The 5th Wall: The Blessings of High Ceilings

Welcome and congratulations! The world is your oyster! Why? Because you have ceilings over 8' in height. Look up - what do your ceilings look like, plain with recessed lighting, maybe a ceiling fan or two? For shame - what a waste of opportunity.

Oh, wait you say there is something interesting up there? Kudos for you. When you have the blessing of higher ceilings, you truly have the blessing of so much more! You have flexiblity to build in architectural interest, you can be playful or serious. Instantly you can give your home character and age, although it maybe new construction.

With the exception of a homes where the ceilings have been wallpapered in palm frawns or banana leaves...(yes it does happen and in a narrow hallway too, I could not help to sing - "I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts...there they are all standing in a row...") There really few bad choices. Let's look at some great examples:


1. Contemporary Homes: While a plain flat ceiling can be appropriate, so can tounge & grove, or beadboard. Be careful of using a narrow beadboard, this can push the look country, cottage, beach or nautical in nature. This is a great photo from Interiors Magazine.

Look Inside >> February/March 2009

The beadboard effect on the ceiling is very authentic to modern/contemporary homes and extremely versitale in its use.


2. Ethnic/Multi-cultural/Resort. Again from the Interiors Magazine -

Look Inside >> February/March 2009

How do you create this for you? Easy, create the beam effect, either with beams, or trimmed out boxes and use a reed wallpaper to create the look of thatching. You won't have as much depth, as this example, but you will be amazed at the effect.

3. Traditional - A quick an easy way to spice up a ceiling with a traditional flare is through the use of beams. Beaming can be used to create long runs, hopefully with the shortest distance to visually push the room wider, or they can be used to create more intricate patterns. This example is from a Cristall Steel Windows ad (http://www.critallna.com/) published in the November 2002 issue of Architectural Digest (http://www.architecturaldigest.com/). The beam detail is intricate, but beautiful!

4. Ceilings - Faux Finish or wallpapers. Formal Traditional interiors really are defined by this technique. It can be done with restraint or with abandon and through multiple techniques. Although I don't have a picture to share, I worked on a library while with Michael J. Siller Interiors in Houston where we used anagalypta to wallpaper the ceiling and then had the faux finisher finish it like antique leather. The paper itself was very well priced, more of the cost was in the faux finishing. But it created a very unique look.

Brief definition here, there is anaglypta and lincrusta. Lincrusta was created first and is a more rigid material created from lineseed oil & wood pulp. The embossing tends to be deeper and more defined. Anaglypta is a trademark name and was created second, offering more flexibilty because it is composed of wood pulp and cotton. The embossing isn't as detailed and has the ability to collapse.

This example also from the November 2002 issue of Architectural Digest also shows how intricate you can work your ceilings. Of an interesting not, the intricacy of the trellis ceiling with the crown is balanced with the simplicity of the walls and furnishings.

5. Exotic Innovation. I love the veneer work on this ceiling. Again from Interiors Magazine (http://www.interiorsmagazine.us/) this ceiling excudes luxury! While I have no doubt that this ceiling is likely actually real veneer, let's talk about how to recreate. First you could do it through wallpaper. Maya Romanoff (http://www.mayaromanoff.com/) or Phillip Jefferies (http://www.phillipjeffries.com/) Both have veneer wallpapers to choose from.

Another way to create this would be through the use of laminates such as those from Wilson Art (http://www.wilsonart.com/), Formica (http://www.formica.com/) or Tree Frog Veneer(http://www.treefrogveneer.com/) Granted your craftman/woman is going to have to love you or love the idea just as much as you do.

So five quick ideas on things that you can do with higher ceilings, either now or tomorrow. Did you notice how many ceilings were darker? The height and pitch of the ceilings enables the use of a darker ceiling as a way to balance and enhance the architecture. The same effect can be done with paint, but has to be done gingerly.

The 5th Wall: Ceilings

Ok - reposting this one because it filed by the wrong date!

