Dramatic makeover! Commode/sideboard/buffet transformation

December 8, 2012 3 Comments

Who out there loves a makeover? I do! I do!

A client had this piece of furniture in her living room. It was lovely but tired, and it needed repair. The client wasn’t sure whether it should stay or go.

Vintage commode

We weren’t sure what to call it. It didn’t quite seem like a sideboard, which is the term I use for leggy storage pieces in the dining room. It isn’t a buffet, which is a more solid storage piece. It’s not a credenza, which I think of a office furniture but technically isn’t…and it’s not tall enough to be a console table. (It’s not a table at all, actually, is it?)

Side view of vintage commode

The word I finally settled on was, “commode,” which also isn’t quite right, but it felt like the best option. I just learned, on a recent excursion to the Hillwood Museum (tagline: where fabulous lives), that the furniture term COMMODE comes from the word, aCOMMODate, because the piece of furniture aCOMMODated all of the items that a fancy family needed to have at the ready to entertain guests. Who knew?

But I promised you a makeover! The moment I realized that we were looking at unrealized potential, I called Evelyn Avery of Avery Art. They are the absolute masters of furniture restoration and refurbishing. (As a bonus, her artisans can build any piece of furniture you can dream up. And they make the most beautiful lamps, custom mirrors, frames, TV-concealing screens…Evelyn also is a dealer of wonderful art from the 18th through the early 20th centuries. It’s one-stop shopping, really.)

So here’s what the piece looked like in progress (eek!):

Commode during restoration

And HERE, Gentle Readers, is the picture Evelyn just sent me:

Refurbished Empire commode

Ta DA, right? Isn’t it just stunning? I can hardly believe it’s the same piece. And in addition to being prettier, it’s also healthier, in that all of the loose pieces were cleaned and re-attached, weak parts of the wood strengthened…this will last forever now.

I wonder if Avery Art could do a refurbishing of ME? Hmmmm….

Quoted in publications from The New York Times to The Washington Post to Real Simple magazine, Annie Elliott is considered an expert in color, residential space planning, and telling people what to do in the nicest way possible. Her interior design firm, bossy color, has been serving residents in the greater Washington, D.C. area since 2004.

Filed Under: Dining room, Furniture, Living room Tagged With: , , , , ,

Thanks, Family Circle! Color palettes for three decorating styles

August 19, 2012 3 Comments

You don’t think of decorating tips when you think of Family Circle magazine, do you?

Family Circle Magazine cover September 2012

Well, Terry Trucco is doing her best to change that. Bossy color is featured in September’s issue of Family Circle, in an article proposing color palettes for three different decorating styles. It’s called, “Fresh Coat.”

Family Circle Fresh Coat article by Terry Trucco

Bossy color’s style selection was, “Traditional with a Twist” (I may have proposed the term, “bossy traditional,” but I grudgingly admit that their choice may have broader appeal). Naturally I suggested that an egg-yolk yellow living room can be just as traditional as beige.

Can’t imagine where that idea came from.

Thomas Jefferson's yellow dining room at Monticello

Thomas Jefferson’s dining room at Monticello, with table setting by Charlotte Moss

Benjamin Moore's 343 Sunrays egg yolk yellow living room

My living room, painted in Benjamin Moore’s 343 Sunrays

The other two styles are “Eclectic Mix” and “Clean and Contemporary.”

The article is only in Family Circle’s print edition, so run, don’t walk, to your nearest grocery store.

It’s on page 44  ;)

Annie Elliott – aka bossy color – is an interior decorator and design blogger in Washington, D.C. She has been quoted in publications from The New York Times to Real Simple and is considered an expert on color, residential space planning, and telling people what to do in the nicest way possible.

Filed Under: Benjamin Moore, Dining room, Living room, Paint, Press, Thanks Tagged With: , , , , , ,

It’s gray’s day! Thanks, Washington Post!

