No More Senseless Acts of Beauty!

I like that bumper sticker that says “practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty,” but it’s definitely not my philosophy. Why can’t beauty be engineered into our lives?

Japanese chyotansu. Office bureaus like this one, which is an antique, were used to hold writing materials and business papers. Often choytansu were made from expensive wood.

I often tell people that I am a “decorator” because I find that it helps many folks understand what services I provide. Although an elite cartel in my profession is busy trying to push the little guys out by restricting the use of the term “interior designer”, I suspect that the general public really doesn’t know what the title means.

The fact is, both terms fall short of what of describing what value a person like me brings to a remodeling or building project.

The notion of “decorating” usually involves embellishment – adding colors or patterns only for reasons of visual stimulation and pleasure – to something that is otherwise utilitarian and purposeful. The example that springs to mind is interior painting, adding color on top of walls, structures whose real purposes are to provide privacy, keep out the cold, and hold up the roof. In daily usage, “design” usually connotes something a bit more purposeful or calculating – hence the play on words in the title of the old TV show Designing Women – but neither term really gets at the oxymoron that makes that phrase “senseless acts of beauty” so amusing.

It hasn’t always been so. The languages of many Native American cultures didn’t contain words that could describe the difference between a beautiful, celebratory calabash and a bowl for everyday use. The tribes didn’t need those words. Their values held that each day of life was worth celebrating, and thus, a spirit of reverence should infuse everyday activities.

Antique Eskimo carving

By contrast, you and I can probably think of a dozen words that would describe the difference between a plastic lawn chair and a Barcelona chair. In our throw-away, get-it-done-quick culture, beauty usually is only skin deep. There’s an enormous gulf between products that are intended only to be cheap and convenient – a Chinette plate – and good things – real bone china – that are intended to convey meaning as well as serve a purpose. Why is it that we bring out the “good china” only on two or three major holidays, when we want to ritually celebrate our spiritual values? Don’t our relationships with loved ones deserve quality attention the other 362 days of the year?

Joe Yazzie, a Navajo artist with whom I exhibited years ago in Chicago, told me that he found this ideology incredibly foreign. Joe’s father was what we would call a “medicine man” and his calling was to cure the ills of body and spirit. The Navajo traditionally don’t divide body and spirit as we do, and correspondingly, there’s no gulf between the utilitarian and the celebratory. Like his ancestors before him,  Joe’s father endeavored to unify the realms of body and spirit by making things that were useful and beautiful, and Joe did the same. Joe told me that this practice was called “walking in beauty,” and it was a way of expressing one’s reverence for life.

The practice I’m talking about here has nothing to do with taste or visual style. Native American cultures had widely varying aesthetics. Ancient Eskimo artifacts tend toward the austere, and they can look quite modern to Euro-American eyes. Pacific Northwest tribes, by contrast, tended to fill every space with symbolically significant imagery, so much so that art historians use the term horror vacui – fear of open spaces – to describe their style.

“Build Thee More Stately Mansions, O My Soul”

A traditional "Chilkat blanket" named for the Native American tribe that designed them; this one was woven by Tlingit artist. Full-surface decoration is characteristic of most Native American Art from the North Pacific region.

The notion of embodying beauty and usefulness in domestic objects isn’t unique to Native American cultures. It occurs around the world and throughout history,  often in spiritually-oriented communities. Examples from Japanese and American Shaker buildings come to mind.

It’s no accident that a Japanese house communicates a gracefully spare Zen sense of repose. Or that Japanese craftsmen constructed wood furniture so finely that you can find tansu chests, built completely without nails or glue, that are still serviceable despite the fact that they are hundreds of years old! Both are evidence of how Japanese carpenters translated the Zen practice of mindfulness into their work.

The Shakers, whose design sensibility inspired the pioneers of the Arts and Crafts movement, a precursor to modern design, shared a similar point of view. Members of this utopian religious community lived by a motto that described how and why the quality of their work and their religious beliefs were inextricably linked: “Hands to work, hearts to God.”

It seems sad to me that we’ve come to the point where beauty could be considered senseless or random.

Architect Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair.

What’s more, to my way of thinking, there’s nothing beautiful about the billions of baubles we bury in the product graves that we call landfills the moment the glitter wears off. (I recently completed a green building certification, and during my studies, I learned to my horror that as much as 50 percent of the junk in our American landfills is waste from constructing, deconstructing, and redecorating buildings!) Grandma got it right: “handsome is as handsome does.”

As the Shakers proved more than a century ago, quality, beauty, and usefulness can be communally joined. The simple Shaker table pictured here was designed to be functional, hence the handy drawer and a drop-leaf that economizes on space while also accommodating another diner. Even though the table is not made from rare or precious wood and does not contain inlaid marble or precious stones, it is prized for its lasting beauty — as attested by the fact that it is currently being sold by the John Keith Russell antiques firm, which has set an asking price of $28,000.

Back to the Future: Quality is Not Optional

A drop-leaf table crafted around 1840 at either the New Lebanon, New York or Hancock, Massachusetts Shaker colony.

In 2007, the architectural firm of John G. Waite Associates put together a master plan for the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The 1,200-acre site holds 20 historic buildings and has served as an outdoor, living history museum for more than 50 years. Hancock is the site of the beautiful round stone barn that inspired film maker Ken Burns to make his documentary about the Shakers.

The architectural team drew from the Shaker heritage in creating their plans, and they found in the Shakers’ history some very contemporary lessons about community and sustainability. Here’s what Ellen Spear, president and chief executive officer of Hancock Village, told the magazine of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in May of 2007 about how the architectural team was looking to Shaker ideals for guidance:

Spear says she looks forward to bringing the Shaker story to address contemporary issues like peace (the Shakers were pacifists) and building community and sustainability, noting the ways they sited buildings and reused materials, approached construction, and looked at things in a sustainable way. “I don’t think they necessarily knew or named it that, but that’s certainly the approach,” Spear says. “The same with organic gardening and the methods they used. They had tremendous technical innovation that we see within the building and building construction, including a water-power system in the early 1800s. All of those things can address issues that are important to us today.”

Handsome is as Handsome Does

The simple fact is that quality workmanship lasts.

While it costs more at the outset, it costs less over the long run. For example, I could buy cheap vinyl flooring for a 10 x 10-foot kitchen for about $100, while a good quality linoleum will cost around $250. (Many people think that both vinyl and linoleum flooring are the same thing. They are not: vinyl is made from petroleum while linoleum is made mostly from natural oils and sawdust.)  It will cost me at least $300 to get someone to install either floor, so why would I want to spend $550 for a floor that looks pretty much the same as a $400 floor?

The answer lies in the ugly truth about what will happen over the next ten years. That linoleum floor will still look good and be wearing well in 30 years; many elementary schools contain 50-year old linoleum floors that have stood up to generations of rambunctious feet. But that vinyl floor will start to look shabby in about 3 years, and most people replace vinyl flooring after about five years. So the true cost comparison is $550 for the linoleum floor and $800 for the two vinyl floors that I will have to install in the same time period.

The shell of the chambered nautilus.

Then there are off-the-balance sheet costs that go along with that throw-away floor. That cast off vinyl flooring is going to wind up in a landfill where it’s going to do some pretty nasty things, but not before it’s had time to release a lot of toxic chemicals into someone’s home! (I’m pretty sure that vinyl flooring helped trigger the asthma that appeared in my middle years, and studies have also found puzzling links between vinyl flooring and autism.)

To my way of thinking, our homes should be beautiful in the same way that a chambered nautilus shell is beautiful. The nautilus, a squid that lives in a shell, expands its home as it grows. The new chambers not only accommodate the creature’s growth, they also function as floats. The squid can fill the empty compartments with gas that cause the shell to rise or sink in the ocean. The nautilus gets bigger quarters as it grows, adding a new chamber each year. It builds to accommodate its changing needs, following a simple but elegant master plan, and building rooms that accommodate the animal at different ages and stages of life.

Human beings think that they invented universal design, the notion that homes and products should be easy and comfortable to use through our life spans, whatever our state of ability or disability. But the chambered nautilus clan has been putting that idea into practice, with stunningly beautiful results, for millenia!

I plan to occupy my earthly shell for quite a few years to come, and while I do, I will endeavor to practice sensible and deliberate acts of beauty. My ideal is to create living chambers that are as luminously beautiful as those of the nautilus.

Because the chambered nautilus so nicely symbolizes my design philosophy, I plan to incorporate it in the redesign of my logo and my Comfort and Joy Interior Design website at the end of this year. My new logo will be an abstracted version of a chambered nautilus shell.

Resource Links

• Comfort and Joy Interior Design – Nicolette Toussaint’s interior design firm
• Build It Green professional green building certification
• Perkins and Will precautionary list of toxic (but common) building materials
• American Institute of Architects’ article on restoration of Hancock Village
• The Shakers: About the Film by Ken Burns
• 2,500 years of passive solar architecture
• Japan House: A Taste of Japanese Culture
• Northwest Indian Art

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The Chambered Nautilus

A spiral staircase at the Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn;
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94)

1 Rump or 2 and Other Kitchen Conundrums

“Please take our guests to the living room. This is strictly a one-rump kitchen!”  I used to often hear that memorable phrase when my husband and I lived in a small apartment. Mason and I now have a two-cook kitchen, but the practice of asking “one rump or two” is one that’s very useful to anyone considering the redesign of a kitchen.

This beautiful kitchen was designed by Jamie Goldberg of Tampa, Florida. Jamie holds an NKBA design certification as well as being a Certified Aging in Place Specialist. She's a splendid colleague and the author of a blog entitled "Gold Notes." Give it a visit; you will find the link at the bottom of this post.

A well-designed, two-rump kitchen offers separate counter spaces for two cooks: one area should be adjacent to the range and another for salad and drink preparation. A kitchen designed for two cooks usually has two sinks, and often more than one oven, as is the case with the beautifully designed kitchen here, the work of my friend and fellow designer, Jamie Goldberg.

But with kitchens, bigger does not necessarily mean better!

A few years ago, a relative – I will call her Antoinette – excitedly invited me over to see her new multimillion dollar home. My immediate  reaction to her “dream kitchen” — it’s a nightmare!

I immediately saw that it was the kind of kitchen that David L. Brooks skewered in his book Bobos in Paradise as “an airplane hangar with plumbing”. Antoinette’s kitchen island looked about the size of Maui!

In reality, the island was around 10 feet square. If the surface had been a bit higher, the outer edge could have been used as a stand-up bar  – if you happened to be serving ors d’oeuvres for 30 or so people! But its depth and circumference were bad news when it came to food preparation. It was so wide no one could reach the center, and to use the appliances, one would need track shoes. Since the appliances were scattered in a ring facing the island, reaching them would be like training for a track meet.

Thomas Jefferson's kitchen at Monticello’s was among the best equipped in Virginia, thanks to all the utensils he picked up while serving as US Minister to France. This is Monticello's second kitchen, an 1809 upgrade that featured a larger work space with bake oven, fireplace, and 8-opening stew stove with integrated set kettle. The restored kitchen is open to visitors.

Although I was kind enough to keep my thoughts to myself, mumbling something about the kitchen being “impressive”, I knew that Antoinette was going to come to loathe the kitchen. It had been designed to impress, and the design was about conspicuous consumption more than about food consumption. (The message in the design, I believe, was “let them eat cake.”)

Over the centuries, our kitchens have come full circle from being the center of family life, to being galleys intended for food preparation to again becoming a gathering place for family and friends. Since the 1950’s, multiple trends have bulked up our kitchens, tripling its size. June Cleaver’s kitchen, seen on the 1957-63 TV show “Leave It to Beaver,”  was less than 100  square feet. The average American kitchen is now around 225 square feet!

This increase does not reflect bigger families. During the same time, the size of the American family has shrunk. While some of the changes are driven by technology, the big drivers for kitchen remodeling have been social, related to both to changes in how we really live and how we want to live.

Reasons to Remodel Your Kitchen

While there’s always a bit of “keeping up with Joneses” that figures into remodeling plans, there are also some green and family-affirming reasons to remodel.  The schedules of two-career families demand that we be able to cook quickly, and they may also prompt us to do more business entertaining at home. Couples often want to be able to invite friends to have a drink in the kitchen or help with salad prep while a convivial meal is being prepared.

Parents need a convenient place to feed the kids, to keep an eye on them while cooking, and also to enable the kids to make their own snacks. Safety can also be an issue.

"Dish drawers" are an energy-saving alternative to the standard dishwasher. They can handle as much as a traditional 24-inch dishwasher, but because each drawer runs independently, you can wash small loads as economically as large ones. The model pictured is from Fisher-Paykel.

In addition, some people also want to reduce their energy bills and lower emissions that drive climate change. In addition to replacing old, inefficient appliances with new “Energy Star” models, eco-conscious homeowners can offset the use of artificial lighting by increasing “daylighting”. Improved window placement, insulated frames, and low-emissions glass can improve the color and quality of interior light while significantly cutting drafts, winter heat loss, and summer overheating.

A remodel also provides an opportunity to replace old incandescent light fixtures with energy-efficient compact fluorescent, LED, and halogen lighting. (Incandescent light bulbs have actually been banned in Ireland, and Title 24, the California energy bill that goes into effect in January 2010, will require that half of kitchen light in newly built homes comes from energy efficient light fixtures.)

All in all, the kitchen is one the two most-often remodeled rooms in the house. (The bathroom is the other.) In this first post, I will look at changes in how we configure and use our kitchens, and I will also include some tips and tool for thinking about ways to improve your kitchen. In later posts, I will return to the topic of kitchens, exploring small kitchens, wheelchair accessible kitchens and other kitchen topics.

It’s best to start with a plan. That seems obvious to me, but apparently not to everyone. I recently heard a story about a woman who simply went out and bought all new appliances without having a plan in place. Because most of them wouldn’t fit, they wound up sitting in her garage for over a year while she backtracked, trying to decide whether to sell the appliances or to ask a contractor to enlarge her kitchen. Who knows, those appliances might still be in the garage had she not met a designer in a tennis class!

I suggest that you start planning for a kitchen remodel not by looking at new appliances – you will get to that – but by first looking at how you use your kitchen now and how the changes you can anticipate over the next ten years will change your needs.

What’s the Best Size for My Kitchen?

Do you need to enlarge your kitchen, adding on or borrowing space from another room? Maybe, maybe not. The optimum size is based first and foremost on how many people will be cooking, and how many will be visiting the kitchen. Here are some questions to answer:

• Is a one-cook kitchen sufficient?
• Does your family have a main cook and a sous-chef who does the chopping and prep work?
• Do you want a kitchen where multiple family members or friends can join in, helping with salad making, table setting and other dinnertime activities?
• Does your kitchen need a family activity area where children can do homework or color near mom while she’s cooking?
• Do you pay bills or use a computer in the kitchen? If so, you might want to add a small desk or a convertible work area.

The National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA), a respected trade industry group, offers some great guidelines for figuring out the best size for your kitchen. Here are a few:

There's a sequence to kitchen work - first the cooking and serving, and later, the dishes! In this floor plan, the orange triangle connecting the sink, stove and refrigerator shows the work area for the main cook while the yellow triangle demarcates her helper. If these triangles cross, traffic problems ensue. The yellow triangle does cross the green clean-up triangle, this probably won't cause a problem since prep and clean up don't happen at the same time.

Countertops – You need at least 158 linear inches of counter. The surface  should be 24″ deep with at least 15″ of clearance between the counter and the upper cabinets. (But a wheelchair user needs 18″ deep counters because she cannot reach the back of a 24″ counter.)

Loading and prep areas - You need about 2 feet of space next to your fridge, sink, and stove to load, unload, and prepare food.

Opening doors and appliances - All doors should swing freely; your dishwasher door should not catch on the pull for the adjacent cabinet, and your stove door should open without causing a trip hazard. (Having enough room for door swings is partly a function of space planning, and partly a function of room size. Small rooms may require different types of doors and some other ingenious solutions.)

Aisles – A working aisle should be at least 42″ for one cook and at least 48″ for multiple cooks. (But one cook doesn’t need more than 60″ either!)

Measuring Kitchen Efficiency

In a kitchen, the “primary work triangle” is formed by lines drawn from the kitchen sink to the refrigerator and stove. For efficiency’s sake, each side of that triangle should be no less than 4 feet long and no more than 9 feet long. The total of the lengths of the three legs should be no more than 26 feet long.

Be it ever so humble, the galley kitchen layout is among the most efficient kitchen arrangements.

It can be a challenge to keep within that limit in today’s large kitchens. For example, the kitchen shown above is 13.5 feet wide and 22 feet long; the sides of the sous chef’s triangle add up to nearly 26 feet. That makes for a lot of walking back and forth!

The most efficient kitchen is probably the galley kitchen; it’s basically two counters with a working aisle in the center. The galley’s small size limits walking distances, and if there’s enough counter space, it can be a delight. Indeed, a caterer we hired to put together a buffet in our  “one-rump” kitchen told me that it was the most efficient kitchen in which she had ever worked.

I was very pleased, having laid it out myself. Although I knew nothing about kitchen triangles at that point, I had argued with our contractor about the kitchen layout. He wanted at 6-foot wide center aisle. That convinced me that he didn’t cook much! If he had, he would have known that an aisle that wide would force the cook to take 2 or 3 extra steps every time s/he went from the stove to the sink.

Better! I revised the kitchen above so that the two cook's triangles and the clean-up triangle don't cross. This involved downsizing the main refrigerator slightly and adding a set of refrigerator drawers in the sous chef's salad prep area. Because this kitchen is designed to also be wheelchair accessible, the aisles are fairly wide (all doorways are 36") and the counters in one area are set at 33" above the floor - easier to reach from seated position that the standard 36" counter height. These lower counters also enable kids to make their own snacks more easily.

All of those extra steps add up to what’s called a “travel penalty.” In the two-cook layout above, both chefs – or rather their feet – are going to be paying that penalty.

The goal in kitchen planning is to have the triangles as compact as possible, but to also ensure that work triangles  don’t cross so that kitchen workers don’t bump into one another.

There are multiple types of travel patterns in a kitchen: movements of the main and sous-chefs, of table setting and serving, of clean-up, of unpacking groceries and unloading the dishwasher, to name a few. The simplified kitchen layouts here show just three of the most-used patterns: the chef, the sous chef, and clean-up. Because the main chef will be preparing the entree at the same time the sous chef is making the salad, it’s important that the two cooking triangles (red and yellow in the big layouts) don’t cross.

In practice, and in smaller kitchens, it’s likely that some of the triangles will cross, so while minimizing them, it’s also important to consider the sequence of traffic patterns. Some of us do clean up while cooking, but most of the clean-up traffic (indicated by the green triangles) will occur after the cooking is done. In most cases, our kitchens involve some trade offs, and it’s best to make them consciously – and before the appliances are purchased.