The ceilings of a home can be one of the most neglected parts of the house. While we will refresh our walls, most people ignore the ceilings, or just leave it at "Ceiling White." I'm not even sure that is a true color name. Do you know that there are over 100 whites in the Benjamin Moore Color Library? Why does everyone use ceiling white? With modern construction, newer homes typically have 10' - 12' ceilings on the first floor and somewhere in the 9'-10' range on the second floor. When you have ceiling height, you have so many more choices as to what you can do - but you are more limited when you have an 8' ceiling. So of the easiest techniques can be through application of paint and trim.

There are a couple of concepts that create illusion of a higher ceiling, one is through the use of less contrast;and the other is through the use of a paint technique called "atmospheric perspective". Atmospheric perspective is a technique developed by Leonardo da Vinci to add depth to his masterpieces. It involves using progressively lighter values of a color from foreground to background, ultimately fading to a blue-grey color.

With that in mind, if you feel the need to raise your ceilings, try one of the following:

1. Paint the ceiling a percentage of the wall color - usually no more than 25%, but it will depend on the color of the walls. Because most people do not have direct or indirect light evenly illuminating their ceilings, any color placed on the ceiling is going to appear darker. By stepping it back considerably, you are countering this effect and creating distance at the same time. Painting the same color also lessens the contrast of the walls and ceilings, drawing less attention to them.

Every notice the contrast of dark walls to a ceiling white ceiling? Not that there are not times for it, but it can be stark. This photo shows the use of this concept, except with wall paper. We used a reed wallpaper on the walls and a coordinating rice paper on the ceiling. Having the 'luxury' of being under a staircase, this poor powder bath has 7' ceilings. The end affect raises the ceiling.

2. Paint the ceiling a grey or blue-grey based white. This creates a "haze" affect and is similar to the atmospheric perspective I mentioned earlier.

3. Paint out the trim to the wall color. This is not one of my favorite techniques, it seems to me to cancel out the architectural benefit of crown, but it is effective.

4. Utilize crown moulding creatively. One of my favorite techniques is to use Cove (upper portion) & Cradle (lower portion) moulding. The cove virtually lifts the ceiling. The cove portion can come in different heights, so make sure to choose the correct one for your room.

5. Create a "frieze" area on the ceiling. This has the effect of a tray ceiling, especially if you apply some of the techniques we mentioned above to paint the main section of ceiling. The trim piece applied to the ceiling does not need to be very large and should have a flat back, similar to that of the cradle. There are other things that can be done from a furnishings perspective to create height, but we will save those for another day.

Next time, fun with higher ceilings.

For Fun Friday

Here are some very fun things. We don't often get to do custom bedding for childrens' bedrooms, so we are always looking for ways to give "Hip" rooms at a price Mom and Dad love. Check out some fun ones. Plus, everyone asks for machine washable - no small feat! These two options are vibrant and have wonderful details and are machine washable.

The first three are from Anthropologie (ttp://www.anthropologie.com), check out the "For Your Home" section.




These three selections are from Bliss Living Home (http://www.blisslivinghome.com/). This is a great line of bedding, pillows and accessories.

Building Your Base: Decorative Floors

Too many of today's homes are just simply plain, a little too vanilla. Either through fear of something different, or through the readiness of inexpensive materials, it just seems that almost every new home has the same non-descript tile laid straight with 12" or 13" tiles. But let me open your mind to the use of accent tiles.

The simple placement of an accent tile can add the interest and impact to any floor, especially key areas. To me, these areas include the foyer, entertainment areas and bathrooms. Each room needs to have a presence and the use of accent tile helps to create that presence, but it should still be simple and subtle. I believe in using accent tile as you would salt and pepper - at the right time and in the right amount.

These pictures are from a new home in Houston where we did the tile selections and designs, the project included the Kitchen/Utility areas and 5 -1/2 baths. Each bathroom utilizes specialty tiles in various applications and relates to the overall interior design of the home. Let's take a look - in the Master Bedroom, we used a antiqued Spanish Gold tile, with a honey-onyx in a fish scale pattern. This home is quite grand, so the Master Bath needed to be in line with the vision for the home. The slight contrast of materials with the green tones of the Spanish Gold and the yellow/golden tones of the onyx is very sophisticated.

