Interior Design with Julia Luttrell
Get ready to spring into spring
It may seem a bit far-fetched right now, but we�re past the halfway mark and with winter winding down, February is the perfect month to conceive of divine design ideas to be born in spring.
Furnishings take four to six months to be delivered, trades have to be booked in advance, so now is truly the time to dial a designer and plan the particulars of your project.
Yes, it�s all in the planning. What better way to spend the balance of the winter than devising a plan to put a little pizzazz in your palace. Think how you could finally make your dreams come true with that brilliant bedroom, or liven up your living room, or focus on a facelift for the family room.
Maybe all it takes to spice up your space is to splash a little colour around, rearrange the furnishings, or inject some ingenuity into your entryway.
Personality and imagination abound, but a good place to start is to have a look at your windows. Changing your window treatments can set the tone of a room, or be the final flourish that finishes off an inspired look.
As the saying goes, �the eyes are the windows of the soul,� and in keeping, the windows are the eyes of your home. They should be a reflection of what goes on inside and compliment your traditional, contemporary or eclectic interiors.
Thinking of how your windows look from the outside is equally important.
For instance, your under treatments might be sheer silhouette blinds in the living room, a woven wood roman blind in the family room, and a metal venetian in a child�s bedroom. However, they should all have something in common to connect them; generally this continuity can be provided by the colour.
A neutral colour works best, something less stark than white, in a hue that compliments the exterior colour of your house.
Inside the home, distinctive colours that focus on earth tones in hues of varying degrees of depth, is a clever design effect that has simplicity and elegance, and can flow easily from one room to the other.
All your window treatments, even in the same room, don�t necessarily need to be a complete match. Sometimes it is far more interesting to have them simply relate to one another. A formal treatment can then live happily beside a much more tailored approach, merely by doing them in a coordinating fabric to tie them together.
Yes, February is a fabulous time to prepare to spring into spring projects. Have fun with it, and think of hiring a professional to demystify the design process. It�s stimulating, more affordable than you�d think, avoids costly mistakes, and makes mediation between all the parties involved far more manageable.