Other Kitchen Conundrums

Here, in no particular order, are a few useful planning tips to keep in mind if you’re thinking of remodeling your kitchen:

• Consider the next buyer. Unless you and your house have a until-death-do-us-part arrangement, you should consider the next owner’s likely needs as well as your own desires. You may love that Wolf professional-style range, but the person who buys your house might consider it a problem that detracts from the value of the house.
• Don’t get too trendy. Similarly, it’s a good idea to consider how the durable parts of your design – such as tile, flooring and appliances – are going to look in 5 or 10 years. For example, right now a retro-1960’s palette is very much au courant. It seems like every interior design magazine I see features several interiors in the same baby blue and brown combo, as well as lime green and orange. If you paint your walls in trendy colors like those, they can be easily changed, but counter tops will cost thousands, not hundreds, to replace. And I can guarantee you, that in 10 years, we will be looking at brown-and-blue rooms and yawning “that’s just so 2009.”
• Don’t overspend. Once you get to looking at high-end appliances, counter tops and flooring, it’s really easy to drop $150,000 on a kitchen.  The cost of the design shouldn’t exceed 20 percent of your home’s value. You can typically recover up to 8 percent of that cost when you sell your place.
• Watch for “bad adjacency“. If you live in an old house or apartment, you have probably inherited some old-fashioned design trends. One of the worst is having a bathroom that opens from the kitchen, something considered very undesirable, even tasteless, by modern buyers. It’s well worth correcting this during a kitchen remodel, as well as finding ways to enclose or otherwise hide laundry appliances. Among other bad, but common adjacency problems are noisy kitchens that neighbor sleeping or study rooms.
• Fix the lighting. You’ve probably had the annoying experience of having your own shadow fall across the vegetables you’re chopping, making it hard to see. This happens when kitchens are designed with just one or two central ceiling lights; those fixtures may create adequate “ambient” light, but don’t do a good job of lighting counters.  When your central lighting is supplemented with proper task lighting – for example, fluorescent panels tucked away under the skirts of your upper cabinets – it  can greatly decrease your chance of injury while preparing a meal. In addition, you will want to ensure that your light does not produce glare on work surfaces.


Cork is a great choice for the kitchen floor. Naturally resilient and forgiving to both the cook's back and dropped dishes, it also quiets the room by absorbing noise. This handsome floor is from WoodFloors Online.

• Reduce the noise level. Today’s dishwashers are much better insulated, and thus quieter, than those of a decade past, but they’re still noisy enough to interfere with conversation. Ditto for range hood fans and washers and dryers. If you add to that the noise produced by your refrigerator, plus the echos of footfalls on stone or tile flooring, the kitchen can be a noisy place. Pay attention not only to the energy ratings of your appliances, but also to the specifications on how much noise they produce. You might also want to consider putting some sound-absorbing surfaces, such as fabric or wood, somewhere in the kitchen, and perhaps even adding some sound proofing to the walls if sleeping or study rooms are next to your kitchen.
• Consider what’s underfoot. Marble is beautiful, but it can be slippery, as can other kinds of polished stone. If you choose a slip-resistant flooring -  a matte-finished wood, bamboo or laminate; cork, or textured or a soft-glazed ceramic tile – you may prevent a fall. (If you’re holding a hot casserole or a knife when you fall, you could be in for a trip to the ER.)  If you select tile, you should also place a throw rug with a non-skid backing in areas that get wet.
• Think safety. Your kitchen layout should enable you to locate the range and cook top away from doorways and passages, and it’s also a good idea for parents to opt for rounded corners on counter tops. In addition, consider the heights of the adults: the NKBA’s Kitchen Planning Guidelines say that microwaves should be installed 3″ below the principal user’s shoulder but no more than 54″ above the floor to avoid accidents.

Resource Links

• Gold Notes – Jamie Goldberg, kitchen and bath design
• Five Worst Kitchen Goofs from Consumer Reports
• Kitchen Planning Guide from Consumer Reports
• Is it Time to Remodel Your Kitchen? – Article from National Kitchen and Bath Association
• Dishwasher Drawers: Pros and Cons from the Remodelista blog
• Is Your Kitchen Making You Fat? ABC News story
• WoodFloors Online
• Bobos in Paradise
• Monticello’s remodeled kitchen

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“One Lump or Two, Dear?”

The work triangles I discussed in this post were developed back in 1944 after the University of Illinois conducted a number of studies of kitchen design, and they gained wide adherence in the US in the 1950’s.

I was tickled to learn that our British cousins have quite a different tool for measuring kitchen efficiency. They count the number of steps the cook has to take to prepare a cuppa tea, English style.  That’s not just a matter of dunking a tea bag in hot water, the way the Yanks do it.

Instead, it requires taking down and pre-heating the cup with tap water, filling the kettle, heating the tea water, gathering the tea, fetching the milk from the refrigerator and the sugar from the cupboard, replacing the tap water with boiling water, steeping the tea, and finally serving it. Those tasks take the cook to each end of the triangle, and possibly then some.

Because one the nicest rituals in my life is awakening to a cup of British-style tea with milk, served in bed by my loving husband, I was delighted to share this piece of design trivia with him. Mason is retired, and he wakes up hours before I do. He says he finds the tea-making process pleasant, and we both enjoy our pre-dawn tea and conversation. While writing this post, I asked him to count the number of steps he walked while making our tea in our current two-rump kitchen.

The total came out to 25.  I was asleep so I don’t know whether they were sleepy, mincing steps, or big, bold strides.

To Arms! Warm Your Fanny, Not the Climate!

Today is international Blog Action Day – a day when boodles of bloggers team up to write about various social problems. In solidarity of spirit, I’m issuing a call to arms on climate change and asking my loyal readers to “pack some heat” – literally.

Not long ago, I wrote Saving My Energy for a Greener Tomorrow, a post about how I harnessed the firepower of the lowly caulk gun to dramatically warm my house and cut my energy bill. I spent about $500 on the whole household warming-and-efficiency process, including the purchase of a low-power convection heater. I saved around $40 per month on my utility bill. Best yet, my humble caulking and sealing efforts added up to something very tangible that I could do to fight global warming.

Best Investment Around – Energy Efficiency!

Recently, I heard Panama Bartholomy, who works for the California Energy Commission, when he spoke at the West Coast Green building conference. Panama said something very witty and quite profound: he compared our attitudes about how to “green up” our energy use — and cut down on what we add to global warming — to the attitudes of teenage males looking at two teenage sisters. We focus on solar technology, the glamorous sister, he said, but don’t spend much time looking at energy efficiency, the smart sister!

The humble but powerful caulk gun

The bottom line on Panama’s presentation was this: when it comes to curbing climate-changing energy emissions over the next twenty years, caulking and weather sealing will save $40 per ton and solar panels will cost $24 a ton!

To underscore the point, Panama whipped out a slide that showed the “McKenzie Curve,” an economic analysis of the costs of a whole passel of energy-greening measures. (That’s where the figures cited above come from.) The Wall Street Journal recently wrote an article about all this. It was provocatively entitled Packing Heat: The Firepower of the Lowly Caulk Gun. That article included a chart version of the McKenzie Curve; I encourage you to click this link and take a look at the price tags attached to our energy choices.

Act Locally: Start with Your Windows!

While thinking globally about the problem of global warming, I also encourage you to act locally – maybe in your bedroom. You could start by improving the performance of your windows. Most of the windows in our California homes were installed long before energy was an issue. They hold single (rather than double or triple) panes of glass. The glass is not coated for energy efficiency, and it has been stuck into the frame with no thought of sealing the drafts that come in around or through the frame. If those same windows were to be specified now, for a new building, the local housing officials would tell you that they are illegal under Title 24, the California energy efficiency act that applies to new construction.

Infrared image of a house leaking energy

As the image at left shows, most homes bleed energy. You can see the heat leaking around the windows here; it’s orange. There’s also a lot of heat leaking out of the attic, and that’s common too.

Federal figures show that US homes consume 21% of all energy used by the whole country — more than cars,  planes, or even offices — and they waste around 30 percent of that energy.

About one-third of that loss could be stopped by caulking and insulating! In addition, you can cut a good bit of the heat that is lost through window glass by adding an energy efficiency film to the window. These films are actually plastic  covered with a very thin, invisible layer of metal; it’s metal that causes the reflection of heat that gives newly manufactured glass for windows its energy efficiency quality. Here, instead of having the metal added at the factory, you smooth it onto the window yourself after the fact.

I did this myself recently. It was easy and fun. The process involved cutting a sheet of plastic so that it was about 1 inch bigger than my window (which is about 3 feet square), then wetting the window and applying the film with a squeegee. I used a laundry spritzer to apply the water, which was lubricated with a drop of dish detergent. The film slid right on, and I carefully squeegeed out the bubbles, then trimmed the margins with a very sharp Exacto knife.

A day later, when the film was dry,  the film was truly invisible. (I called in my neighbor Alexei, had her look at my filmed window and a twin window nearby, and then asked her if she could see any difference. She couldn’t even figure out why I was asking!) While the visual difference was imperceptible, there was a noticeable tactile difference – an absence of the customary blanket of cold air that hung around the inside of the window.  I could feel quite a difference when I did an unscientific test by placing my cheek about an inch from both the treated and untreated windows.

Ways to Warm Your Fanny, Not the Climate

NASA photo - the earth at night showing artificial lights in the USA

There are, of course, sophisticated tools that can be used to find energy leaks in buildings: infrared “guns” and heat sensitive meters that measure drafts. When energy “commissioning” is done on commercial buildings, an engineer runs the HVAC systems with the windows all closed and then measures how and where the pressure changes, and s/he uses a truckload of gadgets to do it.

You’re not likely to try that at home, but I know of some simple low-tech ways to find leaks too. The most interesting one I have heard of was a fellow who rented a fog machine – the kind used in theatrical productions – and then used it to fog up the inside of his house. He kept the windows closed, and after an hour or so, he walked around outside and looked for the escaping clouds.

Draft stopper doggy from Oh Dee Doh - to learn how to make it, click on the image

If you have bigger leaks, you may find them by walking around your house carrying a lit candle, standing here and there, and watching how the movement of air bends the flame. You can also hang lightweight gift wrapping ribbons over doorways and watch which way they bend, then track the breeze back to its source. You can track the breeze by licking your finger, the same way people do to determine which way the outdoor wind is blowing, and then walk toward the cool side of your finger. Not very scientific, but it all works.

Then again, you might just go to the likeliest leakage spots and start plugging away. Your local hardware store will have a variety of weatherstripping and insulation products. I suggest that after you’ve found the holes, you go ask your helpful hardware man (or woman) to tell you the best way to plug them. Here are half a dozen likely places to look for leaks:

Alexei and Nicolette model the ultimate in Eco winter fashion. Snuggies are in - there are big Snuggie parties and pub crawls here in San Francisco

1. Around drafty windows
2. Drafts around and under the doors to outside (seal and weatherstrip)
3. Through internal doors from rooms you’re currently not heating or using (Use one of those little “draft dodger” cloth blocking devices and close the door!)
4. Around plumbing penetrations (the holes where pipes go in and out of the house)
5. The attic – it may be easy to blow in some insulation there
6. Uninsulated walls  (it’s hard to add insulation to finished walls, but there are some insulating paints. Putting cork “paneling” on the wall can help. There are even insulated tapestries that you can hang on the wall in the winter; that’s something that was commonly done by people who lived in cold climates centuries back. It’s ancestral wisdom that we have forgotten.

Resource Links

• About Blog Action Day
• Apartment Therapy: Shaker Wall Curtains
• Bob Vila: Four Fixes to Stop Energy Leaks (including what to do about the attic)
• Comfort and Joy Interior Design – Nicolette’s company
• Eco Heater – convection heater that draws about as much energy as a light bulb and silently warms your room – around $200
• E-How: Video on How to Check your Weatherstripping
• Energy saving tips from PG&E (recognized at West Coast Green as the nation’s greenest, most progressive utility for its action on global warming)
• How to make a “Draft Dodger” – a stuffed critter to stop the breeze wafting under the door
• Insuladd – insulating paint additive
• Lowe’s Home Store on adding an energy efficiency film to the window
• Million Snuggie Snug, fundraiser for the Stewpot Community Kitchen in Dallas – a slideshow
• Oh Dee Doh – How to Make a Draft Stopper Dog
• Planet Green: Weatherstrip Your Doors and Windows for Under $20
• Saving my Energy for a Greener Tomorrow – Many tips on sealing leaks in your home from this blog
• San Francisco Snuggie Pub Crawl
• US Department of Energy: Weatherstripping your Home
• Wall Street Journal: Packing Heat: The Firepower of the Lowly Caulk Gun

>>>>>>>

Meet the World’s Energy Hogs

Among the world’s nations, the United States uses by far the most energy per person. You’re not surprised to learn that, and neither was I when I first heard it.

Top Ten Nations: Population v. Fuel Consumption World rank & percentage of total Country Population Fuel Use China 1 (20%) 2 (14%) India 2 (18%) 5 (4%) USA 3 (5%) 1 (22%) Indonesia 4 (3%) Brazil 5 (3%) Pakistan 6 (2%) Bangladesh 7 (2%) Nigeria 8 (2%) Russia 9 (2%) 3 (7%) Japan 9 (2%) 4 (5%) Germany 6 (3%) Canada 7 (3%) France 8 (2%) UK 9 (2%) Brazil 10 (2%)

But I was gob-smacked to learn that our nation, which holds just 5% of the world’s population, is using 22% of the world’s fuel.

The nations most prone to hog a disproportionate share of energy are the industrial nations. Populous developing nations that want to emulate the Euro-American lifestyle are crowding into the trough right behind them. The chart at right, which compares the world’s top ten fuel-consuming nations with the ten having the largest populations, clearly reveals these trends.

How do we in the US use all that fuel? Here are the top ten ways:

1. Space heating 25%
2. Lighting 14%
3. Water heating 12%
4. Space cooling 11%
5. Refrigeration 6%
6. Electronics 5%
7. Wet cleaning 3%
8. Cooking 3%
9. Computers 2%
10. Ventilation 2%

Adding up the subtotals, it turns out that our buildings are gobbling up 38.9% of America’s total fuel. That’s more than industry (32.7%) and more than transportation (28.4%)!

Grab your caulk gun and start packin’ some heat!

Spinning Straw into Gold: Straw Bale Houses

The Three Little Pigs got it all wrong! Turns out that it was the straw house – not the one of sticks or the one of bricks – that could stand up to all that huffing and puffing. Not only do straw bale houses provide excellent insulation from wind and extremes of temperature, they’re also proving to be surprisingly stable in earthquake country.

An off-the-grid straw bale house. Photo by David Bainbridge.

That’s one of the curious facts I learned from Jack Ruskey, one of the co-founders of Oryzatech, a start-up that was showing its wares at the recent West Coast Green building conference.  Ruskey, a retired lawyer, grins and says that the day back in 2001, when Oryzatech won a $300,000 grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture, was one of the worst days of his life.

Jack Ruskey of Oryzatech

Ruskey’s a folksy kind of guy with a laid-back country style that’s common to several straw bale builders I have met. His bio says that he’s a farmer as well as a retired attorney, so I suspect that this bluff statement is just his way of joshing with the city girl. I take it to mean that the grant opened to door to veritable haystack of work, and closed it on any notion of restful retirement that Ruskey might have been entertaining. For the past nine years, Ruskey and his colleagues have been up to their collective armpits in research about the effectiveness of the funny-looking straw bale block you see here. That research has resulted in the company winning the first US patent protection for Oryzatech’s bale-making advance.

Oryzatech's patented straw bale. The bales stack together like Lego blocks, and then a column is inserted through the holes to further secure them. The block measures 12”x12”x24” and dovetails with other common construction modules. Each block weighs 30 lbs.

It also turns out the Three Little Pigs story was both right and wrong in saying that the reason the first pig built the straw house was that “it was the easiest thing to do.” Straw houses are easy to construct. The hard part comes when it’s time to invite the building inspector over for a look-see (more about that later, though).

On his fun and informative Straw Bale Trail website, David Bainbridge, a prof who teaches sustainability at the Marshall Goldsmith School of Management in San Diego, notes that straw bale buildings are “are friendly to build… Families can work together and even small children can participate.”

“People like these buildings because they are very quiet, fire resistant, energy efficient, strong, durable and attractive,” says David. Another folksy guy, Bainbridge is a friend and colleague of mine at Alliant International University. A founding member of CASBA, the California Straw Building Association, David has been building straw bale houses for many years. He has built them all over the world, including in earthquake-prone China. (Not coincidentally, David is a member of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program Coalition.)

Fawn Lake straw bale house, built in 1914

Straw bale houses have a true-blue American heritage. They were born on the treeless plains of Nebraska in the 1800’s, but they now are being built around the world, springing up from France and Germany to Australia, Iraq, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. They’ve spread fast because they can be built cheaply, for just about $2 per square foot. What’s more, they make use of resources that renew quickly (grains grow in a single season whereas trees take decades), and they reuse material that would otherwise have to be managed as waste.

Straw is what’s left after a grain, such as wheat and rice, has been harvested. Oryzatech’s Stak Blocks, for example, are made from rice straw. The company’s odd name comes from the Greek word “oryza” meaning rice.

Before straw bundles can be stacked to make walls, the straw must be compressed into bales. At West Coast Green, Ruskey showed me how the inside of one of Orzyatech’s Stak Bloks looks. It’s not at all what I would have expected. Instead of looking like a bale of hay, the block looks and feels like the surface of a plywood sheet. It’s surprisingly dense, almost like a piece of wood cut across the grain. Oryzatech makes the block using what it calls a “scalable, low-energy production process.” That means that they do more than stomp on the straw, but the process is proprietary and Ruskey wasn’t talking about it. He did say that the blocks have undergone extensive, independent testing at California Polytechnic University, and test results show that Stak Blocks offer more than three times the thermal value of an insulated 2×6 stud wall. In addition, in an earthquake, they perform better than either wood framing or brittle concrete walls.

Straw bales are usually laid in straight runs, like big bricks. But they can also be bent to create curves and interesting forms. Walls are usually wire meshed or pinned together; Orzyatech has designed a whole system of connectors. Once the bales are stacked, they are often plastered with lime, earth, or cement plasters. The results can be surprisingly beautiful.

Green Benefits of Straw Bale Buildings

David Bainbridge recently joined builder Ken Haggard in publishing a research paper that quantifies the huge impact that straw bale building can make in reducing global warming by “sequestering” carbon. In the newsletter of CASBA, a California non-profit organization whose members are designers, contractors, owner-builders, and people interested in straw building, Bainbridge and Haggard report that carbon can be safely locked up in straw bale buildings for far less than it costs to otherwise dispose of waste straw. Dumping straw bales at sea, for example, would cost around $340 per ton!

Author, educator, and straw bale builder David Bainbridge

Bainbridge and Haggard report that in the US, more than 100 million tons of straw a year could be used to build homes. Because the straw in each house would lock up 40 tons of carbon, those houses could capture and annually sequester up to 40 million tons of carbon across the nation. Moreover, each house could reduce CO2 emissions by 500 to 1000 tons over its lifetime.

In addition, Bainbridge and Haggard note that increased straw bale construction will reduce field burning of straw, in turn reducing the production of global-warming gases and reducing smoke-related health costs.

Energy Savings:
How to Spin Straw into Gold

When you factor in the energy savings that owners get from their straw bale houses, it begins to look as though the advocates of straw bale house have indeed found a way to spin straw into gold. Bainbridge’s research shows that well-designed straw bale buildings — that optimize, shape, insulation, thermal mass, ventilation, shade and orientation toward the sun to take advantage of solar heating and climatic cooling — owners can cut energy demand dramatically.

Congregation Beth David Synagogue in San Luis Obispo. Photo by David Bainbridge.

The Congregation Beth David Synagogue in San Luis Obispo, for example, reduced its energy use 82%! Near cold, snowy Aspen, Colorado, there’s a 6,000 square foot Waldorf School on the Roaring Fork that was built on time and under budget by volunteers and contractors. A passive solar, daylit building, this straw bale building has reduced heating costs by 60% for the school.

Other contemporary, energy-saving, commercial straw bale buildings here in California include the Real Goods Solar Living Center in Hopland, the Schwaesdall Winery visitor’s center in Ramona, and the Woken Center at Hidden Villa in Los Altos.

Straw bale house in Maine

There are also high-end, architecturally designed straw bale houses being built by specialty firms; given all the classy interior features, costs run up to $200 a square foot. You can find haute couture urban homes in places like Oakland, California and Washington DC, as well as striking do-it-yourself projects out in rural areas of Arizona and Texas.