This daughter's toile bedroom ensuite lent itself well to utilizing a fairly basic 6" matte glazed tile with a 2" gloss inset tile - reinforcing the black and white patterning of the toile. A dramatic look with a economic tile.

This bath was for the son of the family. We were concerned with allowing the bathroom to grow with the son's changing tastes. Here, the Jerusalem gold field tile borders the 2" tiles set on a bias. Notice that the tile in the threshold to the WC has been cut to reinforce the architecture, creating a stronger composition.

Another daughter's room had a bit of glamour to it. It was also one of the larger secondary bathrooms, so we had the ability to work a "rug" pattern, reinforcing the colors found in the granite selections. Again, the rug shape reinforces the basic shape of the room, helping to complete the interior.

Our last secondary bathroom we used a standard travertine tile. With an emphasis on patterning in this home, to walk away and leave this bath plain would not have made sense. Very simply, we created a bordered tile effect around 4 tiles. This accent tile comes on a 12" mesh sheet, so the tile setter merely had to cut the tile into strips and lay the strips in. As a note, using AutoCAD, we laid this pattern out several different ways, working the best possible layout for the entry axis, the axis side to side and the axis along the center of the toilet. Seem a bit crazy? I don't think so, ever notice a bad tile job where too main points don't align. I do, EVERY single on of them.

Don't be afraid to use accent tiles. These tiles are more expensive but you use so few of them that the benefit will out weight the cost. It is also important that while regular tile is often stocked, accent tile is often a special order and could take 4-6 weeks to be delivered.

Building Your Base: The 5th Wall, Your Ceiling

The ceilings of a home can be one of the most neglected parts of the house. While we will refresh our walls, most people ignore the ceilings, or just leave it at "Ceiling White." I'm not even sure that is a true color name. Do you know that there are over 100 whites in the Benjamin Moore Color Library? Why does everyone use ceiling white?

With modern construction, newer homes typically have 10' - 12' ceilings on the first floor and somewhere in the 9'-10' range on the second floor. When you have ceiling height, you have so many more choices as to what you can do - but you are more limited when you have an 8' ceiling.

So of the easiest techniques can be through application of paint and trim. There are a couple of concepts that create illusion of a higher ceiling, one is through the use of less contrast;and the other is through the use of a paint technique called "atmospheric perspective".

Atmospheric perspective is a technique developed by Leonardo da Vinci to add depth to his masterpieces. It involves using progressively lighter values of a color from foreground to background, ultimately fading to a blue-grey color.

With that in mind, if you feel the need to raise your ceilings, try one of the following:


1. Paint the ceiling a percentage of the wall color - usually no more than 25%, but it will depend on the color of the walls. Because most people do not have direct or indirect light evenly illuminating their ceilings, any color placed on the ceiling is going to appear darker. By stepping it back considerably, you are countering this effect and creating distance at the same time. Painting the same color also lessens the contrast of the walls and ceilings, drawing less attention to them. Every notice the contrast of dark walls to a ceiling white ceiling? Not that there are not times for it, but it can be stark.


This photo shows the use of this concept, except with wall paper. We used a reed wallpaper on the walls and a coordinating rice paper on the ceiling. Having the 'luxury' of being under a staircase, this poor powder bath has 7' ceilings. The end affect raises the ceiling.




2. Paint the ceiling a grey or blue-grey based white. This creates a "haze" affect and is similar to the atmospheric perspective I mentioned earlier.


3. Paint out the trim to the wall color. This is not one of my favorite techniques, it seems to me to cancel out the architectural benefit of crown, but it is effective.

4. Utilize crown moulding creatively. One of my favorite techniques is to use Cove (upper portion) & Cradle (lower portion) moulding. The cove virtually lifts the ceiling. The cove portion can come in different heights, so make sure to choose the correct one for your room.

5. Create a "frieze" area on the ceiling. This has the effect of a tray ceiling, especially if you apply some of the techniques we mentioned above to paint the main section of ceiling. The trim piece applied to the ceiling does not need to be very large and should have a flat back, similar to that of the cradle.

