GinaFish.com

Design Post #2

I love rooms that are bright and sunny and full of plants.  Sunrooms are good for that, right?

This example of a sunroom is super sunny! I wouldn’t mind this sort of sunroom if there were plenty of trees outside to provide shade over the top of it…which sounds contradictory and dangerous. So I’d like my sunroom to have shade and branches overhead that could fall and break the glass…

Yep…

Maybe what I really want is a garden room? However, I’m pretty sure if I told a contractor I wanted a garden room, it would somehow get confused into something else…like a green house.

What I’d like is a room for plants, with specially made windows to have shelves that could hold plants as well as my cobalt glass so that the natural light would shine through them.

With the windows having shelves, I might as well continue the dust collectors underneath the windows and have built in bookshelves.

I found a picture online that has shelves built across the windows but it is really darker than in my imagination. Instead of dark wood, the color would be bright yellow or something.

Yellow? Yes… yellow! Another design element I have always enjoyed has been Mexican tiles. Since this room is in my imagination, I can do anything I want, right?

Many of the Mexican tiles feature the colors of blue and yellow along with terra cotta colors. So paint the walls yellow, decorate with blue glass, have terra cotta tiles with a few Mexican tiles serving as borders, around the doorway or something.

After I found these elements, I tried and tried to find a furniture style I liked in my imaginary room. After all, with all that sun, you might as well throw in some seating to have a comfy place to read especially since that where all the books are now, along the floor.

What kind of seating style would you say fits? Would you go for a wicker furniture that matched the floor? Would you try for a dinette set instead? Or a daybed so you could alternately spend time sunbathing indoors? Could you do that? Sunbath indoors if you had enough windows?? *whew!* Look there’s a chicken! hehe! Everyone’s brain jumps around topics like that, right?

Back to topic…what sort of furniture would you throw in here?

My mother noted recently that there is no current “style” for American Teens. There isn’t really a ‘rebellious’ look that has traveled all over the U.S. In larger cities, you might see Goth kids who are trying to stand out with their looks, but when my mother was younger, teens all over the states tried the same look. Every decade seems to have a ’style’, but it seems like that strong sense of fashion is disappearing among teens. I wonder if Manba will come to America? Or is it to kitsch/niche? Hmm…

Check out this article from the BBC News:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/video_and_audio/8132815.stm

Here’s a do it yourself video:

Apply Manba makeup

I was NOT born with a decorating gene. As a child, I cried terribly when my mother would rearrange my bedroom or buy a new bed spread set. In my first apartment, my roommate was my sister. I sewed a blue cabbage rose table cloth for our kitchen table we never ate at. Other than that, she decorated the entire place. As a newlywed, I moved into my husband’s home that he had been living in for 7 months. His mother had decorated a little bit after he first moved in, and it didn’t even occur to me until two years into our marriage that I could change anything. The only thing I brought with me when we married was a love of cows and a love of Elvis. So I put Elvis in the guest bedroom so his glamorous self would offend my husband and the cows went into the kitchen as dust collectors.

So while I don’t have any decorating gene, I admire those who do, and who have good taste. I enjoy a good home decorating magazine as much as the next person and watching HGTV dreaming of a day when a talent for designing will smack me in the face.

Besides television and magazines, the internet is full of people who effortlessly decorate. Some of them love it so much they keep “Design Blogs”. Blogs that are like a songwriters notebook stuffed with one liners that might make it onto the radio one day. Snippets of design elements they embrace.

To heck with it, I thought. Even I, as handicap as I am, could post a few “Design blog” posts! Pish Posh!

So here is my first one.

One dream is to live on the beach, so here are elements of my imaginary beach house.

Just as a thought…sometimes it seems like it would be easier to find art you really enjoy and then decorate the room around the color scheme presented there. Instead of trying to find art that blends with your color scheme. I happened to select this art last, but doing it the other way around makes sense too. I seem to recall designers mentioning designing around your favorite fabric too. Any thoughts? Chicken or egg scenerio?

Next element:

I like a bit of whimsy in my life. I think this bucket of shells lamp probably comes in blue too…

Pillows I found from an outdoor furniture place. This is as far as I got with my imaginary beach room, but I think it’s enough to see where I’m going. It was fun surfing the web for my beach theme (pun intended) and I look forward to trying to figure out another room. What do you think?