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.

Rethink Venetian Plaster

One of the biggest challenges in constantly trying to create something new and fresh for each different project, is finding new ways of using common materials. This posting is about a small room that I particularly love. It's a Powder Room that I did, where I wanted to create a very detailed but subtle pattern on the wall. I knew that I wanted to use Venetian Plaster (a tinted colored plaster), the beauty of it, is it's subtle shading of color. So the new technique I developed (well in the interest of full disclosure, had the plaster guy develop), involved using a plastic stencil, like you would use for stencilling. We did a coat of plaster over the wall, then, after it dried, using spray adhesive, attached the stencil to the wall, then applied another coat of plaster. Then you peel away the stencil and it leaves behind a wonderfully subtle raised pattern.

This may sound like a fairly complicated technique, and it certainly requires a certain amount of skill. But you could easily develop a simpler technique, while still using the stencil.

• Maybe a very subtle painted technique (using the same color but one coat with a flat paint, and one with a gloss)
• Try stencilling over a textured wallpaper, I think stencilling over grass cloth is a particularly good technique.
• Using the stencils to create a panelled look in your room.

The important thing is to think creatively about your resources, you might be amazed what you can come up with.