One of the most engaging of the do-it-yourself projects is the home of Carolyn Roberts,  who wrote about being “a petite, forty-something single Mom with two teenage sons” who found herself unemployed and in need of a place to live. Roberts has written  A House of Straw, a book about her journey to bring her life into line with her green values. On her website, Roberts says that although she dreamed of a simple house in harmony with nature, she had “no carpentry experience, no directly relevant skills… no time, no money, no experience…”  Nonetheless, she managed to erect “an incredibly sturdy, beautiful and well-insulated house that will last for many years.” Not counting the land, her house cost only $50,000 to build.

“I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff”

To finish it, however, Roberts had to pass 23 county inspections! That astonishing number points up the other big reason the story of the Three Little Pigs was wrong about straw building being the “easiest thing to do.” Two of the major hurdles that straw bale builders have faced have been: 1) building codes that have been developed for other, dissimilar materials and technology, and 2) officials who may be thoroughly versed in the codes and regulations, but who have no background in straw bale building.

Straw bale pioneer David Eisenberg

Bainbridge says that although “a few people have been discouraged and given up, sustainability and straw bale enthusiasts are a determined lot.” They have put nearly as much effort into educating building inspectors and code staffers as they have into building houses. Straw bale advocate David Eisenberg gave a big push to the much-needed education process when he wrote a series of columns for ‘Building Codes for a Small Planet“, a magazine read by code officials. The two Davids, Bainbridge and Eisenberg, also teamed up to offer a continuing education program for building code officials a few years ago.

“Thanks to the work of hundreds of unnamed builders, to early work by Matts Myhrman and Judy Knox, and The Last Straw magazine, the codes have rarely been a stopper,” says Bainbridge. “The straw bale building response to codes has been helped along by many people  – and thanks to all of them – but David Eisenberg, the founder of DCAT (Development Center for Appropriate Technology) and a former builder, and Bruce King, an engineer, have both been instrumental.”

Bainbridge adds, “Several code officials quickly saw the value of straw bale building; they aided the process and provided support by talking to other jurisdictions and code organizations. Building code officials with a farm background usually saw it right away.”

Resource Links

• A House of Straw, Carolyn Robert’s website
• California Straw Building Association (CASBA)
• Developmental Center for Appropriate Technology (DCAT)
• The Last Straw magazine
• Haute Nature blog – straw bale houses and other items of high eco style
• Natural Home Magazine – The Tallest Little Straw Bale in Texas
• New York Times article on Quake Resistance of Straw Bale Houses
• The Straw Bale House, book by David Bainbridge, Athena Steen & Bill Steen (Greenbooks online store)
• Oakland’s Straw Bale House goes on Sale - San Francisco Chronicle
• Oryzatech
• Registry of straw bale houses around the world (Green Builder)
• Straw Bale bibliography – extensive! – from David Bainbridge
• The Straw Bale Trail website by David Bainbridge

Inspiration or Agitation: It’s a Matter of Taste

Last week, I was delighted to see that the Holiday Inn that I frequent in San Diego has been remodeled. That got me to thinking about how design, personality, and hospitality intertwine to make an indoor environment welcoming and memorable – or not.

Jane's living room features Kente cloths in hues that complement the blue shades of Jane's couch and the blue glassware she collected in Mexico.

I have had several clients who, during my first meetings with them, worried aloud being “forced into a style” or wind up with a design where they “would not feel at home.”

My client Claire put it this way: “We did not want a home that looks like a staged model home. We have acquired lots of art and other things we really like over more than 40 years. But we have never tried to get things that were particularly harmonious, so we didn’t know how to make them look good together…”

Similarly, Elisa fretted about whether the things she had collected would “go together” when displayed in her home.

Jane, a photographer and former Peace Corps volunteer, also wanted to display art and artifacts that reminded her of her travels, but worried over how to do this tastefully, in a way that would integrate the meaning and memory her treasures evoked into a coherent visual experience.

I don’t think that an interior designer should push a client into a style – including that of the designer! Instead, the designer should serve as an expert guide, helping the client tastefully express his or her own style and personality. Of course, taste is a tricky matter, and one that varies with culture, class, and era. Accordingly, I suspect that the task of finding just the right blend of  good taste and personal expression – without going over the top – is one that many folks find intimidating.

However, in the visual arts, as in music, there are thematic principles that hold a composition together. A well thought-out visual design, like a piece of music, has a theme and variations as well as repeated motifs, rhythmic patterns, contrast and harmony. Moreover, the process of creating that composition usually starts with finding an inspirational theme. In music, it may be a bar of melody. In visual arts, it may be a historical period, a pattern, a cultural reference, or a regional motif.

Master Weaver Ekooba Gyasi from Bonwire, Ghana

With each of the clients mentioned above, I found design inspiration in their life journeys. After talking with each of them and viewing their treasures, I went through a process that involved finding a leitmotif that could be elaborated into a complete composition. To me, that process felt rather sculptural – as though I was envisioning a carving inside a chunk of stone, and then stripping away all of the extra stone that kept others from seeing the carving. That ability to focus and then unify visual elements around a theme is one of the benefits that designers bring to their clients.

How Interior Designers Work

Interior designers – at least those who are professionally trained – go through a process of discovery, scoping, design and evaluation that should be somewhat familiar to those who work in science and technology, as well as to those who work in other areas of visual design.

The terms that are used to describe these stages of work differ, but the process is similar. It begins with interviewing the client (or clients) to determine what needs they are trying to solve and what constraints will come into play due to budget, location, timing, or other factors. I often ask my clients to fill out a survey for each room they want to remodel. This helps me determine whether the goals of a couple or family members are unified or are in conflict, and whether my clients’ ideas have crystallized or are still amorphous.

Photos that Jane took in Africa

An interior designer uses this assessment of needs to create what the interior design trade calls a “design program.” (I have heard certified project managers call similar documents “goals and workscope,” and in the ad agency business, account managers used to write up a “communications platform” that served similar purposes in for TV commercials.)

Once the program is complete and has been approved by the client, the designer goes off seeking inspiration. Where do they find it? In the best cases, inspiration is rooted in the personality, cultural background or goals of the client. (I know that this was the case with the design of the rock-and-roll themed Phoenix Hotel in San Francisco, but more about that later.)  Alternatively, a theme and inspiration might come from the building or the location. It also might come from a recent interior design trade show that was put on to promote what’s new and trendy at the moment.

After writing up a program (but before putting together an actual space and furnishing plan), designers often make up an “inspiration board” to communicate a thematic idea to their clients. These compositions usually include photos of some furnishings, finishes, and materials, and they often include pictures of places and artifacts that evoke an ambience. (Often, the items on these boards have nothing whatever to do with the final design of the room).

I enjoy the search for inspiration, and I love putting these visual tours together, but I try to find inspiration close to home. I find it works best for my clients when I can find it in visual elements that they feel drawn to, in artwork they have collected or created, or in cultures they feel rooted in or drawn toward.

The process I went through with Jane provides a good example.

What’s the Problem?

Initially, Jane told me that she wanted to get some color into her life. After years of living in an off-white apartment, she had bought a condo near Ocean Beach and finally, she could paint the walls.

Jane’s photography  reveals her love of color. Shades of blue recur in the fabrics, baskets and pottery she has collected. She loves blue and told me that she wanted it to play a prominent role in her new condo.

“Uh oh!” I thought to myself.

Blue is a devilishly hard color to use in interiors outside the tropics. It looks great in brilliant sun – I love it on walls in Mexico and Morocco – but it’s hard to transfer this love to a cool climate. On sunny days, the light from the west-facing windows and skylights in Jane’s beachfront condo is wonderful, and the deck that can be seen through the windows at left beckons one to share an ocean view. But when the fog rolls in…

The Blues Come Calling

Sure enough, on my first visit to Jane’s new condo, I quickly saw that the blues in her furnishings looked chilly in the space. In addition, the natural tones of the handsome baskets she had collected simply faded away against walls that were painted a uniform taupe color throughout the condo. And when the clouds rolled in off the ocean as evening approached, the light grew gray, flat, and cold. Jane’s blue fabrics and glass made the room seem chillier still. What to do?

I started by asking Jane to show me things she that she had collected. I admired photos that she had taken in Italy, in Southern France, and in Africa. I noted how nicely the texture of her basketry contrasted with the deep sheen of her Mexican blue glass. That contrast was appealing – but what would pull the composition together and chase off the chill?

It was in the back of a rather dark closet that I found inspiration: it was hiding in a duffel bag filled with African fabrics. It was there that the Kente cloths were hiding.

Having visited the Ashanti region of Ghana myself, I was excited to see these weavings. Kente cloths are narrow strips of silk or silk-blend cloth that are handwoven on small looms and then pieced into hangings or garments. The patterns have traditional and celebratory meanings, and the colors are symbolic as well. When I visited Ghana to see my friend Joyce Amankwah Stuber, I was taken to Bonwire, the weaving village, and given some Kentes as gifts. (I was also given an Akan name: Akosua, which means “girl born on Sunday.”)

Color Her Adventurous

Rummaging through the bag and seeing the vibrant colors of her fabrics, I was pretty sure that Jane meant what she had said. She wanted color in her life. Although some folks (my husband for one) might find those colors agitating, I had in my hand evidence that Jane, who is an adventurous soul, found them invigorating.

I suggested a warm gold for Jane’s living room. It’s a color that you will often see in the Mediterranean, where it is paired with blue and orange. (This palette is a favorite of the Provencal region of France.)  Since blue and yellow are complements – located across the color wheel from one another – the boundaries where they come together have a sizzling pop to them. Jane loved the colors- and it wasn’t long before she called me back to talk about two more rooms: the bedroom and the breakfast room.

The palettes for Jane’s breakfast room and her bedroom are both inspired by regions she has visited: the bedroom by Southern France, and the breakfast room by Hawaii. Both locales, not coincidentally, are sunny places – and shades of yellow now provide continuity from one region of the condo to the other, even though the palettes used in the two rooms are quite distinct.

Après vous, Madame

Jane wanted a feminine bedroom, one with lavender accents. Lavender is prominent in Jane’s photos of Southern France. Because Lavender is also a plant that grows in Provence, and because its hues and blossoms are frequently used in Provencal patterns and prints, I  initially thought that a fabric might again provide inspiration and a compositional theme for the room. It didn’t.

A storage problem turned into a personalized design motif in Jane's bedroom.

What did provide the spark of inspiration was Jane’s hat boxes. There were a lot of them: big round ones, octagonal ones, boxes with plain exteriors, boxes wrapped in patterns and ribbons, and even one made of nylon mesh. They wouldn’t fit anywhere! The hat boxes took up too much space in or on top of dressers, and they were hard to reach when tucked away at the top of the closets, but they were nice to look at.

Somehow, those hat boxes made me think of the classic children’s book “Madeline” – and voila! Inspiration!

As the sweetly naiff illustrations of Madeline and her hat formed in my mind’s eye, I suddenly realized that Jane’s hats themselves could be used as a design element. I figured out the placement and designed a way to hang them. Jane elaborated on this and added panache by draping her scarves underneath the hats.

Hele Mai, Malehini!

“How would you like people to feel in this room?” I asked, sitting at one of the bar-height chairs that face the high counter joining the breakfast room to Jane’s kitchen.

Jane wanted a sunny, tropical look for a breakfast room that doubles as a guest room. Color is especially important here at the beach, where it's sometimes foggy.

“Happy, relaxed…” she said.

“Tell me about some breakfasts in places that you have enjoyed,” I suggested.

I don’t remember if Jane mentioned “eating on a lanai” or if my own memories were invoked by what she told me, but a Hawaiian lanai became the inspiration for the breakfast room. (I have fond memories of eating on the lanai of the Royal Hawaiian, the famed old “pink palace” on Waikiki Beach, during my first visit to the islands.)

Jane’s fabric collection included an item that evoked the color of Hawaii. It’s a chain of batik flags, each flag showing a different tropical blossom. Draped across the entrance of the alcove that holds Jane’s futon, it becomes a proscenium that subtly creates an interior border for the guest room area. The batik’s yellow hues provide continuity with this room’s mostly yellow walls, and it also picks up the purple of the futon cover. The purple batik willow covers? Those were another treasure pulled from the fabric collection in Jane’s duffel bag. (Jane gets credit for finding the fabric in the first place, I get credit for rediscovering what she had and figuring out where to put it.)

Another complementary color combination, this time yellow and turquoise, vibrantly marks the boundary between  the sleeping alcove and the hallway leading to the kitchen.

Jane and I love the results. The whole room is bright, tropical, and invites guests to “hele mai” – to come and visit Jane’s welcoming lanai.

Who knew that inspiration was lurking in a duffel bag at the back of a dark closet?

>>>>>>>>>

How They Do It in Hotels

After my recent business trip to San Diego, thinking back on the hundreds of hotels I have visited, I was surprised at how few I really remember as being distinctive. Two stand out: the Sharrow Bay Country House Hotel in the Lake District of England, and the Mauna Lani Beach Hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Sharrow Bay Country House Hotel

What made Sharrow Bay win worldwide accolades was the personalities and talents of Francis Coulson, the chef, and his partner Brian Sack. The decor was fussy and British and not at all to my taste. But Brian’s greeting – a certain hands-clasped together gesture that said “what a wonderful-gift you are” – had a way of making me quickly forget the clutter of antiques and cherubs.

While checking into the Mauna Lani, I felt as though I had just been taken into the home of a concerned and gracious relative who was very concerned about how much I had been battered during transit. Perhaps it was the bowing, the tea, and the thoughtfully paced Japanese-style welcome? While the sleek white hotel is unremarkably modern, it is made memorable by little Japanese touches; I particularly remember colored carp glinting in the sun as they swam through the linked pools that wind their way around the open-air lobby.

Rockin frog sculpture at the Phoenix Hotel

Most hotels are decorated by professional interior design firms, of course, and not long ago, I got a little insight into the process. I had gone to listen to Chip Conley, the founder and owner of Joie de Vivre hotels, talk about his book How Great Companies Get their Mojo from Maslow. During the evening, he talked about wanting to create a “rock and roll hotel” and how that led to his purchasing a nondescript, Motel 6-like property in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Conley recreated it as the Hotel Phoenix.  He visualized the personality of the hotel’s potential guests as readers of the magazine Rolling Stone. Later, as he worked created other boutique hotels in his chain, Conley used magazines to define both the personalities of target guests, and the hotels themselves. That sounds like a great process, both for marketing and for interior design.

Lobby of the Hotel Triton

While Joie de Vivre has a collection of properties that have distinctive personalities and interesting interiors, the most memorable hotel I have ever seen has to be the Hotel Triton, also here in San Francisco. When I first walked in, I found the lobby quite striking. Or perhaps I should say that I was stricken! The hotel’s theme is “pop culture” and it’s the most fanciful hodge-podge of color and fantastical shapes I have ever stumbled upon.

I don’t know if you would call it post-modern, or Memphis design, or what. I do know that it was designed by a team of nine – nine! - artists.

‘Maybe that explains it. You may have heard that saying, “a camel is a horse that was designed by committee?” It looks like a very colorful camel to me. Although it’s not to my taste, the Triton has gotten a lot of rave reviews on Trip Advisor. Maybe the welcome is so warm it makes you forget the rubber duckies floating in the fountain with the great god Triton? Then again, maybe I’m just old fashioned.

Of Scruples, Scams, Divas, and My Evil Twin

 

NEWS FLASH, 10/30/2009 – Thanks to the wild popularity of this post – 554 visitors in the 6 weeks since it was published – the Evil Twin has written a goodbye note and is signing off! Thanks to all those who read and supported Nicolette Toussaint’s and Wendy Hoechstetter’s blogs!

Years ago, in the middle a huge matrimonial argy-bargy, my ex accused me of having an Evil Twin. The notion struck me as so funny that it entirely derailed my anger.

The real T. Nicolette Toussaint

Now it turns out that my ex was more or less right! This week, I learned that I have an internet doppelganger. I found out when a respected interior design colleague, Wendy Hoechstetter, called to ask me – in the most diplomatic and gracious way – if I had lost my mind.

What Wendy was wondering was why my taste had turned to schlock? And why I had sold out to a company that was abundantly represented on websites warning of internet ripoffs?

Let me hasten to add here, that I feel a professional kinship with Wendy. She and I share a strong set of ethics, a similar view of the role an interior designer should play, and mutual devotion to using design to enable those who are aging or disabled to become healthier and more independent. We both blog, comment on one another’s blogs, and belong to a Bay Area networking group affiliated with LinkedIn. I admire the legislative work Wendy has done on behalf of interior designers’ rights to practice.

Like me, Wendy changed careers in mid-life, and as a former paramedic, she has a gracious “beside manner.” She would never have put her concerns into the words I used in the paragraph above. It took the better part of 45 minutes before before I was able to figure out what prompted the undertone of concern in her voice. It was only after she mentioned the term “design diva” the second time that I started to catch her drift.

What’s in a Name?

My Evil Twin

The bottom line was that Wendy was uncomfortable with the links that “Nicolette, the Design Diva” had left in her blog’s comments section. And knowing my penchant for alliteration, Wendy had assumed that I had actually left those links. Therein lies the rub. If Wendy was confused, then others are too.

For years, I have enjoyed having a first name unusual enough to allow me to be a one name wonder like Cher, Madonna, and the artist formerly known as Prince.

But here’s the downside: If you have a common name like Susan Black or Jack Smith, everyone knows that other people share your name. They also know that everything they read that seems to be associated with your name isn’t necessarily about you.

There are very few other Nicolettes around. I have met only one since I began using Nicolette at the age of 14, when I came home and announced to my startled parents that I had changed my name. I had introduced myself at my new school using my middle name. Because my teachers would never learn to pronounce my first name, I had decided to stop using it. I would sign legal documents with the initial letter of my first name and my middle name: T. Nicolette. (No, I won’t say what the “T” stands for. And yes, my initials really are TNT.)

Bitch, Bitch, Bitch

But wait! The plot of this mistaken identity caper thickens even more, giving me yet another thing to bitch about. It turns out that Other Nicolette is also “Nicolette T.” S/he, the Design Diva, is purportedly “Nicolette Teek.”

But what’s in a name? Why should I get my knickers in a twist about Nicolette the Design Diva? In some ways, this mistaken identity is a bit absurd. Not in my most absolute, atavistic attack of alliteration would I assign myself the appellation of Design Diva! Those close to me find it a ludicrous label. My friend Coral’s comment was, “A classy lady like you doesn’t need such a ‘diva’ title.” My client and friend Alexei, said, ever so succinctly, “Never in a million years!”

Exactly. I have serious scruples about design divas. To know why, you need look no further than the Urban Dictionary. Here’s an excerpt of what it says:

1. Diva – a bitchy woman that must have her way exactly… Often rude and belittles people, believes that everyone is beneath her and thinks that she is so much more loved than what she really is. Selfish, spoiled, and overly dramatic.
2. Diva – female version of a hustler…

Friends, if you ever suspect that I’m becoming a Diva, please, throw a bucket of cold water over my head to try and snap me out of it!

Divas v. Decorators v. Designers

Nicolette Sheridan. People frequently get confused between us, but she's taller than me.

A diva, is, my opinion, the last thing my potential clients need when they’re thinking about making changes to their homes. Speaking as a survivor of three remodeling projects, I can testify that it’s a pretty stressful business, and it can be costly. You don’t want to do something that quickly becomes dated, falls apart, or otherwise needs to be redone in a couple of years.

You do want to wind up with a design that’s functional, that lasts, that meets your needs, that promotes health and safety, and that respects the environment in addition to being attractive. Designing to those standards requires training, professionalism, project management expertise, and a willingness to put one’s own ego aside in favor of attending to the needs of others.

