

Droll Yankees 

Irwin Weiner ASID - My partner and I have a weekend home in rural PA, and we have a great garden, protected by a deer fence. It's nice to live in Nature, but it's optimum to edit Nature and allow only nice things into your yard. Case in point: bird feeders. Years of mishap plagued us. Possums, squirrels, and raccoons - and those huge crows! - would descend on our bird feeders, chasing away all the cute little colorful creatures we wanted to attract in the first place. One night, I woke up to a racket in our backyard, got a flashlight, crept to the kitchen, shined the beam out the back window, and found three raccoons yanking and pawing at our hanging feeder. The next morning, the feeder was gone and we never found a trace of it!

Did we give up? Not at all. We discovered the Droll Yankees Yankee Flipper (see photo above); it changed our bird feeding lives! You charge up the wire mesh perch/base and it swiftly rotates when pressure is put on it. It literally flips heavy birds and animals off the perch so they can't get at the food. It was hysterical to see a squirrel tossed into space by the perch. I can't recommend Droll Yankees products enough, and they have a squirrel-proof line of feeders worth looking into. This video doesn't feature the Flipper model, but it's a Droll Yankees feeder, and it's certainly mesmerizing to watch. 

 

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