August 12, 2012 5 Comments

Anyone tired of the 50 Shades of Gray references? I’m not! The witty and eloquent Elizabeth Mayhew debuted a column in The Washington Post on Thursday, and her first one was called, 7 Shades of Gray.

Bedroom with upholstered floral headboard and Benjamin Moore's Gray Owl paint

Benjamin Moore’s 2137-60 Gray Owl on the walls of Elizabeth Mayhew’s bedroom (photo by Annie Schlechter)

I was delighted to provide some thoughts for the article’s sidebar. You know I think gray can be tricky…and we’ve talked before about two of my favorite light grays, Benjamin Moore’s HC-172 Revere Pewter and HC-173 Edgecomb Gray. My dining room is currently a medium gray, AC-31 Hot Spring Stones (also by Benjamin Moore).

But this time, we’re going deep. We’re going dark. Sherwin Williams’ Iron Ore has captured my fancy of late: it’s a beautiful grayish black with a hint of brown in it – just a touch of warmth. I’ve been thinking about it for my new kitchen cabinets, as a matter of fact.

Black dark gray dining room with chandelier

Dining room painted in Sherwin Williams’ SW7069 Iron Ore, in the blog Ruth Burts Interiors

For those of us who haven’t quite had the courage to paint a room black, as Candice Olsen has been begging us to do for years, maybe dark gray would be a little less scary.

Tell you what: I’ll try it if you will, ok? We’ll just hold hands and jump.

Annie Elliott – aka bossy color – is an interior decorator and design blogger in Washington, D.C. She has been quoted in publications from The New York Times to Real Simple and is considered an expert on color, residential space planning, and telling people what to do in the nicest way possible.

Filed Under: Bedroom, Benjamin Moore, Color, Dining room, Paint, Press, Washington Post Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Colors that match vs. complement vs. just plain work. (Bonus: an unexpectedly fabulous color combo!)

May 24, 2011 16 Comments

We all know that when you’re decorating a room from scratch, my advice is to start with the rug.

One of my most loyal, blog-reading, bossy-bossing clients is moving into a darling bungalow, and she took this advice to heart. (Advice, gentle suggestion, command…tomato, tomahto, tomuto.)

Remember how I said recently that blue dining rooms are all the rage? In part because they pull the blues from Oriental rugs so beautifully – blues MATCH well. That was the case here. This client’s bungalow dining room was a ”before” in the blue dining room post.

Red oriental rug with mustard walls

(Can you believe that’s the same color above and below? Yeesh. Without flash, mustard. With flash, Merry Marigold. Either way…yeesh.)

Oriental rug gold walls

Anyway, we’d decided that we’d make the most of her beautiful rug by using Benjamin Moore’s 2062-50 Blue Jean on the walls.

Benjamin Moore Blue Jean

Ta-DA, right? It looks fantastic. It MATCHES  :)

What’s doesn’t quite match but doesn’t quite qualify as a complement (try saying that 5 times fast) is what we did in the L-shaped back room.

Here’s the before, with her gorgeous rugs but also, tragically, with semi-gloss walls the color of rye toast.

Tan room with pretty rugs

Red rug tan walls

Beautiful rug with tan walls

Here’s a closeup of the larger rug. It’s beyond gorgeous.

Closeup of flatweave silk rug

Those reds are closer to dark pink. And there’s a light aqua, a light but intense yellow-green, lots of cream, various oranges…just beautiful. It’s a silk flatweave that my client bought years ago at a store called Paysage in Cleveland. (I tried going to the site, but it seems to be having some issues.) She insists that the rug indestructible, despite being silk. Ask Harry and Duncan, her dogs. They’ll tell you.

Anyhoo, what color would YOU have put with this rug? Would you have MATCHED it by pulling out the yellow-green? The aqua? Cream? Here’s what we went with in the end:

2069-50 Blue Orchid

Silk rug lavender walls

Benjamin Moore’s 2069-50 Blue Orchid, a blue with quite a bit of lavender in it. Isn’t it great with the silk rug? It JUST PLAIN WORKS.