If a person who purports to be an “interior designer” is in a rush to tell you what’s in style, what the new colors for this fall will be, or is otherwise pushing you to keep up with the Joneses, my advice is to run the other way, fast! The person you’re talking to is probably an “interior decorator” – someone whose skills are largely limited to picking out colors, curtains, and fabrics – rather than an interior designer.

Interior designers, by contrast, are trained to follow building codes, fire regulations, and federal disability access standards (in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act), to anticipate the environmental impact of various architectural materials, and to apply wear and flammability standards to meet your needs. They are taught to read and create floorplans and blueprints and to apply formulas to determine whether hallways and flow patterns are safe and practical. They know how to find reputable contractors, how to manage projects, and how to save you money and multiple patches of new gray hair.

They start work not by jumping in and recommending trendy products, but by asking questions about your needs, your frustrations, your budget, and your plans for the future. Come to think of it, that’s true not just of interior design, but also of graphic design, and internet design, all of the forms of design that I practice!

Internet Marketing and Transparency

Remember the movie "Paper Moon"? I loved this exchange: MOSES: I got scruples too, you know. You know what that is? Scruples? ADDIE: No, I don't know what it is, but if you got 'em, it's a sure bet they belong to somebody else!

Before becoming an interior designer, I spent 20 years in marketing and communications, collecting BAs in journalism and English, and master’s degree in graphic design, and additional training in radio reporting, public speaking, web design and social marketing. I have designed and launched no less than eight websites, created a social media campaign notable enough to have landed a front-page mention in the San Diego Union Tribune, and have a long record of success in running paid and “natural” search engine campaigns. I conform to professional standards in all those activities. Specifically:

• Authenticity – I am who I say I am. I never post to my blog – or anyone else’s  – under any name but my own, real name. I also identify myself with either the link and name of my blog (Living in Comfort and Joy – http://nicolettet.wordpress.com) or of my business website (Comfort and Joy Interior Design – www.comfortandjoydesign.com)
• Transparency – I am often asked to promote or endorse products and websites. I find dozens of links in the comments section of my website. (I too got a comment and link from Diva Nicolette.) I delete most of these. On the rare occasion that I do include a requested product or link on my website, I do so only because I find it worthy of interest. I have never been paid to write about anyone or any product. I strive to disclose conflicts of interest, affiliations, activities, and personal agendas.
• Truthfulness – I tell my readers the truth, in so far as I am able to determine it. I state facts when I know them, and when I’m stating an opinion, I try to make sure readers know that it’s only my opinion.
• Fair Attribution – When I write about someone else’s work, ideas or opinions, I attribute them to the originator.
• Accountability -  I will admit mistakes and correct them promptly. I resist sources that offer information for favors, and if I ever do accept favors, I will disclose them. I will also expose unethical practices of other bloggers when I discover them.

These ethical standards, by the way, are my adaptation of a Blogger’s Code of Standards developed by Cyberjournalist.net. That organization adapted its code from the ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists and Sigma Delta Chi. (I became a member of Sigma Delta Chi years ago as an honors graduate in journalism.)

Buyer – and Reader – Beware!

Nicolette Larson. People get confused between the two of us, but she sings better than I do.

Up to this point, I have been somewhat lighthearted about this case of mistaken identity, but I also want to sound a “caveat emptor” about the Other Nicolette to my readers.

Wendy and another reputable interior design colleague – I will call her Carly – did some investigating after Diva Nicolette left a comment on Carly’s blog. For reasons none of us can discern, Diva Nicolette affiliated herself with Wendy’s business, Hoechstetter Interiors. This is misrepresentation, fraudulent, and illegal, and Wendy has contacted her attorney about it.

Carly was the one who called our attention to the problem. In her words, here’s what happened:

I have a blog and receive several emails a day from manufactures and PR companies that would like me to insert a press release or review a product and write about it in my blog. I do not respond to everyone and am very selective in what I choose to talk about. I responded to Mr. L from company C who requested to write a guest blog on bathroom design on my blog.

After reviewing the article I rejected the offer due to content and the multiple SEO links placed within the body of the article. It was a pure commercial endorsement for Company C which I was not interested in promoting… Immediately after rejecting his offer, I received an onslaught of emails indicating that comments were ready for moderation on my blog. They were always from “Nicolette” and always had a link to Company C’s sponsored web site. I deleted them once I noticed the link and simply treated them as an irritation. The last one that caught my attention. The sender name showed my friend Wendy’s business. I thought, “that’s weird, why is my friend Wendy calling herself Nicolette?”

When I complained to Mr. L in a recent email, he told me that several people write under the name “Nicolette” for his company’s blog. He was unable to identify what writer is responsible for assuming my friend’s identity…

In other words, not only do we not know who was fraudulently using the name of Wendy’s business, we don’t even know whether Diva Nicolette is singular, plural, masculine or a genuinely feminine Ms. Teek. (This is starting to remind me of the plot of Ken Follett’s novel The Third Twin in which a man discovers that he not only has an unknown criminal twin, but also that he has been secretly cloned 13 times to evil intent.)

But Wait! The Plot Thickens!

Nicolette Teek's Facebook image. It's an illustration, not a photo. Is she real? Or is "N Teek" a homonym and play on the word "antique"?

My colleagues researched the links that Diva Nicolette had left on their respective blogs and dug up more unsettling facts:

• A Google search on the name Nicolette shows that this “entity” has commented on hundreds of blogs
• Many of those links lead to a furniture company named “Cymax”
• A Google inquiry on the name Cymax turns up dozens of web links from rip off report, fraud links, and consumer complaints
• Wendy’s attorney discovered that the Better Business Bureau has given Cymax a “F” rating

Holey Moley! You’re known by the company you keep, and Ms. Teek certainly hasn’t been living up to my professional standards as blogger, a journalist, or an interior designer.

Is it too late to go back to using my first name? And no, I’m still not saying what that “T” stands for!

>>>>>>>>>>>

Resource Links

• Internet Etiquette from Irene Kohler’s Almost Savvy Blog
  • Dear Ex-Facebook Friend
  • How to Ruin a Reputation in Just One Click
• Twelve Rules of Blogger Etiquette from Mel Kaye
• Society of Professional Journalist’s Code of Ethics (Sigma Chi Delta)
• Bloggers Code of Ethics (by Cyberjournalist.com, an adaptation of the Journalist’s Code of Ethics)
• Hoechstetter Interiors
• No Design Legislation blog

>>>>>>>>

From Othello

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.

“Othello”, Act 3 scene 3
William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

A Conversation with the Clutter Coach

Not long ago, at a networking event, I met Claire Tompkins, the “Clutter Coach.” A number of my clients have needed organization as much as the space planning solutions I provide, so I had quite a few questions to ask Claire.

But alas, since it was a “speed networking” event, there wasn’t time! (For those who are wondering, speed networking is a little like speed dating, but for professional purposes. Claire and I are indebted to Irene Kohler, moderator of Linking Northern California, for introducing us.)

This post, which is a conversation between the two of us, will remedy that. Given the comments and emails that earlier posts have occasioned, I know that storage, clutter, and “too many junk” are common issues. (Links at the bottom of this post will lead to several earlier posts I have written about related topics.)

<<<<<o>>>>>   <<<<<o>>>>   <<<<<o>>>>>   <<<<<o >>>>>

Nicolette Toussaint, Comfort and Joy Interior Design

Nicolette: Claire, I admire what you said on your website about your services being confidential and “non-judgmental.” Although I am scrupulous about confidences – I name clients only when they have given me permission and otherwise use pseudonyms – I’m challenged when it comes to being judgmental!

I confess that I once turned down a date with a guy mostly because the floor of his car was awash in six inches of flotsam and jetsam. To my mind, that meant that he wasn’t good relationship material. (Perhaps this was because I had recently divorced someone who filled every nook and cranny of the house with magazines, books, collections, clothes, you name it!)  I think that “Collectors“, like my ex, who can’t bear to part with anything, need to work with an organizer before they even consider interior design. While only a few people fall into my Collector category, everyone you work with needs organizing help. How do you go about working with your clients?

Claire Tompkins, the Clutter Coach

Claire: I like to find out what kind of person the client is. Usually I start by asking questions about the space in question:

• What works?
• What doesn’t work?
• Why is this here?
• Do you use this?

I ask obvious questions because I find that people overlook those themselves. Once I know what they want, I figure out what’s realistic and simple.

I have a client whose home office is also a playroom. This combo works for her because she likes being in the room with her children, and it’s next door to the kitchen so they are nearby when she’s cooking. For someone who needs quiet concentration time, I would not recommend this.

On the other hand, sometimes people set up fancy home offices that they never work in. When I ask why, it turns out that it’s too cold, it’s too far from the rest of the house, it’s too dark, it’s too noisy, they can’t hear the doorbell, etc. Personal work style and preferences have to be accounted for. Just because your house has a room labeled “home office” it doesn’t mean that you have to work there.

Nicolette: Your questions are similar to a questionnaire I use to create the “program” that guides my design work.

EcoSystem’s Bada table folds to become a love seat

Many of my clients need to create what I call “hybrid rooms” in their homes. You know, a kitchen-office, or a laundry room-play room. But I haven’t come across a playroom-office before. When I work with these rooms, I often recommend “convertible furniture” – pieces that can serve more than one function or change size.

Claire: Wow, that is some cool furniture! My focus is more on process than products, although I do recommend simple things such as using an artist’s taboret for office supplies because it can roll away when you’re not using it. Some taborets are unassuming enough to stay in view in the dining room and not scream “I work here too!”

Earlier, I mentioned the beautifully appointed office that isn’t used. I’ll suggest setting up a real work area in the dining room (there are often tell-tale items in there already). I like to work with what my clients have, and who they are, and keep it as simple as possible.

I look for ways that dining room workers can store their supplies so that they’re easy to put away. I urge them to get in the habit of stashing everything away in the evening and getting it out again the next day so they can use the dining table to eat. For those who rely on seeing a pile of paper to do the work, this is a challenge. In that case, we create ways to organize their workflow so they know what to do in the morning.

Nicolette: What common hybrid rooms have you seen? What combinations of activities work well, and which don’t?

Claire: Guest rooms are mostly underused, in my experience. Either they’re wasted space, or they become storage rooms, the bed piled high with boxes of Christmas ornaments, old tax returns, etc. I’ve recommended that clients ditch the bed and get a convertible sofa instead. If the mattress isn’t that comfy, they can top it with an Aerobed. That makes space to use the room for something else, such as an office or playroom. If a room is in use, it’s less likely to fill up with junk.

Nicolette: As a designer, I find that it’s not only important to have enough storage, but that the convenience of storage is also an issue. When I design a room, I make sure that the things that a person uses daily can be accessed without crawling on the floor or climbing on ladders. Recently, I planned a layout for a couple who was moving into a condo, and in the early stages of the project, I visited their old, pre-move apartment. Every available surface was piled high with books and papers.

This is exactly how the offices of the attorneys I worked with years ago -- at a nonprofit, public-interest lawfirm that shall remain nameless -- looked. I was afraid to walk in for fear of knocking over piles of "discovery" papers. But they knew what was in the piles.

I saw this as a symptom of poor planning, not as an indictment of their behavior – they seemed organized in other areas of their lives. But they really didn’t have places for newspapers, for books, and for projects that involved writing and reading papers. In their new space, I made sure that they had about a dozen baskets that would hold 8.5 by 11 inch papers and would fit neatly into their bookshelves. I also recommended hassocks that could be used for storing newspapers and books, and I used credenzas as room dividers. So far, their new place has remained neat. Can you tell me how, as an organizer, you help people who are drowning in papers?

Claire: The biggest challenges my clients have regarding paper is that they won’t put it away for fear of forgetting about it, or they resent doing the work of putting it away. So, making it easy and/or keeping it visible is paramount. Open shelving, literature sorters and stacking trays can help. For reading material, open baskets and containers near seating (where they will read) works well. I like the Pendaflex Pile Smart line of office products. They have a binder clip with a big label area on it. That way, you can pile papers, but they can be clearly marked with the clip. The label area is re-writable too. I am not against piles. I’m against not being able to find things.

Labeling containers is also helpful. I like your idea of having baskets on the bookshelves. For a unified look, they’d probably be all the same size and color. Labeling is good so it’s easy to see what goes in which container. I also think labeling has a motivating effect. When you see the label Dwell Magazine, you want to look around for one to put in there. It’s like doing a puzzle. Not everyone needs labels, but I have had clients whose lovely baskets eventually turn into miscellaneous catch-alls.

Nicolette: In some ways, designing interiors that help people to live happier and healthier lives is a bit like herding cats. I have owned cats for years, and I have had quite a bit of success in training them. For example, they trot off to their “den” at night when I give them the command! The secret is to observe and understand what they are inclined to do naturally, then bend that native behavior in desired direction, rather than trying to counter it. People are not all that different.

I got the idea of shaping a room’s interior around the occupant’s habitual behavior after reading a book written by journalist Amy Sutherland.  Amy used reward and non-response to condition her husband to perform chores, and then wrote a book about it. It’s called What Shamu Taught Me about Love, Life and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers.

Bada coffee table from BoConcepts. I love how papers can be tucked out of site in this coffee table.

I recently told a client to “observe the animal called Lena for the next week and tell me what her habits are.” I wanted her observations because if I understand my client’s natural tendencies, and learn what features of the built environment are helping or hindering a desired change, then I can re-design the room accordingly. In Lena’s case (that’s not her real name) she needed a place to hang book and gym bags that was near the door – not a dozen steps across the room and in a closet that was already too crowded.

Claire: What you told Lena is similar to what I tell clients when I coach them to “become a detective of your own life.” The idea is to watch yourself when you come in the house. Where do you put the keys, the mail, your bag, the newspaper? Does it all go in one place? What about your jacket? Then where do you go? Make things easy for yourself. If you have a front hall, put a table there that’s big enough to accommodate the mail and your bag. If you don’t, set up an incoming-outgoing station as close to the door as possible where those things can be parked.

Nicolette: Many of us here in the Bay Area live in small spaces. Do you have any special advice for us?

Claire: Well, the first step is always paring down. Deciding that you really can live without the spare blender in the back of the cabinet, the stack of magazines you’re going to read this weekend, etc. People keep a lot of stuff “just in case” or because they stopped using it but never got around to getting rid of it. As for occasionally used items, you should ask: Could I borrow or rent one? Could I make do with something else?

Before: Bookcases only

The second step is maximizing storage. This is a dance of using that hard-to-get-at space vs. being able to access things easily. Naturally, people want to just pick something up off a shelf without climbing up a ladder. The trick is to identify the things they want to keep but don’t use often. I had some clients who have a huge book collections and many of the books are over-sized; art books, coffee table books. They installed a bookshelf about 18 inches down from the ceiling that went around the kitchen, down the hall, and into the office. They have a portable library ladder to reach them. This saved two large bookshelves worth of space.

After: Shelves over the windows, partly resting on door frames.

Nicolette: I have used that trick too. Many older Bay Area houses have high ceilings, and it’s often quite easy to put a bookshelf above a door frame, or extend it across two door frames. The frames even help support the shelf. It’s not like you need to look at that photo book about the museum’s Samurai Exhibition every day.

But if you’re going to use that high space well, you need to be clear about what you’re going to store there. I’m going to specify a different width lumber for a shelf that holds over-sized art books than I would for paperbacks. Then again, a high shelf like that is great for things that are bulky and lightweight, such as guest pillows or towels. If I know that we’re going to store linens, I will probably specify an enclosed cabinet or a shelf that can hold storage baskets, because linens usually aren’t going to make good display items…

Claire: As a first step, it’s important to find out how clients want to use their space. Many times clients want to rush out to the Container Store and buy some cool containers. You probably run into this too. Clients who want particular pieces of furniture regardless of how they’re going to fit in or work with their lifestyle. I’ve often worked with folks who already went out and bought a bunch of baskets or boxes and they turned out to be completely useless. But they looked nifty!

Nicolette: Oh, yes! I had a client run out and buy a wonderful desk, only to discover that once it was in her office, she couldn’t open the drawers wide enough to get things in and out of them. And then there was the family of seven who didn’t have enough living room seating for everyone – but they did have an over-stuffed Chesterfield chair that had a footprint as large as a loveseat that would seat three people!

Claire: Encouraging clients to be realistic about how much time and energy they want to spend on organizing is really important. If they want their home office to look like Martha Stewart’s, they need to realize that she (or her assistant, more likely) spends a lot of time keeping it Martha-ized. I suggest that “done” is better than “perfect.”

Nicolette:  Some people – I call them “Collectors” – have trouble getting rid of anything. (I alluded to one, my ex-husband, at the beginning of this blog, and I wrote about Collectors in an earlier post.)  Have you encountered them? If so, how do you help them?

Claire: I write haiku poems about clutter. Here’s one about Collectors:

Museum lovers
Create their own collections
But lack the warehouse.

When Collectors really can’t part with anything, no matter what condition the things are in, it doesn’t work to apply logic. As you mentioned, this is a tricky topic. I will ask if there are other family members who would want some of the heirlooms. Sometimes I suggest photographing them. These days you can make lovely coffee table books yourself and that would be a great way to preserve and honor the memories associated with the possessions. Sometimes it works to sort the things and then have the client select the ten best from each category. Another tactic is to buy a display cabinet for the objects and then choose only what will fit inside it.

A dragon like the one that disrupted the honeymooner's home

The collection is about the past. I had a client who consulted me because his sweetheart feared there was no room for her in his life. His home was still full of stuff that belonged to his deceased wife. We worked on ways to honor his previous marriage, while still welcoming the present and future.

Nicolette: (Laughing) I have a very similar story about a newlywed couple who had quite a contretemps over a Mexican sculpture called a “alebrije.” Even though he liked primitive art, he hated this particular little dragon of hers. He knew that it was a souvenir of a trip his new bride had taken with her old boyfriend, and he just couldn’t stand to have his rival in a place of honor on the mantle of the fireplace!

Claire, I love your haiku. It’s so uncluttered! Did you know that I often end my blog posts with a bit of poetry? Would you mind being the poet laureate for this post?

Claire: Not at all!

Resource Links

• The Clutter Coach’s website
• Claire Tompkins’ blog (she has a great series on the “Seven Deadly Sins”)
• Comfort and Joy Interior Design website
• Comfort and Joy Interior Design space usage questionnaire
• Comfort and Joy space planning services
• Bada table on Inhabitat
• BoConcept Functional Coffee Table
• Leather storage ottoman from Improvements
• The Study Bed
• Pendaflex PileSmart Binder Label Clip
• Remodeling plans for a tiny apartment with all the amenities, from Comfort and Joy
• More on convertible furniture from Living in Comfort and Joy

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The Haiku of Clutter If I kick that box Under the desk one more time I’ll just have to scream. Storage ottoman from Improvements

A Finnish art student decided to inventory every object in her 250 square meter home (about 2,700 square feet) and present it as her thesis. Using archaeological methods, she found that she owned 6,126 objects. Here’s her analysis of how often she used each object: Never used objects – 1457 Objects used less frequently than once a year – 2209 Objects used once or twice a year – 1411 Objects used every month – 587 Objects used every week – 401 Objects used every day – 61

I Can See Clearly Now: Daylighting II

Want to see how the light will look before you spend money on remodeling windows, adding skylights, or repainting a room? If the answer is yes, have I got a story for you!

The room has a nice warm quality when lit with two different sources of artificial light. This is at 4:30 on a summer afternoon. (Note the yellow wood stairs that cover and shade much of the left side of the south-facing window.)

Here's how it looks at noon with the lights off. OK for computer work, but it's hard to read a book. Light comes from the south-facing window and an east-facing door that leads to the kitchen and living room.

