Powder Rooms

When I am designing a house whether it is in Los Angeles or anywhere around the world, one of my favorite rooms to design is always the powder room. It is one of the few spaces in the house where function is so limited that it frees you up to explore almost any fantasy.

I have a few examples of some of my personal shown below. You can tell I am a fan of wall decoration and trying to find things that are unusual and unique.

This is a home by the beach, but we wanted to do a more sophisticated feel, so the paneling painted black really added some formality and then a collection of old prints of a variety of coral gave us just enough of a nod to the ocean for it all to make sense.

This home was in Northern California and I wanted the room room to have a carefree formality. The wallpaper gives it a bright, garden quality, but the crystal bird sconces stop the whole arrangement from getting too cutesy. Instead of a framed mirror I just mirrored the whole wall, which simplified the design and opened up an otherwise small room.

Just because it says WALLpaper it doesn't mean it won't look good on a ceiling!

I have been a huge fan of Lori Weitzner now for a while. I think that she brings such a cool fresh thought to all that she does. so I thought she was a perfect example to use for this post, because I think she would appreciate the idea of wall paper on the ceiling.

In this home we had an existing raised ceiling in the Dining Room that I wanted to find a way to highlight. I found a drawn plaster series that Lori has that is perfect for this kind of use, we installed it and then had a faux finisher add a subtle iridescent wash over it. It provided just enough sparkle to make the room feel more special, but with enough money still in the budget to buy great furniture.

The pattern we went with is called Cartouche. It was the right choice as it has a perfect blend of old and new and the spacing on the design was spread enough that it didn't get too busy.

Hope you like it.

Fresh Wallpaper Ideas

Like most things, it is often the simplest solution that is the toughest one to achieve. Take wallpaper for example, how many times have you looked at a pattern and thought it was pretty but it was too much to use over all four walls? Well that doesn't have to be the case, here are some ideas that you might not have considered:

• Try, like I did in the room above, to use the wall paper on just one wall. Feature walls received a bad rap in the 70's but they are now back as a legitimate tool in the designers arsenal.
• Still not enough, on the room above, a nursery, I used alternating rolls of paper in different colors.
• If you are luckier enough to have paneling in your room, try wall papering just the insides of the panels.
• I think that ceilings are underrated, you may want to try papering the ceiling, don't be afraid of pattern there.
• Wall paper doesn't just have to go on the wall, what about a piece of furniture, a great way to put those flea market finds to good use.

Well good luck with your paper adventures!

Resource Day: Studio Printworks

I have seen lots of postings on other design blogs recently about wallpaper, so I thought it was appropriate today to feature one of the new, bright shining stars of the wallpaper world as part of Resource Day. That company, is Studio Printworks out of New York. The president Dennis Shah, comes from a family tradition of fine wallpaper manufacturers, they produce a lot of the classic papers for Clarence House and Brunschwig and Fils, to name a few. So he knew what he was doing when he set out and founded this comapny with two other partners. What I think is so chic about their line is, how on the surface they look like classic designs, but actually are quite tongue in cheek, subversive. Take the three designs that I picked, they all have that wonderful, old world feel to them, however the first is an homage to the B and D lifestyle, featuring locks and chains, the second, South Beach Toile, features muscle men with little dogs and female impersonators, while the third, on the surface looks classic chinois, but actually shows spy planes over china.

There are terrific color ways, samples available off the Internet, and they can be purchased all across the U.S. , Asia and Australia. Distributors are listed on their website. I hope you will check them out, if nothing else, its inspiring to see edgy work like this getting the attention it deserves.

www.studioprintworks.com