Benjamin Moore's 2069-50 Blue Orchid

Closeup lavender walls with silk rug

It really brings out the pinks, somehow. I even like it with the navy and red rug, which the client’s friend brought her from Turkey. (I tell you, if you want nice rugs, make friends with a foreign-service officer today.)Red Turkish rug with Blue Orchid walls

So what are we to make of this? I pulled out a color wheel, and this is not a cut-and-dried case of COMPLEMENTING colors. (Sick of the caps? Sorry. But it’s helpful, right?)

If it were a true complement, we could have put, I dunno, yellow-green on the walls to complement those pink hues in the larger rug.

Color wheel

Or a truer blue or aqua on the walls to complement its orangey-ness. Maybe the lavender works because the large silk rug reads yellowy cream overall?

I’m about to embark upon a series of podcasts with 5 kick-a$% color experts, so maybe I’ll just ask them. (More on that later.)

But for now, let’s just say that the Blue Orchid just plain works with the rugs. That’s good enough for the client. And, frankly, it’s good enough for me.

Annie Elliott – aka bossy color – is an interior decorator and design blogger in Washington, D.C. She’s also the creator of the “bossy basic,” a one-time service to jump-start the interior design process in your home.

Filed Under: Bungalow, Client project, Color, Dining room, Paint Tagged With: , ,

Blue dining rooms. So here! So now!

May 1, 2011 15 Comments

I know Honeysuckle Pink is the color of the year, but I seem to be recommending blue for dining rooms these days.

Why is that, I wonder? I’ve never thought of blue as a particularly appetizing color, but it seems as though blue has been just the ticket for several dining rooms I’ve been working on.

For the client below, we (I) just couldn’t bring ourselves (myself) to paint the walls goldy beige, which was the original plan.

Oops.

But don’t the blue walls look great with the paisley drapes and Jaipur rug? The client is so pleased. And we all know that a happy client = happy bossy.

Blue and brown dining room Benjamin Moore Buxton Blue

Benjamin Moore's HC-149 Buxton Blue

Benjamin Moore Another client is moving into an adorable bungalow, and the winning color for that DR is Benjamin Moore’s 2062-50 Blue Jean. Not that ANY color wouldn’t have been a vast improvement over the Merry Marigold that’s in there now. (That name’s a guess.)

 

Dining room with Oriental rug

I think one of the reasons blue keeps presenting itself as The Dining Room Solution is that it pulls out the blues in Oriental rugs so nicely. This is a dining room I did for some super duper clients several years ago. The rug was a given, but we didn’t want neutral walls. We used Benjamin Moore’s HC-150 Yarmouth Blue, if memory serves…

 

Blue dining room Benjamin Moore Yarmouth Blue

I don’t go in for blues that are too periwinkle, as in this dining room:

Blue dining room

Jamie Creel and Marco Scarani in Elle Decor

It’s my own bias, but periwinkle will forever remind me of Laura Ashley bedrooms. (It sure looks fab w/ those red/orange light fixtures, though, doesn’t it?)

Warmer blues are safer for a dining room.

Blue dining room green chairs

Tony Fornabaio in Elle Decor

No, you have to be careful that a blue dining room isn’t too cold. My mother told me that her English mother-in-law had an ICE BLUE dining room, and the effect was, well, chilly. (Mind you, I bet Grannie looked fabulous in that room, which may not have been unintentional.) I can see how an icy blue dining room might be a 40s holdover, can’t you?

Blue dining room Steven Gambrel

Steven Gambrel in Elle Decor

A client and I are planning to do a navy blue dining room this fall. (We’re renovating, or we’d be doing it tomorrow, we’re so excited about it.) In LACQUER, no less. Yum.