I recently built a scale model of my dining room and tested eight ways to increase the room’s natural light. My tests yielded some surprises – insights that I will share in this post.

As you can see from my photos, it’s so dark that, without artificial light, the pink walls in my dining room/office look smoky gray. When the room was occupied only at night, this wasn’t much of a problem. However, as I have moved my design practice into the room, the lack of natural light has become an issue. There are multiple reasons for that:

• Human beings need full spectrum light for accurate color perception – a fact that makes natural light particularly important for visual designers.
• Humans also perform better in natural light. Studies show that adequate daylighting can increase building lease rates, reduce worker absenteeism and sick leave, increase production, result in higher sales, and speed patient recovery times in hospitals. It has even been shown to help raise student test scores and reduce tooth decay.
• Lack of natural light can impact mood. Like many other people, I suffer from SADS, or Seasonal Affective Disorder Syndrome, and natural light helps combat these blues.
• We waste a shocking amount of electricity lighting our buildings during hours when sunlight is readily available. I find this reprehensible for both environmental and economic reasons.

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I wrote about the first version of this model in A Light at the End of the Tunnel, Daylighting. That post contains much more information about the health and energy benefits of daylighting, as well as summaries of some daylighting strategies that I decided not to test on my model. For that reason, I don’t talk about them here, but you might find them of interest if you’re trying to lighten up your own dark room.

Match Wits with My Model

Before I share the results of my experiments with the daylighting model, I invite you to test your best guesses about what would most help to lighten the room.

Below, I have listed, in alphabetical order, the eight alterations I made to the model, giving each a two-letter mnemonic code. Take a moment to rank these options so that you can compare your predictions with the results of my experiments. (Put the number and code for the strategy you think would make the most difference first, the second-most effective strategy second, and continue until you have ranked all eight alterations in order of expected effectiveness.) You may be as surprised as I was by what worked, and what didn’t add much light to the room.

Here's where the window and stairs are on my house.

Here are the alterations I tested:

1. AW – All white - Painting the entire dining room white
2. CL – Clerestory windows. Cutting clerestory windows through the east wall of the room to admit more light from the living room (wide, short windows located up near the roof where you can’t see through them are called “clear story” windows)
3. MI – Mirror inside. Mounting a mirror on the sunny, west wall within the room
4. MO – Mirror outside. Mounting a mirror on the outside wall that reflects the most light in through the window
5. OS – Open Stairs. Replacing the solid wood stairs with openwork metal stairs that allow light to shine through
6. WE – Window Extension. Extending the dining room window up to the ceiling
7. WI -White inside wall. Painting the sunniest wall, the one that reflects the most light inside the room – white instead of pink
8. WS – White stairs and stairwell. Painting the outside stairs and stairwell white, leaving the room pink

My test results will be revealed at the end of this blog. In the meantime, here’s a bit more information about the model, and some photos of the changes in light produced by various alterations.

The Second Daylight Model

The daylight model; this is the same side of the house that is shown in the photo above.

To make the light in my daylighting model accurately show the changes I wanted to test, I expanded my original one-room model so that it would show both the main sources of light and the features that obstruct it. The expanded test model, the second daylight model, is shown at right. It includes:

• Yellow painted stairs that block much of window – they can be seen on the left side of the model and also in the dark photo at the top of this post.
• Door to kitchen – the door is at the center of the model. Here the kitchen is represented only by the tile placed outside the model. This is the same tile that is installed in the real kitchen, and it reflects a surprising amount of light.
• Living room – the space to the left of the door is the dining room. The main sources of living room light are the  window at the right side of the model and the door into the kitchen. Light from the living room enters the dining room through the door on its east side.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall?

Adding a mirror inside the room reflects light, but not as much as I expected.

Here's a surprise - look at how much more light the room gets when the mirror is placed OUTSIDE on the landing!

Painting the wall outside the window white reflects about the same amount of light as a mirror in the same spot.

A white wall, white stairs and whitewashing the black tar roof (unseen from this angle) reflects the most light of any of these options.

At the outset, I thought that placing a mirror to catch and reflect sunlight falling on the room’s west wall (right side of the photo) would brighten the room a great deal. One of my fellow designers suggested this idea, and I was eager to try it.

The prof in my Building Envelope class, however, was unenthusiastic. He noted, rather disdainfully, that this smoke-and-mirrors trick would make my room look like every third restaurant in downtown San Francisco!

I was surprised to discover that placing a mirror outside the window – as the photo at far right shows – brightened the room far more than a mirror inside the window.

What startled me even more, however, was the discovery that white painted walls, both inside and outside the window, reflected more light than mirrors in either position! This seemed counter-intuitive, but both experiments with the model and a review of ASHRAE tables confirm it.

ASHRAE is the acronym for the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers, and they have published extensive tables that list the reflectance of dozens of types of building materials and finishes. The reflectance standard for a perfect mirror is 100% (meaning that it reflects all of the available light) and is referenced as a value of 1.0. The aluminum foil I used in the model as a “mirror” is not perfect, but polished aluminum has a reflectance – or “R value” – of .8 to .9, and many mirrors are actually in that range too. So the foil probably gives us a good idea of how much light a real mirror would reflect.

A white masonry wall, according to the ASHRAE charts, also has an R-value in the range of .8 and should reflect about as well as the mirror. My model experiment not only confirms this, it also reveals that the reflectivity from white walls provides a much more even wash of light than the mirrors do. Look carefully at the light on the floor and ceilings in third photo at right and you will see this. In addition, you will see that the painted wall actually reflects light back into the depths of the room better than any of the mirrored options.

The fourth photo in this series shows that the room is significantly brightened when the outside wall, the bottom of the staircase, and the black tar roof outside the window (unseen in the photos here, but visible in the model above) are all painted white. The amount of light reflected onto the ceiling is substantially greater than in any of the preceding photos, and the wash of light to the right of the window reaches deeply into the room.

More Light from the Adjacent Room?

Clerestory windows were invented to let light into Gothic churches on the level above the stained glass windows that line the nave, and today, clerestory windows are often used in green buildings because they offer a great way to get to light travel from perimeter rooms into windowless interiors.

As you can see from the photos in this post, my room receives a lot of light from the east wall’s door that opens to the living room and kitchen. I had hoped that installing clerestory windows in that same wall would add light to my dark dining room – but it was definitely an option I would want to test before trying it in real life. While it was easy to add the little windows shown at left to my model, adding them to the house might be quite an expensive option. To add them, my contractor would need to pierce a load-bearing wall that provides support to the building’s upper floor. That’s not impossible, but it would necessitate reinforcing the wall, and that would add to the cost of the project. Unless the clerestory windows added a lot of light to the room, they wouldn’t be worth the expenditure.

That’s exactly what the model showed. The amount of light the clerestory windows added to the room was negligible – much less of an improvement than I would get from simply painting the east interior wall of the room a lighter color! (You can see the model’s clerestory windows in the photo at the bottom of this post.) So that’s a neat $5000 or so the model has saved me. Painting all of the walls white of course increased this effect.

Buying a Stairway to Heaven

The old, solid wood stairs at left. New, pierced metal version at right.

The most obvious barrier to daylighting in this room, of course, is those darn stairs. They not only block the view, but they also shade the window from the wonderful south light that comes into the kitchen and living room, and from light that would fall from the sky directly above the stairs.

Those stairs need to be rebuilt, and I have wondered whether leaving the risers open at the back of the stairs (or alternatively, putting a transparent material at the back of the riser) would significantly lighten the room.  Ryan Stroupe, from whom I was taking a green building course, suggested something even better: what if the stairs were made from a pierced or open metal grating? I tested that option by building a set of stairs for the model out of metal window screen; you can see the old and new stairs in the model photos above.

Here's the model after all eight alterations have been made. The best improvements came from painting the light well's surfaces white, raising the top of the window, exchanging the solid wood stairs for metal stairs that admit light, and painting the interior walls white. You can see that the clerestory windows, at top left side, don't add much light to the room.

My last change was to further open the room by extending the room’s window up as far as possible toward the ceiling. Obviously, this strategy would work best with open stairs and an open top landing.

Grand Finale

Drumroll, please! After all this testing and photo-taking, I can clearly see what’s going to work best, and you can compare your predictions to the results. Here’s how the eight possible improvements stacked up:

1. Open Stairs
2. Window Extension
3. White stairs and stairwell
4. White outside wall
5. Mirror outside
6. White inside wall
7. Mirror inside wall
8. Clerestory windows

Interesting, eh? How well did your predictions turn out?

If you’re thinking about improving the daylight in a room, here are some resources that you might find useful:

• David Darling’s Encyclopedia of Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living
• The Daylight Site – Great how-to’s about daylighting
• Seasonal Affected Disorder (SAD)
• Ten myths about daylight debunked
• Comfort and Joy Interior Design - the author’s design firm. Can I help you remodel a room, or build a model for you?
• Home Design Helpdesk – the author offers affordable, personalized interior design consulting and problem-solving every Saturday morning between 9 am and noon. (The Helpdesk number is (415) 690-7107, and rates are $25 for each 20 minutes of phone consultation).

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I Can See Clearly Now

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.

I think I can make it now, the pain is gone
All of the bad feelings have disappeared
Here is the rainbow I’ve been prayin’ for
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.

-Johnny Nash

Designing for the Day Your World Shrinks to a Single Room: TenderCare Beds

Recently, I got a phone call from a gentle soul named Gary Owens. He lives in Mississippi, thousands of miles away, and I have never met him. He’s a wood worker, a craftsman, and a caring person. He has devoted himself to bringing comfort and joy to his wife, Gina, and to others like her who are trying to live full lives from the confines of a hospital bed.

Gary has done this by inventing an easy and inexpensive way of turning a drab, institutional hospital bed into a handsome piece of furniture. You have to look carefully at the bed shown above to discover the support bars at the right near the pillows and the controls beneath the foot on the floor. The head and footboards that transform this bed from a medical necessity into a piece of furniture are available in half a dozen types of wood, and run around $500. They slip over the hospital bed’s headboard for an easy installation, as the photos below illustrate.

TenderCare headboard easily slips over the metal headboard of a standard-issue hospital bed

What’s more I liked Gary immensely! I was astonished that he sought me out on the net, and I thought I would do him a good turn by writing about him and his business, TenderCare Beds, in this blog.

Writing about Gary and his wife Gina is in keeping with the reasons that I started writing Living in Comfort and Joy. This blog is as much about the building the architecture of the second half of my life as it is about green building and remodeling our homes so that we can continue to live comfortably in them despite aging and the disabilities that so often come along with it.

As my regular readers know, I started Living in Comfort and Joy in an effort to do well by doing good – by sharing what I have learned about interior design, designing to accommodate disability, and green buildings. I hoped to become known in a new field, and in time, to build my own Comfort and Joy Interior Design business. While the visitor count on this blog (15,808 visits in the seven and a half months since I launched it) indicates that my interior design expertise must be much better known than it was a year ago, I can’t say that it has brought me any interior design clients (yet), or even inquiries about possible jobs. (I would like to go to work marketing a green building, home furnishings or architectural business for the next few years while I continue building my knowledge, skills, and clientele.)

While patience is not among my notable virtues, I’m trying to remember that the economy remains depressed, that even established interior design firms have little work, and that growing a new business takes time. Thus, I have resolved to keep writing this blog for a least a year, casting my bread on the waters in a spirit of generosity to see what washes back to me in the fullness of time.

Which brings me back to Gary Owens, who is not only a craftsman, he’s a good role model for me. He writes:

“My wife Gina and I were married in 1994. In February of 1998, our  lives changed forever, due to an extraordinarily debilitating disease. As in most cases like this, a standard in-home hospital bed is used. From day one, Gina was self-conscious about the institutional look of the bed. She not only had to deal with her illness, but the design of the bed didn’t let her feel at home. She hated it.

“My background is woodworking. To make her feel better, I designed and built her a beautiful headboard for her bed. From that effort, TenderCare Beds was born.”

Those us who are able-bodied (so far), spend one-third of our lives in a bed. On the few occasions when I have had to spend extended stretches in a hospital bed, I have come to loathe my surroundings. I recall feeling profoundly grateful for a small and gracious gesture I received from my mother-in-law during a week I spent in the hospital following a surgery. Reina came into my room with a small vial of Chanel Number 9, which she spritzed on my pillow. Thirty years later, I still remember.

I also remember feeling frustrated and oppressed by my own bedroom during the two months I spent recuperating from pneumonia. At that point in my life, I had hand-me-down furniture that took up too much space in very cluttered room. After spending nearly every waking hour from several months staring at it, I vowed that when I got the chance, I was going to design a bedroom set I liked – and one that would forever banish the clutter created by the extra pillows, hot pads, books and paraphenalia that cluttered my room.

Nicolette’s headboard: When closed, it reclines at a nice angle for reading. It opens to reveal a convenient storage compartment for extra pillows, trays, books, and heating pads.

My bedroom designs are shown at right – the headboard reclines at a nice angle for reading, and opens with a piano hinge at the bottom to reveal a convenient storage well.

I had my headboard created by a woodworker in Los Angeles during the time I lived there, but I have recently sent photos of it to Gary Owens, with the suggestion that my design might incorporate nicely into his transformative designs for hospital beds. (He’s promised to name the new headboard the “Nicolette” headboard if he creates one from my design.)

Having had these recuperative experiences, I can testify that Gary is really onto something important. Beauty, convenience, and comfortable surroundings are important to all of us, but doubly important to those whose bedroom becomes their whole world. That’s the case not only for invalids, but also for many older people whose mobility becomes impaired.

Not long ago, my friend Sonnie, who is now an octagenarian, told me that she spends most of her time in one largish room with a view. Her bed, her desk, and her kitchen are all integrated into this studio room, and she says that she would also like to entertain from that room. I can see numerous ways to make that dream a reality, and I hope to eventually be Sonnie’s designer in that quest.

TenderCare headboards come in multiple colors and woods.

What she’s envisioning is desired by many seniors and many disabled people. Those who have been reading Living in Comfort and Joy for awhile may remember me writing about the Space Planning class I took from Edwin Walters, and how he used reverse psychology to get his mostly young students to learn about the needs of the elderly by hiding articles about this topic in a folder entitled, “Top Secret: Do Not Read”. In that folder were articles that specifically described why good design is so important to those whose world has shrunk to a single room, and instructions to young designers on how to make a single room a place of comfort and joy for an older person.

While many interior designers have little sympathy or personal insight into the needs of the disabled and elderly, I’m happy to say that attitudes are changing. I’m happy to count among my friends multiple people who combine a deep understanding of the physical needs of the disabled and/or elderly, and with their human needs for intellectual stimulation, human connection, and beauty. Designer Wendy Hoechstetter – a former EMT turned interior designer is one. Gary Owens is another. And then, of course, there’s me!

I’m hoping that Gary and I will have the opportunity to collaborate both on some furniture designs and on some room designs, and that in time, I will be able to show you some space plans that I have done for clients whose world has shrunk to a single room. I will let you know how it goes.

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Coming Attractions on My Blog

A silk painting by artist Ellen Brook

When I started this blog, a bit more than six months ago, I wondered if I could find enough topics to enable me to write regularly. I have actually had the opposite problem – too many good ideas! My list of planned posts is almost as long as my movie queue at Netflix!

I thought it might be a good idea to share with you, dear reader, some of my coming attractions, and if you’re especially eager for any of them, you can let me know. So far, the “priority” has been simply to write about whatever topic appeals to me at the moment. But if you have requests, leave me a note and I will be happy to move a post forward in the queue.

Here’s what I’m planning:

1. Daylighting Part 2 – Photos of the experiments with my daylight model and what worked best to brighten my office/dining room
2. A Visit to Plyboo, the makers of beautiful bamboo floors
   
3. An interview with David Bainbridge, a pioneer in building straw bale houses
4. An interview with Ellen Brook, silk painting artist
   
5. An interview with a psychologist Dr. Michael Tompkins, author of Digging Out: Helping Your Loved One Manage Clutter, Hoarding and Compulsive Acquiring
6. An interview with Claire Tompkins, the “Clutter Coach,” a professional organizer, on how to overcome clutter
7. A post on ceramic tile, one of my (very-occasional) series on flooring options
8. A post on travertine, limestone, and marble flooring
   
9. A post on the best locations for and styles of skylights

If you’re particularly eager to read any of these posts, leave me a comment. I will be happy to change the publishing order. And if there’s a particular interior design topic you’d like me to cover, let me know that too. Living in Comfort and Joy is here to make you happy.

On the Loveseat? Or the Counseling Couch?

A newlywed couple I once worked with had quite an argy-bargy over a carved dragon. Who knew that a 6-inch long sculpture, much like the one here, could cause such a brouhaha?

Painted, hand-carved figures called "Alebrijes" come mainly from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Alebrijes, strange figures of dreams or fantasies, are painted in astonishing colors.

Kim delighted in that critter. Its bright colors looked great on the mantle of the  mostly-white condo she and Ed had bought, and it reminded Kim of the beaches in Cancun.

Ed hated it, hated it, hated it, hated it! He said so quite emphatically, and repeatedly, and in a way uncharacteristic of his normal soft-spoken self. “A matter of style, or something deeper?” I wondered. Ed liked color and primitive art, so why, Kim wanted to know, why had he taken such a dislike to this particular chatchka? The more she demanded an explanation, the less articulate he became. Because the conversation was starting to generate considerable heat, but no light, I decided to get Ed alone to see if I could slay this particular dragon.

It  turned out that Ed was suspicious of the dragon’s provenance. He knew that Kim had bought the carving in Cancun when she was there with a former boyfriend.

Although I’m an interior designer, rather than a marital counselor, I was able to quickly diagnose the problem: When Ed looked at  the dragon, he saw his old rival bearing his fangs and worse – the guy was occupying a place of honor on the mantle of Ed’s honeymoon home!

Half a Dozen Warning Signs: Rough Water Ahead

I’m not only skilled at banishing itty-bitty basilisks, I have also had fairly good luck in designing for couples. Having a background in psychology and communications doesn’t hurt, and generally, when my clients have disagreed, but I have been able to find an option that pleased them both. I will also confess to having pretty good instincts  for recognizing when the waters ahead are about to get choppy. Here are half a dozen classic recipes for discord:

1. The Defacto Designer – One person in the couple fancies himself a designer (usually a female) – but she doesn’t have the experience or education to know what will and won’t work
2. The Purist – One person is a design purist, insistent on a particular style, and views variation from that style as compromising his/her artistic vision
3. Newlyweds – It’s a new relationship and the partners haven’t developed joint decision-making skills
4. Cuckoo’s Nest - One partner is moving into a space that has been occupied for the other partner, alone, and perhaps for a long time
5. The Collector - One (or both) partners has collected a lot of belongings, and is highly resistant to parting with anything
6. The Elitist – One partner looks down on the other partner’s taste or background or discounts his/her needs

Why Working with a Designer Helps

The entry of a condo I recently designed for a wonderful retired couple. Ron and Claire occasionally disagreed, and then one or the other would tell me, "the management doesn't necessarily agree with this opinion." That was my signal to dig a bit deeper and come up with a creative option that made them both happy.

While there’s no panacea for domestic discord and designers can’t begin to muster the kind of skills a marital and family therapist brings to bear, working with an interior designer can help couples over some stumbling blocks. For one thing, a design professional should be able to look at each partner’s likes, dislikes and belongings, and find shared visual elements that unite the partners’ desires.

