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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Bergdorf Goodman Windows

Irwin Weiner ASID - This was the week that sent blizzards to New York City to finally add atmospheric oomph to the beautiful department store holiday windows around town. My office is a block north of Bloomingdale's, and I'm afraid that their windows completely missed the mark this year. Video screens slowly showing an animated Christmas tree and snow falling and messages of merry, merry, joy, joy. Blank windows filled with video screens on a constant loop. Disappointing, and the store lost the usual crowds of tourists and families waiting in line to see every animated detail of the windows. Hopefully they'll shift back to tradition next year.

Consistently pleasing are the elaborate holiday windows at Bergdorf Goodman. They always amaze, and this year there was a steampunk, industrial chic vibe to their fashion-forward displays. Beautiful gowns framed with Victorian-meets-Information-Age futurism straight out of the pages of a Jules Verne novel. Enjoy this video of the behind-the-scenes making of these wonderful windows.

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Modern Victorian

Benjamin Stanley Freeman House; photo by Boston.com

Irwin Weiner ASID - Victorian furniture and architecture is quirky and fun. I love to collect random pieces and sprinkle them into my overall decor and tabletop. The quality that jumps out at me with Victoriana is the handmade, handcrafted quality of the pieces. Some pieces are so bizarre, they make me wonder who made them. Sadly, many modern pieces put me to sleep and I never wonder which machine turned out one piece after another. The Steampunk movement - or we've been hearing it called Modern Victorian lately! - imagines what life would have been like if the Information revolution had occurred 100 years earlier. It would have been a world where Jules Verne novels come to life. This video show you what we love about Modern Victoriana. For those interested in attending a convention, there's a ModVic "Back Home to the Future" Exposition on March 5 and 6, 2011 at the Philadelphia Expo Center. Visit the ModVic website for more information.

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Update on December 28, 2010 by Design2Share

Rolf's German Restaurant - Winter Wonderland