Interior lattice walls create a garden like ambience in any room. Admirers of French-style decorating probably know about trellis walls – the decorative wall treatment fashioned from crossed wood strips that applied as panels. Traditionally, lattice or trellis was used to formalize walled gardens or in interior rooms with garden themes. While diamonds and squares are the … [Read more...]
Cool Bathrooms
These cool bathrooms are worlds apart yet connected through common materials. Two very cool bathrooms, built 80 years and almost 7,000 miles apart, share an austerity which I find very hip. Some might call them cold — in one case that might be viewed as a blessing (you’ll see why) — but, for me, that’s not the point. What drew my attention is the way each architect/designer … [Read more...]
Middle Eastern Kitchen
A middle eastern kitchen expresses my fascination with rustic kitchens in the European style. Each time I lived in a house or apartment in Europe, the kitchen resembled this middle eastern kitchen owned by a French archaeological engineer in Damascus, Syria. This one is especially interesting for its typical rusticity and for the fact that is is accessed from the second floor … [Read more...]
Tile Masterpiece Bathroom
Tour an Arts and Crafts style tile masterpiece bathroom in a NYC penthouse retreat Christmas green, white and pewter comprise the stunning color scheme in this tile masterpiece bathroom, created by legendary designer Jed Johnson in a New York City penthouse. With a pair of doors opening onto a terrace overlooking Central Park, it’s hard to imagine a bathroom as … [Read more...]
Plummy Dark Rooms
Plummy dark rooms -- purples and oxblood reds -- are deeply romantic and fashionable this year. The red-and-purple color scheme in what I call plummy dark rooms has a special impact in these two English living rooms. Red rooms are hardly a novelty, especially in dining rooms. But brining this type of dark hue into the living room feels like a statement about creating an … [Read more...]
New Direction Kitchen
Natural materials, used in an organic way, triumph in a stone house kitchen If you ask me the direction green kitchen design should take as it develops beyond the current formulaic “bamboo cabinet-apple green wall-concrete counter” stage, I would point you to the natural materials used in this kitchen by the late Uruguayan architect Horacio Ravazzani. The home is in the beach … [Read more...]