The fact that a couple wants to work with an interior designer in the first place, rather than just hashing things out themselves, also sends a good signal. It means that they want a neutral third party involved, and that brings with it a number of benefits:

• With both experience and formal education to draw on, a qualified interior designer is apt to see options that won’t have occurred to the couple.
• By repeating shapes, defining a common palette of colors, finding continuity in materials, or articulating a cultural or regional theme, the designer can take elements from each person’s taste, belongings, and background and weave them together in a way that visually enables “mine” to become “ours.”
• When there are three people involved, as opposed to two, there’s always a majority point of view, and the designer can play a mediating role.

If you’re designing or redesigning a love nest and looking for an interior decorator or designer to help you, it’s a good idea to pay attention not just to the person’s portfolio, but also to his or her interpersonal skills. Your goal isn’t just a handsome home, it’s a happy home, and what happens en route counts. You don’t want to wind up with a showplace home in which a resentful partner is giving you the cold shoulder. (That’s why, when working with couples, I’m always careful to make sure that the partner who holds the minority view – the one who doesn’t agree with me, the quasi-authority figure! – doesn’t feel marginalized.)

Having a professional like me in on the planning for a shared space can help in multiple ways.  For example, when one partner is a Purist, a professional who understands architectural history can sometimes suggest ways to meet both partners’ needs without compromising the style, or may be able to redirect the Purist’s design impulses in a way that’s more hospitable to his/her partner. Consider this scenario: The Purist wants a home  that’s International in style – all steel and glass, stone, neutrals and textures with no embellishment of any kind – and she declares that the pressed oak rocker that he got from his grandpa has to go.

He knows nothing about the International style, and this whole thing about “purity of style” totally escapes him. But he loved Grandpa Jo, and feels that, in rejecting the rocker, she’s going to be seen by his relatives a rejecting the family into which she has just been welcomed.

The designer might be able to redirect the Purist by letting her know that currently, the design trend is away from uniform styles and toward a more eclectic look. The designer may also be able to figure out a space plan that allows the Purist and the Family Man to have their visual and emotional needs met in different rooms, while still defining colors or motifs that give the over-all house a sense of visual continuity.

In the case of Newlyweds, or one partner moving into another’s nest, the designer can also play a moderating role. For example, I have used quizzes and weighted voting to help new partners develop a sense of shared style and make decisions on key pieces. I was extremely pleased (and somewhat surprised) when one gentleman took my advice and moved all of his things out onto the sidewalk in front of the apartment he had occupied for five years, then moved back in afresh when his new bride moved in. This allowed her to feel that she was creating a new nest with him. That’s far better than her being pushed into the crazy-making role of the cuckoo who moves into an already-occupied nest and tries to commandeer space for herself.

Professionally, I approach Collectors and Elitists carefully – and occasionally pass up the opportunity to work with them.  The following cautionary tales will explain why.

A Brief Interlude with the Purists

I have known of a couple cases where a couple has reached absolute deadlock. In one instance, a couple bought a fixer-upper house intending to remodel it and run it as a Bed and Breakfast. The B n’ B never quite got off the ground, because they never could agree on how to fix it.

As an overnight guest in their Boston home – it was  more of a rooming house than a B ‘n B at that point – I saw potential all over the fine old house. But it was shabby, and in dire need of maintenance. And the state of the house pretty much mirrored the state of the relationship. She was a Purist with a French Country Vision; he was a Modernist. Neither party was willing to trust the other enough to experiment, and neither was willing to compromise on their idiosyncratic view. They both just wanted what they wanted, and they could no more decide on a designer than they could agree on a couch, a color or a vacation destination. (Or as I learned subsequently from a mutual acquaintance, when to have kids, or how to behave at the marriage counselor’s office!) Listening to them at breakfast, I looked across at my own new spouse and thought, “Ah, let us not go there!”

I believe that’s pretty much what most potential guests decided about their B ‘n B as well.

What’s It All About, Alfie?

Most often, I see partners squabbling not over the style or color palette, but about a particular piece, as was the case with Kim and Ed. The disagreement usually isn’t about style at all, but about the psychological meanings that the people are assigning to the couch, or the lamp, or whatever. This is something I learned in the School of Hard Knocks.

My ex-husband, Dan, collected antiques, magazines, clocks, opals, flavored rum, magazines, you name it! One day while dusting, I accidentally broke a crystal tumbler that pre-dated me in Dan’s life.

To say that Dan was upset would be an understatement – and I spent months trying to replace it! The tumbler was one of a set of six that Dan had gotten from his dad, who had in turn gotten them as a gift in a pro-am golf tournament. The six tumblers fit on a silver platter that was engraved with the name of the tournament.  After writing and then phoning the British Isles, it turned out that the glass was a special edition, not a standard Waterford pattern, and it couldn’t be duplicated.

Dan held a grudge about that glass for many months. He said that if I truly loved him, I would be more careful with things he cared about. Vice versa, it also meant that if I was that careless with his glass, then I was going to be careless with him, personally! Huh? Why would he think that?

It’s All Just Stuff, Isn’t It?

If the Waterford isn't quite right...

Then how about the Royal Doulton?

I found Dan’s worldview odd because I draw quite a distinction between “stuff” and people. Stuff can almost always be replaced, and on the rare occasion when it can’t, then I know that there’s another, different furnishing or space solution that’s going to be equally delightful. If you can’t get Waterford, there’s always Royal Doulton, Baccarat, and Orrefors!

Dan, like other Collectors, did not share my worldview at all. Dan and his things were merged in a Zen-like state where they were all one. (In my experience, that “I am what I own” view is fairly common among young males who own trendy cars, but most, I think, grow out of it. I’m hoping that will also be the case for the young woman who answered my “who decides about home decorating” question by saying, “My boyfriend’s idea of decorating is hanging t-shirts from historic rock concerts on the wall!”)

But Collectors can be old as well as young. I recently assisted a charming 60-ish couple with a space-planning consultation. Their house is crammed to the rafters, not only with family, but with piles of books, toys, musical instruments, travel mementos, clothing, etc., etc., etc. When I queried them about what could be stored or moved, I quickly discovered that one of the partners was a Collector, for whom virtually everything belonging holds emotional significance. She can’t part with anything.

The lesson to be drawn from all of this is that, for Collectors, it’s not just “stuff”. It’s identity. That memorabilia  defines who they are, and changing it involves wrestling with emotional issues. (I will be writing more about these issues about in a subsequent post.  I’m interviewing a psychologist who has researched and written a book about the psychological mindset that underlies hoarding behavior.) For now, let’s just say that Collectors are a bit too complex for this blog post, and turn to some successful couples for advice on how they cope.

Good Advice: A Little Help from our Friends

With a little help from my Facebook friend Brian Howlett – a naturally gracious host who has a knack of drawing people into all manner of interesting conversations – I recently participated in an online discussion about how couples make home design decisions. Brian asked, “So you’re going to paint the walls and buy new furniture. who makes those decisions in your home?” Here are some the answers he got:

• Dian: LOL!!! We are extremely compatable when it comes to our tastes. …..so our issues are small like “the shade of wine” for the kitchen. We get a few samples, put them up and decide (is it too pink, is it too dark?). As for furniture, one of the things we had in common before marriage was our love for mission style antiques. After children that has changed some, but our tastes are still very agreeable.
• Stephanie: Me. And then I run a long campaign to convince my S.O. that it is the perfect choice.
• Joan: Paint color me, furniture we.
• Amos: She has me confirm the decision she already made.
• Patricia: Compromise, compromise, compromise!
• Honey: My partner and I are usually like (or at least similar) minded, so that helps. We each listen to the other’s ideas and then choose. We don’t always agree 100%, and it’s not a big deal to compromise. After all, it’s just stuff.

Honey Ward and her partner Sandy Davis

It turns out that in twosomes, just as in tumblers, there are lots of options that work. You might divide up areas of expertise (one partner does furnishings, and another does paint), have similar tastes, agree that one party is really in charge, or like Honey says, compromise. (Honey Ward, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a nationally known keynote speaker and a success coach who helps people to live happier and more conscious lives, so she has the credentials to offer good advice.)

Despite what some of my interior colleagues write and practice, I hold that designers should not be “arteests” who get huffy when their vision is “compromised.” It’s all just stuff, and a designer worth his or her salt should be able to think of many options.

During the Facebook discussion I mentioned earlier, several people had an interesting exchange about the emotional and spiritual values inherent in making decisions about interior environments, those places where we share the lion’s share of our time.

• Brian: So you’re going to paint the walls and buy new furniture. who makes those decisions in your home?
• Daigan: The Director and Senior Staff
  
• Nicolette: Which one of you gets to be the director?
• Daigan: I live in a Monastery, so there are other folks who make those decisions.. I just get to enjoy the results.
• Julie: How cool! how does one get to live in a Monastery?! unless they are a monk…?
• Daigan: And there you have it Julie!
  
• Nicolette: Fascinating, Daigan. Who decides what the furnishings will look like in a monastery? Do the people making those decisions know that their choices have spiritual impact?
• Daigan: LOL!  It’s Zen… Nothing has spiritual impact … or wait maybe everything does… or maybe it’s everything and nothing… hrmmm

This family - a minister, his partner and five adopted sons - lived in a modest house, and because the living room/dining room was so small, they had to eat in shifts. In a design project I called "Extreme Makeover, Ministerial Edition" I created a space plan and found multi-purpose furniture that let them eat together as a family.

That seems about right to me. It’s all stuff and none of it has spiritual impact – except that, subconsciously, it all does! We are deeply influenced by our surroundings. Light, color, temperature, sound, and space influence our feelings of well-being and contentment. (As the Zen Master said to the hot dog vendor, “Make me one with everything!”)

Our homes also influence how we relate to one another – whether we’re squabbling over closet space or cuddling on the couch. It’s important to create spaces that encourage shared activities and enable us to engage in important rituals, such as gathering as a family over dinner. As Brian put it, “Decoration and furnishings are an extension of ourselves, like clothing… we’ve lost the skill of compromise. To compromise means you have to sacrifice opinion in lieu of the prize you get from cooperation. A loving home is more important than a beautiful home from my perspective.”

For me that’s the whole point of a well designed interior. It needs to be arranged so it enhances health, happiness, and human connections. That’s what we’re all here for!

Visit Nicolette’s Comfort and Joy Interior Design website

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The Marriage of True Minds

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
Oh, no! it is an ever-fixéd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come’
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-William Shakespeare

No Longer Lost in Space

Claire's living room now

I’m told that mice prefer to skirt the walls of a room, avoiding the center. They don’t feel safe when they are exposed in open places. Some people have a similar reaction to the wide, open spaces of the Great Plains. Folks can even be stymied by trying to figure out how to place furniture in a loft or large room.

Wide open spaces can be daunting.

My friend and client Claire is certainly no mouse! She’s an extraordinarily self-possessed and capable person, but the living/dining area of her new condominium – pictured below and at left – posed problems similar to those encountered by mice.

Claire’s wry comment about this was,  “If I did what I usually do, and put the furniture around the edges, I would have just wound up with a big hole in the middle!”

A Spatial Puzzle

The solution to this particular lost-in-space problem wasn’t obvious to me either, at least not initially. The space is a bit like one of those 16-space number puzzles that hold 15 tiles. Each time you want to reposition one tile, you have scoot several others around to compensate.

Claire's living room a year ago. It was a big, bare box! The windows on the left face west.

While my clients’ needs imposed one set of problems on the room’s layout, the openness of the room imposed another. Somehow, the room needed to be divided into separate, functional spaces:

• a dining area,
• a living room conversational area,
• a media entertainment area, and
• a writing area that would highlight Claire’s large, antique roll-top desk.

As you can see,  the room is a large box that receives strongly directional natural light. Windows wrap around two sides of the room, stretching the full length of two walls. The largest wall of windows faces west, catching the low, slanting rays of the late afternoon and early evening sun.

This makes it difficult to figure out where to place the TV.  Judging from the placement of the previous owner’s satellite cable, a TV had been placed in the left front corner of the floor plan below, behind the red chair. This placement led to two bad options: It would either force viewers to squint into the sun, or they would have to struggle with a sideways glare across the TV screen.

Providing Face-to-Face Conversational Areas

The obvious solution to the TV viewing problem – placing the television so that the outdoor light enters behind the viewers, as shown below – solves the viewing dilemma.

However, it introduces other problems. When chairs are placed at a comfortable viewing distance in front of the TV, the resulting entertainment area takes up more than half of the room’s width. While this does leave enough space to place a couch and coffee table under the windows (which, in this 3-D image would be on the cut-away wall nearest you), it does not leave enough space for a separate conversation area. If a chair were to be placed on the other side of the coffee table, it would block the circulation path through the room and into the kitchen.

So how can the room be set up to enable people to have face-to-face conversation? The obvious  – but impossible -  solution would be to make the room six feet wider!

Instead, I hit on the idea of using the available living-room-to-kitchen circulation path for both viewing distance and a walkway. It was far easier to come up with this idea in a scaled plan than in the actual room, and I’m sure the movers would have been grateful had they known this.

Floor plan for the living/dining area. You can see a larger version of this by clicking on the image.

How many sitcoms have we seen in which the movers have to haul the heavy pieces of furniture here and there around the room while the new resident tries to figure out a floor plan?

Long before these particular movers came onto the scene, I had asked Ron and Claire to measure all their furniture. I had measured the room and created both the floor plan and the three-dimensional rendering you see here, so that I could shove all the furniture around on my computer.

By the day of the move, I had solved the space use problems and Ron and Claire knew exactly what they needed to move. This also meant that they could avoid moving furniture they didn’t need. In addition, it meant that I could be shopping for the few pieces they would need to acquire while they were busy packing.

A Few Other Needs

At the start of this project, I interviewed Ron and Claire in their previous apartment. In addition to getting a feel for their tastes, I asked them what annoyed them in their living space. Both of them said that they were pressed for closet space, and both felt that they were awash in papers. (Indeed, surfaces were piled with papers. Knowing Ron and Claire, I suspected that this had more to do with inadequate filing space than personal habits.)

Claire and Ron also wanted to highlight a few prized possessions: a large, antique roll-top desk, a glass-fronted china cabinet, a brass samovar, a collection of hats that commemorated their globe-hopping travels, and a three-foot high wooden giraffe decorated with thousands of daintily-strung seed beads. (You can see her in the photo above.)

The Old Switcheroo

My space plan, shown in the plans above, divided the living and dining areas with filing cabinets that serve multiple purposes: they allow Ron and Claire to file their papers, they serve as a side board for family meals, and they also can be used as a buffet surface for entertaining.

Entryway: the brass samovar claims a place of honor. Picture lighting and glints of metal brighten a windowless area.

The cabinets that were purchased are shown in the photo above. They are matched credenzas that are finished back and front so that they’re attractive seen from both their living room and dining room sides.

One key feature that opened the space to multiple uses was replacing two old recliners with new swivel recliners that would  lend themselves to a quick switcheroo – they could be oriented either for watching the TV or turned 180 degrees to face the conversation area. One of the new recliners that I found for Ron and Claire can be seen in the photo at the top of this post.

As noted earlier, the room’s architecture is functional and austere. That, coupled with a paint and trim scheme of neutral colors, meant that attention would be focused on Ron and Claire’s furnishings, rather than the room itself. Accordingly, I created a color palette that is keyed to a couple dominant and repeated hues that are featured in the rugs: a deep red, a celadon green, and an off-white.

Deep red is the most prominent hue in the tribal and Oriental rugs, and I used it to actively define the social spaces in the room. Two existing red leather chairs and an existing love seat were grouped around one Oriental carpet to create a face-to-face conversation area. Another handsome rug demarcated the TV viewing area, while yet another defined the breakfast area. These three rugs  are all visible in the photo at the top of this post, while still another is featured in the entry area shown above.

Showing Off Prized Possessions

Another featured item: Claire's china chest

Prized possessions, such as that beaded giraffe and the china chest at right, were featured prominently in this layout. “We have acquired lots of art and other things we really like over more than 40 years,” said Claire. “But we have never tried to get things that were particularly harmonious, so we didn’t know how to make them look good together. Nicolette managed to make the things we already had look good just by placing them differently and showing us how they coordinated.”

“Nicolette also recommended a few pieces of new furniture that we have acquired over the past year. She also helped us solve a long-term problem of not having enough storage for lots of papers and books. Her suggestion was creative and looks good in our condo.”

If you’d like to see more detail in the floor plan and 3-D plans for this project, I invite you to visit the space planning page on my Comfort and Joy Interior Design website.

The valances of the windows that wrap Ron and Claire's living and dining room areas are topped off by a collection of hats from all over the world. They're mementos of many trips abroad.

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Ready, Fire, Aim!
(A Cautionary Tale about Space Planning)

Since I’m pretty sure my ex-husband will never read my blog, I think I can safely tell a story about his foibles here.

My ex was (and presumably still is) a fabulous cook. Our Eddy Street condo had a huge kitchen, two ovens, and vast expanses of counter space. My ex loved to prepare complex and sophisticated dinners, and it wasn’t long before he began to complain that the refrigerator was too small. Dan (not his real name) wanted a big fridge that served water and ice through the door.

I measured the space and we went shopping. The features he wanted were available only on a significantly larger fridge. Dan looked at my measurements and insisted that the side-by-side refrigerator/freezer he wanted would fit.

I was dubious. The new fridge was stout, measuring only about half an inch less in width than the available space, and I wondered aloud about the lack of clearance on the sides. What if the bordering walls or the counters weren’t square, how would the unit get any ventilation, how would we clean, how… Dan interrupted my comments – more loudly this time – insisting that it would fit.

“But where’s the door going to swing? There’s no clearance…” I whined.

“No one needs to walk through the door when I’m cooking!” he fumed. By this time, the volume of our debate was starting to turn heads, so I gave up and let Dan arrange for delivery.

Okay, when the refrigerator was delivered, it did fit – but only when the doors were closed! The hinged side of each door was actually wedged shut by the counter on one side and the wall on the other.

That refrigerator sat protruding several inches into the doorway for months. It was replaced only when I decided to replace the chef who went with it…

A Light at the End of the Tunnel – Daylighting!

How is it that I, a person who is highly sensitive to light – or rather the lack of it – works in not one, but two spaces that are as dark as the inside of a pocket?

The presence of sunlight offers amazing benefits to a building’s inhabitants and/or owners. Studies have shown that adequate “daylighting” can increase building lease rates, reduce worker absenteeism and sick leave, increase production, result in higher sales, and speed patient recovery times in hospitals.

Here’s how dark my office is at noon on a sunny day lit only by the south-facing window and an east-facing interior door.

Here’s how it looks a few steps farther back with all of the lights turned on.

I know from experience that a lack of sunlight can cause depression. When I lived in gray and overcast Chicago, I suffered from SAD (Seasonal Affected Disorder). After a move to San Francisco my mood brightened, except during bouts of summer fog. Another move to the border of the sunny Mission District has helped me escape both gray skies and blue days.

Even so, the rooms where I spend the most time are both dark: my home office and my office at Alliant International University. At the university, I’m privileged to have a private office, but it’s an interior space that is wholly dependent on artificial light. My office has no windows. A vertical glass panel beside the door would let in light from the hallway – if there were any. On three occasions, I have been in that office during power failures, and each time, I was instantly plunged into darkness. I found my way out to the hallway – an equally dark space – only with the help of the small flashlight on my keyring!

View of artemisia bush from inside the daylight model, same south orientation as the real window. This shows how much light should be getting into the room - quite a contrast to the real room above.

Frankly, this is the result of bad design. Alliant’s offices were built out only about five years ago, and the folks who planned them should have known better. The offices on the perimeter do have some glass walls, and they do let light. But due to the floor plan, internal walls quickly block the light.

The layout spaces multiple windowless interior offices like mine along long windowless hallways. The halls receive natural light only at the far ends, rendering the glass insets beside the doors pointless. A couple times, when we had extended power outages, the staff wearied of waiting and groping in the dark and went home.