There are other things that can be done from a furnishings perspective to create height, but we will save those for another day. Next time, fun with higher ceilings.

For Fun Good Friday

On a trip to the Houston Decorative Center this week, I happen to walk by the Tai Ping showroom, where this lovely carpet sample was sitting in the window. Ever appropriate for Friday and for the floor, I couldn't resist.

The pattern is named Daisies and Grass and is a Tai Ping Carpet Pattern (http://www.taipingcarpets.com/). This one sample really speaks to the advancement of technology in the realm of carpets and rugs. Do you have a little girl that loves "Fancy Nancy"? Then this is the rug for her room. It is so plush and it feels good on the toes too! HAPPY EASTER!


In Houston ,and just have to have one for yourself? Contact your designer or the Tai Ping Carpet showroom (713-877-8432).

Building Your Base: Floors

Last time, we talked about wood floors, today, it is tile's turn. Tile is probably the most universal material for your floor. You can choose any color and any size and put them in any pattern. Yet, the most readily used tile is the basic 12" tile. So many opportunities are lost when we only use a 12" tile, set on a straight pattern.

To begin with, there are a lot of different types of tile, including: Natural Stone, Glass, Ceramic & Porcelain. They have varied price ranges, but for the most part, I prefer to use natural stone, glass and porcelain. I also try to select a tile that has a range of tile sizes available. And although not exclusively, I select a tile with a rectified edge (meaning a straight edge, no chips or chiseling). These tiles provide us with the greatest flexibility of use.

We are seeing many new products that give more texture, more modernism and interesting variations to the tile world. One of my favorite lines is Pietre/2 from Casa Dolce Casa (http://www.casadolcecasa/) This specific line is a great porcelain tile from Italy that is very consistent in color. We used this in a contemporary master bath for a few reasons. We wanted to create a slab look to the floor and the shower walls to help expand the visual space of the room. The rectified edge also allowed us to get tight grout joints, furthering this effect.

Patterning is probably the next most important aspect to tile. How you treat your floors can help accent good architecture or even reduce distractions. Every choice we make should be based in supporting the overall interior.

For instance, here is an outdoor veranda area that is very long across the backside of the home. By choosing this pattern, we created larger groupings out of 3 differently sized tiles. Another reason we chose this pattern was to provide additional slip resistance to the surface as this area is prone to being wet. Granted slate is not as bad as a polished tile, but the smaller tiles help provide a greater surface area.

It is imperative to choose a tile that is appropriately sized for your room. A 12" or 13" tile in a room that is 15' x 17' is probably undersized and just as awkward as an 18" tile in a 3' x 6' powder bath.

If your unsure of ideas, stop by a Dal-Tile, Master Tile or American Tile showroom near you. These showrooms don't sell to the public, but are available as a resource to you for ideas and products. Additionally, Dal-Tile's website (http://www.daltile.com/) is very searchable for products.

That's it for the basics, next time we will talk about decorative and accent tiles.

Building Your Base: Floors

When most people think about the structure of their home, they think about their walls. But really your rooms have 6 surfaces, 4 walls, the ceiling and the floor. Everyone thinks about the walls, but people are the most unwilling to change anything about their floors. Truth be told, it can be messy, it can take time and it does require moving a considerable amount of furniture. But here is the other side of that truth - IT IS WORTH IT! The extra time and thought you put into your floors is one of the details that create a luxurious home.

WOOD FLOORS

I love wood floors. I love everything that you can do with the floors and how they are finished. I do not hold much love for laminate flooring, although it does have its purpose. To me, it just lacks the sound, heft and warmth of wood floors. Then there are the repair issues. I've actually come around to the use of engineered flooring and the benefits of a pre-finished floors. Remember the mess I was talking about, these products so greatly reduce the mess, it is quite amazing.