Navy blue breakfast room

T. Keller Donovan in Elle Decor

First dinner guest caught licking the walls should win some sort of prize. Suggestions?

Annie Elliott – aka bossy color – is an interior decorator and design blogger in Washington, D.C. She’s also the creator of the “bossy basic,” a one-time service to jump-start the interior design process in your home.

Filed Under: Benjamin Moore, Client project, Color, Dining room, Paint Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The skirted table: making a comeback?

April 16, 2011 15 Comments

Or did it never really leave?

I was surprised to read a short article in praise of the table skirt in today’s Wall Street Journal. Former Domino dynamo Sara Ruffin Costello confesses that she has dragged one from apartment to apartment, changing covers as she goes.

Sara Ruffin Costello table skirt
The Wall Street Journal, April 16-17, 2011

Ms. Costello declares that, “The strong dose of fabric balances rooms that have a lot of leggy furniture and goes with any kind of interior design scheme…”

Rectangular skirted table
Nicky Haslam, designer; photo by Simon Upton in The Wall Street Journal

She’s right, of course.

I have to confess that  I’ve always pooh-poohed the skirted table. When someone says, “table skirt,” I think round, ruffly, conservative, flowered, and, well, kind of ’80s.

Flowered skirted table

By Vicki Daeley

Yes. Kind of like that.

It’s hard to explain, but a skirted table felt like a cop-out. Don’t know what to do in the corner? Let’s put a skirted table there w/ a lamp on it and all those extra family pictures! And tchochkes! And heck, a few small books lying on their sides!

But a year or so ago I remember taking a long hard look at a picture of rectangular sideboard cloaked in white cotton duck in a quirky, white room. (Was it in Apartment Therapy? Metropolitan Home? I can’t find it now.) It looked so modern. And fresh.

Table skirt

Palmer Weiss in the blog, La Dolce Vita

Ms. Ruffin is absolutely right about the softening, grounding effect amidst a skirt in a sea of furniture legs. When a room craves fabric – even a contemporary room – my first instinct is tall, simple, ring-top drapes…

table skirt

Tom Scheerer in the blog, So Haute

But maybe I should consider a skirted table instead.

Table skirt dining room

Via Gretchen Leigh Clark Interiors' blog

I’ll keep it tailored and straight, which probably means that the round skirted table will continue to elude me, unless my fabricator knows Tom Scheerer’s.

Am I the only one who has shunned – unfairly – the skirted table? Do weigh in. I’m curious.

Annie Elliott – aka bossy color – is an interior decorator and design blogger in Washington, D.C. She has been quoted in publications from The Washington Post to Real Simple and is considered an expert on color, residential space planning, and telling people what to do in the nicest way possible.

Filed Under: Dining room, Entry hall, Fabric, Press, Table Tagged With: , ,

Mid-century chairs vs. table: a fabulous update

February 26, 2011 8 Comments

I received an “after” picture 17 seconds ago and couldn’t WAIT to show it to you!

Do you remember a post about some mid-century dining room chairs and table that were looking a little tired? Go back and read it. I’ll wait.

Dining room chair and table

There was a spirited discussion about my recommendation that some or all of the table and chairs be painted black. Remember?

Well, look at this!

Dining room furniture

WOW! I think it looks fabulous! (And, much more important, so does the client.)

What do you think, Gentle Readers?

Annie Elliott – aka bossy color – is an interior decorator and design blogger in Washington, D.C. She’s considered an expert on color, residential space planning, and telling people what to do in the nicest way possible.

Filed Under: Chairs, Client project, Dining room, Mid-century modern, Paint, Table Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Benjamin Moore, the new Pottery Barn catalog, and me

February 10, 2011 19 Comments

With all the Restoration Hardware bashing I’ve been doing recently, I’m feeling the need to be a bit, how shall I say?, nice.

So I opened my new Pottery Barn catalog determined to find something nice to say.