My home office, which doubles as a dining room, is not much better, however. You can see the problem in the photos at the top of the post. I have complained to the management. The manager (me) has assured the tenant that despite serious fiscal limitations, there are some possible options for brightening up this dark space. In this post, I will tell you a little about a model of the room I have built, and how I’m using it to weigh my options for improving the room. Later (perhaps quite a bit later, given the current economy), I will tell you about how my lighting renovations come out.

Modeling the Room

I have created a scale model to test changed paint colors, a light shelf, a light reflection pad, above-head-level clerestory windows, and changes to the reflectance qualities of the surfaces outside the window. Eventually, I will also need to redesign the outside stairs that partially block and shade the room’s one window, but I decided to start by seeing how much I could lighten the room with the easier, cheaper, indoor fixes.

The scale model in the garden. The camera opening is facing you and the windows of the room look south, in the same orientation as the actual room. What the window "sees" is that artemesia bush, the view shown in the previous photo.

The first steps in this experiment have involved testing how the surfaces outside the room impact the light and color inside. I’m conducting my tests using the scale model, pictured at right. This little box is made of foam core, which is easy to use, but too translucent for a daylight model in most cases. But in this instance, the interior walls have been finished with the same wall texture, flat pink latex wall paint, and white gloss wood trim enamel, as in the actual room. The paint and its underlayment (rubber cement sprinkled with grainy brown flour to create wall texture) make the foam board opaque.

The real room (pictured at the top of this blog as it looks when lit by artificial and natural light together), is nine and half feet wide, 11 feet long, and has a 10-foot high ceiling. All of this, plus the window and doors, have been replicated in the  model at a scale of 1.25 inch equals 1 foot. The model even includes an appropriately placed picture rail and high baseboards similar to those in the real room.

Why Daylighting is a Bright Idea

With all the lights on, the room pictured at the top of this blog is fairly attractive – and one made even more attractive by my cat Bridget, who is sitting on the table. What’s wrong with turning on the lights, you might ask?

As it turns out, quite a few things. It takes energy to keep those lights burning. As much as one-third of your total energy bill may be going to light your house.

A beautifully daylit room

To my way of thinking, that’s ridiculous! To adequately light a space, you need to capture only about 2% of the outside light, and all that’s required for that is proper fenestration. But over the past couple decades, architects, who have been DUI (designing under the influence) of cheap oil, haven’t thought much about daylighting and energy efficiency.

Happily, that’s changing. With buildings responsible for gobbling up 38.9% of America’s total fuel – more than industry (32.7%) and more than transportation (28.4%) – many building owners are undertaking energy-efficiency retrofits. One example is Chicago’s Sears Tower, which has just been rechristened the “Willis Tower” by its new owners.

The Willis Tower, like its glass-box cousins, bleeds energy. This year, it’s getting a $350 million sustainability retrofit that will reduce its base electricity use by up to 80 percent. Like me, the Tower’s owners have little ability to change the building’s basic shape, but they are replacing 16,000 single-pane windows with thermally efficient models and are also installing “daylight harvesting” systems that dim the artificial lighting when the sunlight is adequate. They expect to save up to 150,000 barrels of oil – megabucks – every year!

Green is for Greenbacks

This might be a good place to note that energy costs drive both efforts to improve daylighting and efforts to improve the thermal performance of the building’s envelope. A few months back, in a post entitled “Saving My Energy for a Greener Tomorrow“, I wrote about plugging heat leaks in my house. Last month, I found out how effective my investment of a couple days time and around $100 had been. I received a rebate check from PG&E for reducing my energy use, and that prompted my husband Mason to compare current and past utility bills. A year ago, our June bill totaled $142, and this June it was $49. Since the house was fully occupied both months – Mason is retired so he’s there during the days – and the weather was quite similar, I think the credit goes to mostly to me.

But the financial benefits of daylighting aren’t limited to energy savings. One big box store noticed that the skylit-half of its store consistently showed 40% higher sales than the side that was artificially lit. Wondering whether that might be due to unpopular merchandise or to the way it was displayed, they flip-flopped the store layout, so that the slower-selling products were now under the skylights. To their astonishment, they found that the under-the-skylight sales pattern persisted. This chain is now working on installing skylights in all their stores.

Health Benefits of Natural Light

Natural light also has a positive impact on human health. It makes us feel happier, perhaps because we feel more connected to the environment. We also see a fuller spectrum of color in daylight.

But there’s more to it than that. The depressive impact of SAD (Seasonal Affected Disorder) – also known as “cabin fever” – is well documented. Studies show that people who suffer from SAD exhibit many of the signs of depression: sadness, anxiety, irritability, lack of interest in their usual activities, social withdrawal, and inability to concentrate. They often suffer from fatigue, lack energy, crave sleep and carbohydrates, and experience increased appetite and weight gain.

Less well known are several studies done in schools, where natural light has been linked to reduced absenteeism, higher test scores, and even to less tooth decay!

Meanwhile, Back in My Office

Because the daylighting model is turned about 30 degrees and facing southwest, there's far less light on the right side wall. It's also interesting how much what's outside the window affects the interior color. Compare the color of the walls here, with the San Diego red bougainvillea reflecting on them, with the image above, where the green from the artemesia creates a complement effect that greatly tones down the pinkness of the room.

It’s far easier of course, to orient the windows correctly in the first place than to later attempt to correct the problem – as I will be trying to do with my office/dining room. In my case, the room should have adequate light.

As the daylight model at right shows, the south-facing window gets quite a bit of light. Light also comes through the door on the left side of the room – though not quite as much as this model would indicate. In reality, that door opens into my living room, a space I have not yet added to the daylight model. My living room does have adequate light, but it filters the light that enters the dining room.

The real problem here can be seen in the photo at the top of the post: wooden stairs with closed backs block much of the light that should be entering my office. To fix this problem, I will need to have those outside stairs rebuilt in addition to changing the inside of the room.

What kind of changes can help improve daylighting in this room – or one you want to brighten up? Here’s a list, starting with the simplest and moving to the most difficult and costly:

• Change of wall color: Light colors reflect significantly more light, and a change to a wall inside or outside can help. I will be repainting some walls inside my model to test this. I will also be experimenting with changing the color of the “ground” surface outside the window; currently, that landing is covered with a black tar roof. I would get more reflection if that surface were a light color.
• Mirrored wall: Mirrors reflect light; I will be experimenting with putting mirrors on the wall opposite the windows, and also with hanging something reflective outside the window.
• Light shelf: Light shelves are horizontal panels that are placed near the top of window and used to bounce light into the depths of a room. I’m not sure I have enough direct sunlight to make one work – at least until the stairs are redesigned to let light through – but this, too, is easy to test in a model.
• Light-deflecting panels hung from ceiling: I have seen these in only one place, the LEED-certified offices of the Energy Foundation in downtown San Francisco. In that office, interior designers have hung a V-shaped panel from the ceiling over a conference table. The angled sides of the panel catch light from the windows and reflect it down toward the work surface, brightening a room that is otherwise somewhat dark. My room is shaped somewhat similarly, and I’m eager to try this approach.
• Drop ceiling: The best light comes from the tops of windows, at eight feet and above, and windows are most effective when they directly abut walls and ceilings. The top of my window is separated from the ceiling by a two and a half foot margin. The ceilings throughout the house are 10 feet up, and it may be that much of my available light is escaping up into the area above my picture rail. An experiment with the box will tell.
• Install clerestory windows: Those wide, short windows located up near the roof are called clerestory windows, and they are great for letting light travel from perimeter rooms into interior rooms. Installing clerestory windows probably would let more light travel from my living room into my dark dining room – but it might be an expensive option, because to add them, my contractor would need to pierce a load-bearing wall that provides support to the building’s upper floor.
• Install skylights
• Install tubular skylights: I can’t add a skylight in my room (because of that upper floor), but some tubular skylights can channel light down inclined paths by reflecting it down a tube, and I might be able to use one of these to import sunlight into my space.

Resource Links

• David Darling’s Encyclopedia of Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living
• The Daylight Site – Great how-to’s about daylighting
• Seasonal Affected Disorder (SAD)
• Ten myths about daylight debunked
• Comfort and Joy Interior Design

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It was the sun that made ancient Egypt prosperous, and they worshipped that life-giving source of energy. The god Ra, the god of the sun, was regarded as the source of everything.

Living Large in Small Spaces

A small space should be designed with the elegance of a Swiss Army knife.

How so? It should be convenient and pleasant to use. It should anticipate every daily task you do, providing all manner of wonderful accoutrements that open, neatly serve one purpose, then fold, swivel, and pop into another configuration, allowing you to do something altogether different. What’s more, the room and its furnishings should do all this while looking as sleek and beautiful as – well, a Swiss Army knife!

The accordion-like center that allows the XPand table to grow.

The XPand table comes in three sizes and all can grow in length without leaves or hardware. The medium sized table stretches from 63 inches long to 82 inches long.

Although I own three of those canny little knives, it wasn’t until I began researching this blog that I learned that the Swiss Army knife’s design has been included in the New York Museum of Modern Art and Munich’s State Museum of Applied Art. So I’m not alone in finding design inspiration in this humble implement.

This post will be devoted to handsome and fiendishly functional pieces of furniture that, like Swiss Army knives, sleekly serve multiple purposes. Here’s what I have found:

• the Bada multi-tasking table that turns into a love seat,
• Murphy beds that disappear behind bookshelves,
• a Study Bed that transforms into a desk,
• an XPand table that stretches to welcome company without adding leaves,
• Silla Garda chairs that divide and multiply,
• children’s furniture that grows, flexes, and offers fun places to play,
• a couch that turns into a bunk bed, and
• storage that banishes clutter.

Furniture like this is what you need to live large in a small space!

Small is Beautiful

Small dwellings offer environmental advantages. A small house costs less to heat and cool. It requires fewer resources to build, and at the end of its usefulness, there’s less to bury in a landfill. A gentleman in Texas by the name of Brad Kittel builds charming, milk-truck-sized houses from 99% salvaged materials to make that very point. Jay Shaffer has put together his Tumbleweed Tiny Houses for similar reasons. While their houses are bit too small for my taste, I do subscribe to Susan Susanka’s “Not So Big” house philosophy. Susanka encourages her readers to invest in good design and detailing, making a smaller house truly livable. (She’s not an advocate of economy or frugality, but favors quality over quantity.)

EcoSystem’s Bada table folds to become a love seat

In this age of super-sizing, my love of small spaces may sound contrarian. But among all the interior design tasks I perform, I get the most joy from solving the three-dimensional puzzle of the perfectly planned small house. I get a thrill when a piece of furniture that I have measured and chosen drops perfectly into its allotted spot, wasting no space and looking as though it was created to be there. I enjoy designing original cabinets and window seats that add balance, convenience, and function to an odd dogleg in a floor plan. I get a charge out of finding a bit of wasted or forgotten interior real estate and recovering it in the form of a closet or a china hutch.

It’s even better when I can work this magic using things that are already at hand, local, or re-purposed to some clever end. In my fantasies, I’m the McGyver of interior design, whipping out my Swiss Army Knife and transforming a dozen left-over thread spools, an abandoned automobile hood, and a broken dresser drawer into an incredibly cool coffee table.

In reality, I’m not that inventive, but Ecosystems Bada table, shown above, is! It’s made from reclaimed walnut, and with a flick of the wrist, it changes into love seat.

How many chairs do you see? You could sit on any of these chairs, but these three seats come from just two Silla Guarda chairs. The chair on the left has been pulled apart to double the original seating.

The Guarda Silla chairs shown at right are equally clever. Designed by Alberto Villareal, they are like Russian nesting dolls. The chair’s outer shell is made from smooth white Corian. That shell, seen empty on the far left, slips over the redwood core at the center of the photo. Together, the shell and core make up the two-tone chair shown on the right side of the photo. When you need more seating, you can pull the wooden chair out of the Corian shell to form two chairs, both equally functional.

Strive for Simplicity

In a small room, you should strive for a visual harmony. Monochromatic color schemes and neutrals tend to make rooms seem larger, and coordinated furniture and wall colors will also make the space seem roomier. Another good trick is to use see-through surfaces, such as Lucite and glass. Reflective metal surfaces and large mirrors will reflect light and visually open the space as well.

A kaleidoscope of colors, dizzying detail, or a backwash of books, papers, remote controls, wires, or tools is to be avoided.  Visual complication will make a small room feel cramped. That’s why it’s important to be able tuck things away or close a closet door on clutter.

BoConcept Functional coffee table comes in white lacquer, walnut, black-stained oak and wenge veneer. Size: 13"H x 44 3/4"W x 31 1/2"D. From $1,099.

In a small living room, a coffee table like the BoConcept “Functional Table” shown here will give you a convenient spot to store small objects such as books or remote controls. Its separate table tops will provide flat, raised and stable surfaces for dining or working, so it accommodates two of the most common activities that take place in living rooms and dens.

Planning is Crucial

Frankly, I think that designing for a small space is far more challenging than designing for a large one. It requires far more planning because you need to effectively use every bit of the floorplan while being sure to leave enough room to circulate around the furniture. It requires more shopping because the difference between a 62 inch long love seat and a 65 inch love seat may mean the difference between being able to open the door and having it wedged shut! Small spaces also call for a lot of attention to storage, and that, in turn, often means designing and installing built-in shelving and closet hardware.

“Doc” has removable covers and transforms into a bunk bed. From Bon Bon Trading.

What’s more, in a small dwelling, you don’t have the option of devoting one room to  single purpose. Today’s McMansions can come with multiple bedrooms, an office, a dining room, a family room, a kitchen, a mud room, a guest room, a library, an exercise room, a laundry room – and one heck of a big heating bill. In a small space, however, you’re far more likely to wind up with multipurpose spaces. Here are some common ones:

• a kitchen/laundry room,
• a bedroom/study,
• a library/guest room, and
• a dining room/office.

The Doc sofa shown at right would be a good choice for an older couple whose library needed to also be able to serve as a guest room for grandchildren who visited every now and again.

Another fascinatingly flexible bed – one that a teenager would love – is the Study Bed. It’s hard to find the words to describe how the Study Bed folds and rotates a double-sized bed into the wall to reveal a good-sized desk. It’s even hard to show in a series of photos, so if you’re curious about, I encourage you to head on over to YouTube to watch the video of the Study Bed in motion.

Grouping Functions

The trade-offs of using spaces for multiple functions complicate both furnishing and storage, and the answers about which functions to group together aren’t always obvious. For example, what if there’s just one unallocated room, and you need a yoga retreat, a mud room and a children’s play area? How are you going to make sure your downward facing doggie pose doesn’t wind up with its nose in mud left over from the kids’ galoshes? Will you need to rout the Space Invaders before you can achieve yogic repose?

Combining these functions would require superb storage and a lot of attention to flooring. If you had a comfortable rug that could be rolled out just for yoga, and then easily stored out of sight, this combination might work.

However, it’s better to group noisy activities in one area of the house and quiet functions in another. Doing that also involves thinking about the chronology of the family’s day. If the kids are going to home playing at the same time you want to do yoga, perhaps your yoga retreat should be designed into the bedroom, the living room, or the kitchen?

Tagei table opens to reveal bench with side tables. Designed by Akemi Tanaka; links below lead to Futaba, another nice convertible sofa by Tanaka.

The redesign of one room in a small dwelling frequently causes a domino effect. I find that accommodating a change in one room often requires moving functions or furnishing in another room as well. In the case of the yoga retreat, while there may not be enough floor space for a self-respecting cobra to stretch out in the living room right now, there could be.

The answer might be to use the spare room for a play and mud room only. You could practice yoga in the living room if you replaced your bulky coffee table and that seldom-used armchair with something like the Tagei table at left. (Tagei means versatility in Japanese.) This table/bench combo would free up the floor space you need for daily exercise, and it will easily open into seating for the occasional buffet or cocktail party.

Provide Lots of Storage

My final tip on furnishing small spaces is to provide plenty of storage, particularly units that do not protrude into the room. Your storage might be built in – like the closet I discussed in last week’s blog – or it might be a wall system. (If you like Asian-inspired design, there’s a firm called Green Tea Design that creates some very handsome wardrobes and wall systems using wood recycled from old Korean barns.) It’s often effective (if counter-intuitive) to shrink the room’s footprint slightly by creating a full-width wall for a closet or wall system. When the view is uninterrupted by edges, it appears less busy. Visually, a whole-wall system intrudes into the room less than a dresser or breakfront would.

Modern Murphy beds take the same approach, and they often include options for shelving and closets. Some include desks and drop-down tables that really make them more like wall systems than beds. Hardwood Artisans has a nice selection of Library Wall beds. The Wallbed Factory, which has an active green initiative, offers library and wallbeds with plenty of storage features, and prices ranging from $2,100 to around $5,000. Flying Beds offers a Murphy bunk bed, a library bed and also a computer bed.

Who You Gonna Call?

So there you have it, a whole passel of solutions for shaping up your small spaces. The links below will help you explore all of your options save one.

If it turns out you don’t care for measuring, drawing floor plans on quadrille paper and cutting out little chunks of paper to represent your furniture, you can call for help. There are odd souls around who actually enjoy wrestling with the three-dimensional puzzles of space planning. I’m one of them. Like my fellow interior designers, I’d be happy to help!

Tao by Italian design firm Colico. The two complementary pieces, perfect reflections of one another, can be transformed from two chaise lounges to a double bed. Used as sofas, Tao can seat up to 10. It will also function as a room divider.

• Bada table on Inhabitat
• BoConcept Functional Coffee Table
• BoConcept Sofa Bed
• Colico Design: Tao lounges
• Comfort and Joy Interior Design
• Cayman leather sofa/table/bed/chair
• Comfort and Joy Interior Design (Nicolette’s firm)
• Crib/Bed by Oeuf on Inhabitat
• Doc Sofa/Bunk Beds from Bon Bon Trading
• Green Tea furniture’s website
• Flying Beds
• Futaba folding couch on Inhabitat website
• Hardwood Artisans Library Wall Bed
• More transformable furniture from Urbanist blog
• Pikolino Child’s Chair-Bed Combo
• Pikolino Play Ottoman and Storage
• Pikolino Wave Seating for children
• Reversica TV and bookshelves
• Silla Guarda chairs
• Storage benches online
• Tiny House blog on Murphy beds
• Tiny Texas houses
• Tagei Bench/Table: Inhabitat website
• The Study Bed
• Trix Armchair or Lounge Chair
• Xpand bamboo lattice table: Inhabitat website

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When God Made Space, She Made Enough of It

Have you ever complained that you don’t have enough storage space? I’m willing to bet that you have – and I’m also willing to wager that you’re at least partly wrong. Although the lack of closet, book, filing, and storage space is the single most common housing complaint I hear, I find that it often results from using the space that we do have rather poorly.

The window of Meg's kitchen as it looks now, with a book case under the window. The left door leads to a closet; the right door opens to a bathroom.

Take my friend Meg, who recently moved to the wine country. Like most retired ministers, Reverend Meg Whitaker-Green has a lot of books. A gifted photographer, she also has hundreds of photos. But her house was built as a cottage and has only two tiny clothes closets – each about three feet wide and two feet deep. The linen closet is so tiny that it holds only towels; sheets must live elsewhere. Meg would like to rent out her house when she travels, but right now it’s too cluttered.

With tongue in cheek, I could say that she has no vacancy right now because the place “is booked solid.”

Here's how I envisioned more book storage. The high shelf would be easy to install because the closet and bathroom door frames would support the sides, while the window frame would support the back. Brackets would be mounted into the internal frame that supports the window, holding the middle so it doesn't sag under the books' weight.