For a good amount of time, the "hand scraped" look has been very popular, but it seems to be shifting. When considering wood floors, take a look at bamboo. In the last year or so, the colorways available in bamboo have expanded to blonde, carbonized (honey) and even the ever popular dark brown. You can also get this product in a horizontal grain, where you have wider strips of bamboo and can see the bamboo knuckles; or a vertical grain, which has smaller strips engineered together. Take a look at what this looks like for a contemporary interior. There are some environmental advantages to using this material as well.

This photo is from Bamboo Hardwoods, Inc (http://www.bamboohardwoods.com/), but there are several suppliers and distributors out there.

Another idea for wood floors, especially existing ones, is to add a painted treatment to them. This room graced the Jan/Feb 2009 cover of Veranda (http://www.veranda.com/). The room, designed by Mary Douglas Drysdale, is very traditional in nature, but what drew me to the photo was the intricacy of the pattern and the subtlety in which is was executed. Such a technique could be done with paint, or even a slightly different tinted finish. Painted wood floors is nothing new, but we often think of it being used in more country or beach settings, but I think this technique can even be applied in more modern interiors as well. In my head, I can see a small/med/large stripe that adds the most subtle pattern and motion to the floor. But imagine the pattern as a Greek key, or modified trellis - really you could have too much fun with this.

The last thing to keep in mind is that wood floors don't have to be run straight. Pattern works just as well, parquet has been popular for a very long time. Just think of a new way to achieve the look. Even for a modern interior, imagine larger scale parquet.

Don't be afraid to use the details to set your house apart from others. If you plan on staying in your home a while, then the investment is one you will enjoy and will add value to your home in the future. For more information or fabulous ideas on what can be done to wood floors go to the National Wood Flooring Association (http://www.woodfloors.org/).

For Fun Friday

I'm one of those people that don't really take pictures of my family while on vacation, I take pictures of buildings, sculpture and the like. For this Friday, I thought I'd share some of my favorite skyscrapers and a bell tower. They are from Chicago, New York and Puerto Vallarta (wish I was there!)

Enjoy & Have a Great Weekend.

Chicago

Chicago

Chicago

New York

Puerto Vallarta

Building Your Base: Walls

Building your base is a key component to developing a successful interior. There are 5 different elements to your base - Walls, Ceilings, Floor, Lighting, Architectural Detail. That seems simple enough, right? But there are many choices to make for theses 5 areas. They all relate to the structure of your room or home and when done right, your home will have "good bones".

Unless you have built your home and made selections along the way, you probably have a blank canvas. But some of the elements you are going to feel are unchangeable. But a lot of the elements are just waiting to be transformed. The first and most important step is moving past the builder tan walls. With a few exceptions, this color does nothing for your home. I'm not even sure where the color came from. Even when choosing lighter neutral colors, I've never seen a designer willingly choose this color - yet every builder puts it on the walls.

There are many techniques that you can apply to your walls, you could paint, wallpaper or apply a faux finish. Most often though we are applying paint. The choice of paint can be a perplexing one. When choosing your paint, think of it as the background that should highlight everything else you put into the room. This is just one layer to your room. You also need to consider the mood or feeling of your room. Are you needing to concentrate in this room (warmer colors) or do you need to relax (cooler colors)? If you already have furnishings and drapery in the room - try not to choose a color that "matches" one of those elements. Instead look at the color opposites. If your home has reds or burgundy, try looking at a green based paint. If your home has blues, try looking at a more yellow or gold tone paint (like below). When your furnishings are more neutrally based, you really can have your pick.

There are a few steps that can ensure success when selecting paints. The first is to test, test and test. This is the step that most people want to skip. But here is the reason for testing. The quality of light in your home changes 8 times a day. With out testing, you'll never know if that yellow or green shifts to a less than desirable shade. If the thought of paint swatches all over your home is not appealing, then create sample boards. But they need to be larger, I think 2' x 2' is ideal. And there needs to be two coats of paint. The truest color will be when there are two coats. And unless you are simply refreshing the color on the wall - always plan on two coats.

And as for quality I would recommend at least a Sherwin Williams or Benjamin Moore Quality Paint. In the age of more awareness of toxins and chemicals, Health Magazine (http://www.health.com/) published this chart, in April 2008 issue, as a comparison of the different low VOC paints.