And guess what? It wasn’t that hard! In addition to a few items that weren’t bad, such as:

block-print napkins-these block-print linens at right,

-the “Daily System” wall-mounted bulletin boards, letter bins, etc. (which I have in my office AND which happen to be on sale right now), and

- the Alhambra Dhurrie rug,

blue and white dhurrie rug

one thing really stood out. The room shots that identify the Benjamin Moore paint colors used on the walls.

Pottery Barn Benjamin Moore fan deckThey may have been doing this for years, for all I know; I’ve been so disappointed in Pottery Barn that I haven’t done more than breeze through it of late.

But I’ve always thought the Benjamin Moore / Pottery Barn fan deck was an excellent idea. We all should have one. Can you imagine? Instead of Googling someone before a first date, you’d just try to get your hands on his/her fan deck. Learn a lot.

Knowing the exact paint color in a picture is super duper helpful. We all know how hard it is to guess how a paint color is going to look on THIS wall in THIS room with THIS exposure with THESE lights with THIS rug…etc. But having a photograph of the color in situ – even if the “situ” is an impossibly beautiful catalog set – is a good thing.

The walls of this “bedroom,” for example, are painted Benjamin Moore’s 302 You Are My Sunshine. See the little paint dab in the lower right corner?

Pottery Barn bedding

The walls of this dining room are painted Benjamin Moore’s HC-26 Monroe Bisque:

Pottery Barn dining room

And this breakfast room is painted Benjamin Moore’s Decorator’s White, which is an INT RM color. (Interior ready mixed*, get it?)

sunny dining room

Thank you, Pottery Barn. Thanks, Benjamin Moore. It feels good to love again.

*Note added 2/11: It took Gentle Reader ErinEvelyn to enlighten me that the RM does not, in fact, stand for room. Duh. My painters know what it means.

Annie Elliott – aka bossy color – is an interior decorator and design blogger in Washington, D.C. She’s also the creator of the “bossy basic,” a one-time service to jump-start the interior design process in your home. Think of it as CPR for your living room.

Filed Under: Bedroom, Benjamin Moore, Catalog, Color, Dining room, Paint, Pottery Barn Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Merry Christmas, Gentle Readers!

December 24, 2010 7 Comments

For those of you who celebrate Christmas, have a wonderful day tomorrow! I’ll be back with you next week.

In the meantime, three lovely, tasteful Christmas rooms by Vern Yip.

Christmas living room

Vern Yip in Elle Decor

Christmas dining room

Vern Yip in Elle Decor. I'm pretty sure those vases are from Ikea, which is excellent.

Merry, Merry Christmas!

Christmas decorations

Vern Yip in Elle Decor. Nice antlers!

Annie Elliott – aka bossy color – is an interior decorator and design blogger in Washington, D.C. She’s also the creator of the “bossy basic,” a one-time service that jump-starts the interior design process in your home.

Filed Under: Dining room, Holiday decorations, Living room Tagged With: , ,

And the moral of the story is: paint your radiator

December 22, 2010 16 Comments

Thanks, Uncle Jimmy! Just in time for Christmas, he painted our dining room radiator!

Painted radiator

Remember when we talked about radiators? Well, I went to the paint store and bought this Modern Masters metallic paint.

Can of metallic paint

I’ve never used it before and wasn’t sure if we’d need a primer, or how much scraping would be required, etc. But James just cleaned the radiator super well, slopped on a first coat, and then touched up with a lighter second coat.

Painted radiator

It’s not quite as light as I’d thought it would be – I thought it would be closer to the wall color – but I still think it’s a drastic improvement over the white.

White radiator in dining room

Painted radiator

Don’t you?

Annie Elliott – aka bossy color – is an interior decorator and design blogger in Washington, D.C. She has been quoted in publications from The Washington Post to Real Simple and is considered an expert on color, residential space planning, and telling people what to do in the nicest way possible.

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