Quick and Easy Home Design Tips: How to Bring Summer Inside

From time to time, an interior design job requires subtle touches that may not come to mind immediately. For a client who loves the outdoors but lives downtown, or who loves the beach but lives in the middle of the country, you can bring summer inside with these quick and easy home design tips.Often, the smallest change can alter the feel of a space significantly. These tips will help you set up a client’s home in ways that make it feel spa-like and outdoorsy.

Imagination Brings a Trip to the Coast Inside

For client who miss life on the coast, a strategic use of decorative sea shells as an accent can bring the coast to them. (AcanthusAndAcorn.com)If you're looking for more than just an accent, sea shells and a rustic shelf, along with a few other items, can alter the entire feel of a room. Is this what vacation looked like when they were children? (CompletelyCoastal.com)

Wood Bath Mats Add Luxury and Reduce Humidity

It’s easy to add a touch of luxury to the bath, along with an outside feel, using wooden bath mats. Hard woods like ash, or Aromatic Japanese hinoki wood, are naturally resistant to humidity and have some antibacterial properties. They will help to reduce the feeling of dampness and the potential for bacterial growth that is present in a thick cloth mat. (Crate & Barrel, dog not included)

Beach Accessories in the Home Tell the Story

Hanging beach towels in the bath may be the quickest, easiest way to bring summer inside. For anyone who’s slow to grasp the concept, these towels tell the story loud and clear! (MyHomeIdeas.com)

Outdoor Showers Bring the Beach Home

Last but not least, if you can’t bring summer inside, set up an outside shower, enabling your clients to feel like they’re living at the beach. An outdoor shower near the pool makes sense anyway but, for those who want to feel closer to the beach, this is a great way to get them there. (CoastalLiving.com)You can take it a step further by adding beach themed accessories…Or a nautical theme.Do you have other ideas to make a home feel “summery”? Share your summer home design tips in the comments section below.Looking for more new design trends, tips, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

New Interior Design Trend: Mixing Wallpaper Designs

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) offers insight into an interesting new trend being followed by interior designers: mixing wallpaper designs within the same space.Say what?That’s right. With the recent versatility of wallpaper from the manufacturers, including much less permanent adhesives that used to wreak havoc on drywall, adding and removing patterns and textures is far simpler than in the past.Now that a room can be stripped and re-papered within a few hours, innovative designers have gotten over their fear and are making inroads into new uses for old-style wallcoverings.“‘The new, vast selection of papers is energizing designers,’ said industry veteran Dennis Shah, president of Studio Printworks in Hoboken, N.J. His company creates handmade papers via centuries-old processes such as block and screen printing, but he has also invested in digital printers, which can produce giant seamless panels, scale designs up and down to fit any wall and achieve effects not possible with analog methods, such as subtle watercolor-esque gradations and razor-sharp photorealism. With this flexibility, ‘designers are excited, unusual ideas are coming to fruition and rules are being broken,’ said Mr. Shah.”

Contrasting Walls and Ceiling

For example, this combination of contrasting papers on the walls and ceiling of a sitting room. Whether you choose to “flex” with patterns or colors, today's choices come in almost endless varieties.

Brave or Bravado? You Decide!

While the word “busy” might be a bit tame for this collection of wallcoverings, it certainly cannot be said that the choices made were not bold. And yet, despite the stunning array of patterns, the oriental theme somehow brings it all together to make a cohesive statement.

Mix n’ Match Colorways

Far subtle is the use of two colorways to add a bit of life to this simple yet elegant living room. The similarity of the patterns, though presented in differing hues, hold the design together beautifully. Whatever you may think of some of the choices shown above, the good news is that wallcovering is making a comeback. This, along with the flexibility of mixing wallpaper designs, gives interior designers an addition to their palettes that had been missing for a couple of decades.Looking for more new design trends, tips, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.