Except for the baths, every room has at least one book case, and every one is stuffed solid! Yet there are still books piled on the kitchen table, on the desk, on the hearth, on the mantle… on almost every flat surface, including the floor.  Clearly, Meg needs to find more and better ways to house her beloved books.

That’s the kind of challenge I love!

Although Meg insisted that I had been invited to rest during my visit, and not to work, I just couldn’t help myself. I can no more keep myself from solving spacial puzzles than I can prevent myself from reading the promotional drivel on the back of cereal boxes. As I moved around her house, I kept seeing one “wasted” space after another. There were many ways to solve Meg’s storage problems.

Look to the Heavens for Help

This hotel shelf is mounted in my bathroom to provide over the door storage.

While sitting at Meg’s kitchen table, gazing at the window, I spotted the empty space above the window and envisioned the book shelf illustrated above. Heavens! This would be a great spot to keep volumes that aren’t often needed, such as Meg’s theology texts and over-sized art books.

In my own house, which lacked closet space, I installed the “hotel shelf” shown at left over the bathroom door. Meg could do the same in her powder room. Because the toilet blocks access to the wall, and because the wall also holds the TP dispenser, it’s shielded from traffic. Even a tall person wouldn’t bump into the shelf. If Meg moved the towels there, she would be able to put her sheets in the linen closet. (A note about the title of this blog: I have no special knowledge about the gender of god. But since the Reverend Whitaker-Green is a feminist minister, I’m assuming that Meg addresses god as “she.”)

What’s Over the Refrigerator?

Meg also has a problem with finding a spot for her photos. Because they need to be kept dry, they can’t be stored in the basement. Right now, they are piled on the floor near her desk.

This handy step stool doubles as a seat next to the bath. Designed for porters on railroads, the Pullman 12" high step has a built-in handle and is easy to move. This stool costs less than $20 at Stacks and Stacks.

During breakfast, I spotted a home for Meg’s photos – over the refrigerator! A cabinet is mounted alongside the refrigerator, and it reaches the ceiling. But there’s no parallel cabinet over the refrigerator – just a big, open box of space. Given the height, depth, and width of the refrigerator, that space is about 30 inches square and three feet high. I have a similar space above a stackable washer and dryer, and I use that space for storing large, rolled-up architectural drawings. Meg could use her warm, dry, over-the-fridge space in a similar way.

To reclaim this forgotten spot, Meg should ask her carpenter to build a box to fit the space. It should have horizontal shelves; it could optionally include a hinged front door. Because Meg’s cabinets are painted, rather than wood-stained, this box will be easy to finish, too. She can match the color by removing one of the painted wooden knobs from the front of an existing cabinet door and taking it with her to the paint store.

Look for Hidden Spaces

Unfortunately, many houses have been designed – or even remodeled – without enough attention to space planning.

Both of the older houses I have remodeled included odd doglegs, uselessly shallow closets, and mysterious enclosed dead spaces that could be effectively re-purposed for storage. In my current house, only two of the three bedrooms had closets. Those odd little spaces were only about one foot deep – far too shallow to hang clothes! After I retrofitted them with shelves that used the space efficiently, I immediately began looking for places to put functional closets. (There’s a photo of an efficiently redesigned narrow closet near the end of this blog.)

The turquoise areas in the floor plan below show where I found space for closets. I enclosed one end of a bedroom to create the 10-foot-wide closet pictured at left. Note the white sliding doors above the mirrored doors. These wooden doors enclose a somewhat inaccessible space that is used for storing Christmas lights, back taxes, and memorabilia.

When you plan your storage, you should place the items you use daily close to where you need them. For example, our everyday clothing is located behind the mirrored doors. Holiday supplies, out-of-season clothes and items you rarely need should not be taking up space in your most-accessible storage areas.

As you can see in the floor plan below, I created a second closet by enclosing an odd dogleg in the hallway between the bathroom and dining room. This created a much-needed coat closet near the front door. I saw no need to remove the existing door into the dining room, and this closet now has doors on either side, making it accessible from both the entry hall and the dining room.

If you’re looking for tips on how to better use closet space, you might want to visit my Comfort and Joy Design website. You’ll find great ideas in the Solutions Gallery and also on the Space Planning page.

Floor plan of the entry way in the author's house. The gray walls are original and the turquoise spaces indicate closets that were added in minor remodeling. The yellow rectangle shows where walls probably enclose nothing but air. This dead space was likely created by an unimaginative contractor who installed the tub and then found that he had left-over space at its foot. This may in time become another closet that opens into the dining room.

What’s Behind the Wall?

The website for Apartment Therapy New York has a great article on using space between the studs. The photo shows a vanity alcove that has been placed between the studs; click the image to visit the full article in Apartment Therapy.

Unless you’re friendly with contractors or have done some remodeling, you might not have thought about what’s behind the surface of your walls. Most modern residential walls are formed by a half-inch-thick sheet of gypsum board (also called “drywall”), which is like plaster. Older houses’ walls are formed by plaster on top of lath, thin wooden strips that look like they came from orange crates.
Under these plaster surfaces are parallel uprights called “studs.” Studs are usually made of two-by-fours, boards that nowadays measure slightly less than four inches wide and two inches deep. They are placed at 12 or 18 inch intervals, and on rare occasion, every 24 inches. Between them is open space.

That space can provide room for insulation, electrical wires or plumbing. However, in many cases, it’s just an open area. Although the cavity is not deep, its space can be used for recessed storage. For the vanity shown here, a space has been cut between studs, and then finished in tile that matches the bathroom walls so that the assembly looks like it was designed in from the start.

If you decide you’d like to recover some of the space inside your walls, get a contractor’s help.  Your shelving will need to be placed between the electrical outlets on the wall. Even in places where you don’t see outlets, wires could be running inside the wall to an attic or basement. Hidden wires could be severed when you cut into the drywall. (Whoever remodeled my current house managed to cut through all of the phone wires! When I moved in, not one of the three phone jacks was working.) In addition, some homes have heating and cooling registers in the floor; if this is the case and the house sits on a concrete slab, duct work will be positioned between wall studs.

If you have an unfinished garage or basement, however, the space between the studs is easy to use. You can even buy “Stud Buddies“, pre-made shelves that can be quickly mounted as storage space for tools and other small items.

Vertical vs. Horizontal Space

Recently, when Meg wanted to frame a photo, she tried to do it on the carpeted floor. Having tried that myself, I can testify that it doesn’t work. Matting and framing require a stable, unmoving surface. Accordingly, Meg has been shopping for a credenza. That will work, and it won’t take up any more floor space than her stacked photos are currently occupying.

Built in drawers recapture the open space under the stairs

But a credenza may not be the best solution: it will not use the space

e above the work surface, nor will it extend the full length of the wall. I suggested two options:

1. Install modular shelving above the credenza, with the wider shelves placed higher so that they don’t cramp the tabletop work space, or
2. Have a carpenter build a box that extends the wall’s full length, and include horizontal shelves sized for the photos. She can install a counter top on the workspace (she can probably even find a used counter top and recycle it for this purpose). By placing a sheet of glass over part of it, she can create an area where she can cut with Exacto knives without gouging the counter top.

Meg’s credenza v. cabinet decision illustrates a couple of key storage principles:

• Determine whether you need horizontal or vertical storage space and design the closet or shelving to accommodate those needs.
• If you’re pressed for storage and spot usable space, use all of it – don’t leave a hole at the top or gaps at the side. Often, when people purchase furniture, they fail to measure the space and/or fail to buy something that truly makes fits the area. For this reason, it’s often better to ask a designer to plan built-in storage and then have a carpenter build shelving or counters from the plan.
• Create spaces and places that accommodate multiple uses.

A good example of this last principle would be the space plan I designed for my clients Ron and Claire, who were moving into a condominium where picture windows wrapped around two adjacent sides of the living/dining room. They weren’t sure how to position the furniture, or what to bring from their old place. As Claire observed, “You can’t just put the furniture around the walls because there would be a big hole in the center!”

Ron and Claire needed to divide the big space horizontally while preserving its open character; they also needed places to tuck the papers away. For them, I created a floor plan showing which pieces of existing furniture would work and what needed to be replaced. The keys to using the big, open room were:

• Two credenzas that were finished on the back as well as the front to separate the dining room from the living area. The matched credenzas create a low wall that divides the two spaces, and in addition to hiding papers, the credenzas’ flat, open tops double as a buffet surface. It can be used for serving meals or to provide canapes accessible from either area when Ron and Claire are entertaining.
• New swivel recliners that do double-duty because they can face either the TV or the conversation area.
• A neat storage hassock that hides newspapers. It can be used as a seat, and the removable top also flips over so that it can be used as a small side table.

More Tips on Better Storage and Space Usage

• Apartment therapy: Installing shelves or a vanity between the studs
• Comfort and Joy Design website (Nicolette’s design firm)
• Home Design Find: Controlling clutter
• How to install between-studs bookcases
• Inhabitat: article on the under-stairs drawers shown at right
• Nicolette’s Space Solutions Gallery
• Nicolette’s Space Planning Services
• Organizing a Closet: Learn from a professional organizer
• Ron Hazelton’s housecalls: Building a recessed bookcase
• Stacks and Stacks: Pullman step stool shown above
• Storage hassocks
• Stud Buddies: Instant shelves for unfinished walls
• Tips on Controlling Clutter from a Pro

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“Too Many Junk!”

When I was in high school, and one of five teenagers in my parents’ blended family, we briefly employed a Japanese housekeeper. I’m sure my stepmother, who had a full-time job in addition to five teenagers, needed help around the house just to stay sane.

I think that Miko’s real aim in working as our housekeeper was to have a chance to practice conversational English. She had come to the US after becoming engaged to an American of Japanese ancestry who owned a martial arts studio in Denver, where we lived. Miko wanted to make sure that she would be comfortable living in the States before she moved from Japan, and she wanted to be able to communicate well enough to avoiding feeling isolated.

I thought that Miko’s English was fine – it was certainly good enough to convey all the information in the paragraph above. But every now and then, she would come up with a howler. I fondly remember the day she came in to find the five us in the kitchen, eating, playing a board game, practicing the piano, doing homework, playing with the dogs, and listening to tape cassettes, more or less simultaneously. (Technology has changed, but teenagers don’t behave much differently now.) We had the flotsam and jetsam from these activities spread all over the kitchen, along with a variety of snacks and dirty dishes.

As soon as she opened the door, Miko exclaimed, “Too many junk!”

I couldn’t have expressed that nearly as well in grammatically correct English, and it frequently pops into my head when I’m planning storage. My rule of thumb is that, when you’re organizing a space, if you find yourself repeatedly encountering items you haven’t used for the past calendar year, you have “too many junk”!

If you do have too many junk, you need to simplify and stop being a slave to your possessions, in addition to improving your storage. The resource links above will take you to some great decluttering tips, courtesy of a variety of professional organizers.

What Color is Comfort?

When I first visited my mother in sunny San Jose, stepping inside her house was like being beamed to the Mexican Riviera. It was totally unlike the Denver houses we lived in before the divorce and before my father got custody of me. I was astonished to see a flame-red hibiscus in her living room, its tropicality underscored by a fake snake whose gaily painted, jointed wooden body was twined among the leaves.

But my room felt arctic. I knew that mom had painted it my favorite color – blue – in honor of my first visit. But despite the sunny surroundings, I felt so cold that I was turning blue in that room.

In reality, that bedroom was as warm as the rest of the house. But its French blue hue strongly influenced the way I perceived its temperature. For that reason, blue is seldom a good color for a room in a temperate climate. I rarely use it in work I do for my interior design clients.

As you probably know, the words “comfort and joy” figure in the names of both this blog and my interior design business, Comfort and Joy Interior Design – and for good reason. I am more concerned with the ways things feel and work than many of my fellow designers. The information we take in through our eyes is hugely important, and it strongly influences our feelings. But vision is just one of the five senses through which we perceive our surroundings, and what we take in through one sense is colored by what we learn through another.

In this post, I will talk about the emotional impact of color – about what colors make us comfortable in what circumstances – and also about how color influences our perception of space and place. Most of my recent design jobs here in San Francisco have been color consultations, and this post will share some of those experiences. At the end, you should have a pretty good idea of what the color of comfort might be for you.

Jane’s Blue Glass and African Tapestries

After years of living in an off-white apartment that she wasn’t allowed to paint, my client Jane bought a condominium near Ocean Beach. On sunny days, the light streams in from the west-facing windows. The deck beckons you to come out and enjoy white gulls skimming over a cobalt blue ocean. I could see why Jane, a talented amateur photographer whose work reveals a love of color and equatorial light, was attracted to the place.

But the beach is often foggy. On overcast days, the living room, which was painted a putty color in its entirety, looked drab and cold. The baskets Jane had collected during her travels disappeared against the walls. Her blue couch and her wonderful collection of royal blue Mexican glass added to the chilly feel of the room.

How could Jane enjoy the treasures she had collected in her travels without making her condo look as cold as my mother’s guest room?

I suggested a warm gold for her living room, a color that is often used in the Mediterranean, where it is paired with blue and orange. Since blue and yellow are complementary colors – colors that face one another across the color wheel – they are opposites, and the boundaries where they meet are so intense they sometimes seem to vibrate.

Better yet, all these hues were reprised in some Ghanian weavings that Jane had stashed in a closet. (Jane spent time in the Peace Corps in Africa where she collected a treasure trove of traditional and rustic fabrics. ) I suggested making these Ashanti Kente cloths, shown in the photo at left, a focal point, warming up the wall opposite her fireplace. Jane and I both were pleased by the results.

Coloring our Emotions

Our thermal comfort is affected by the actual temperature of the air, by the amount of wind, sun, and moisture we feel, and also by our emotional response to colors. We refer to watery blues and greens as “cool colors” and to fiery yellow, red, and orange as “warm colors” for reasons rooted in our psychological response to our environment and in our physical sensations. Language, too, reveals these connections: we refer to anger as being “hot under the collar” and to embarrassment as being “red in the face” with terms that correspond to the physical sensations that accompany these emotions.

In multiple experiments, psychologists have tested the links between color, behavior and emotion. One psychologist found that people were apt to buy more in a shopping area painted blue. Another study found that red enhanced men’s amorous feelings. Yet another investigator asked people to guess the air temperature in a room where the thermal level was held constant and found that their subjects’ perception of warmth was definitively and consistently influenced by the color of the room.

That’s why, even though blue is difficult to use successfully in homes in temperate climates, it’s a cool manuever in places like Morocco and Mexico. Some years ago, I traveled to Antigua, Guatemala for a wedding and stayed in the Hotel Azul. True to its Spanish name, the hotel was decorated with multiple blue walls, the most striking of which was behind the reception desk. (You can see it in photos on the hotel’s website.) After the dazzling tropical sun, the heat and the dusty streets, the cool, shaded entryway with its blue wall seemed like a very welcome oasis.

Many people are afraid to add color to their walls, but I encourage you to get over it. Because it’s only paint and can be re-painted, experimentation is not really risky.

Tips on Trying Out a Color

You can also get a much better idea of how a color is going to look by buying a small sample can of paint and trying a patch – or several patches of different colors – on your wall. Be sure to look at the patches repeatedly throughout a day. It’s best to observe how the hue changes in bright sun, under clouded natural light, and in artificial light at night. Lamplight tends to be pink or yellow, depending on how it’s produced. Natural light, however, is quite blue, and when a strong beam of it hits a wall, it will also reflect the color onto adjacent walls, increasing the impact of the color.

Another good way to try out a color is by stretching a sheet or blanket of a color similar to the one you’re considering near or in front of where you’re planning to paint. Have a couple friends over, and then take turns holding the sheet and looking the wall from across the room.

If you happen to be good with Photoshop, you can move complex furnishings (those with edges that are not straight) away from the wall, take a photo and “virtually” paint the wall. At the bottom of this post, you can see at set of these that I did for my friend Alexei. I was prompted to do this after she announced that her off-white living room looked “like the inside of a refrigerator.” I suggested the idea of an accent wall, and we first tried out the colors with Photoshop and then with my sage green sheet. Both helped her visualization process.

Color and our Perception of Space

White or pale colors make objects appear to recede. Dark or bright colors draw things closer, and, that in turn, causes them to appear larger. Perceptually, yellow, red, and orange seem to move toward us, while a blue or green wall, or one that’s painted a dark gray, will appear to move away. Knowing this, you can use paint to improve the way that an awkwardly shaped room looks. For example, you can make a corridor look less long and skinny by painting the side walls a lighter color than the wall at the far end of the hall – you can doubly enhance the effect by painting the end wall a strong, warm color like brick red or ochre orange.

You can also use color and finish to help a room that gets too much, or too little, sun. A light colored surface will reflect more light than a dark surface. You can also hide unattractive objects, such as the convection heater I recently installed in my dining room, by painting them the same color.

You should also consider your furnishings and lifestyle when choosing colors and paint finishes. Matte white walls and small children are not a good combination; an eggshell or enamel finished green or yellow will probably hide little fingerprints and bear cleanup better. If you have a dark blue couch, it’s a good idea to use that blue as an accent and choose something lighter for your main room color.

Here are some tricks for using color to improve problem spaces:

• Lower a high ceiling: If you paint the walls a light color and the ceiling a darker color, it will appear lower. The opposite also works; a ceiling that is light than the walls will appear higher.
• Make the room more intimate: Dark, warm colors make a space feel cozy and intimate
• Break up a big room: Use colors to define areas within the room. Not long ago, my clients Ron and Claire asked help in arranging a large living room that was the shape of a shoe box with waist-height windows along two sides. Claire quickly saw that her customary procedure of positioning the furniture along the walls wasn’t going to work. I used the tribal and oriental rugs they had collected to define areas within the room; the deep saturated reds in the rugs set off the wood floors and immediately drew the eye to focus on a collection of couch and chairs placed so that people sitting in them were close enough together to hear one another talk. The color also differentiated that conversation area from the dining and TV areas.
• Make the room bigger and more airy: Use light colors, pastels or shades of same color.

Cultural Cues and Regional Palettes

As noted above, the palette I chose for Jane’s living room is Mediterranean and particularly associated with Italy and Southern France. (My favorite French Bistro, La Provence, for example, is done in the same palette.)

Above: Pierre Deux fabrics in classic Provencal hues. Top to bottom: Favenay Cream, Avignonet Red and Ochre, and Campano Blue.

There are classic color combinations that are associated with many of the world’s countries and regions. Sometimes, they are even incorporated into a nation’s flag – an example being the red, white, blue of the French “tricolor.” Powder blue paired with butter yellow denotes Sweden. The combination of black, gold and a deep, glossy red, called “Chinese red”, is characteristic of traditional Chinese interiors.

Decorators consciously use these combinations to evoke a locale, particularly in decorating restaurants. You may have noticed the plethora of Italian restaurants decorated in red, white, and green. You might also have realized that virtually every Chinese restaurant includes the same deep, laquered red you see on the Empress Dowager’s fingernails in the movie “The Last Emperor”.

Since you’re reading a design blog, you probably are aware of this, but for some people, the effect is subconscious. Not everyone is visually oriented. I remember being absolutely astonished when I visited the home of my husband’s friend Nate. Although Nate had been living there for more than five years, not a single picture was hanging on any of the white walls. By contrast, when I move into an office, I usually hang things on the wall the first week!

You might want to use such a classic color palette, as decorators do, to evoke the ambience of a particular locale. Similarly, you might want to use a palette to create a particular style or period of interior. For example, French Provincial furniture is usually distressed and rustic, and it’s colors are the natural brown of wood, pastels, or white with gold accents. The wall and fabric colors characteristic of this country French style are drawn from traditional block-printed Provencal fabrics, such as the “Les Indiennes” patterns that became popular in the 1800’s. The French firm Pierre Deux has been producing classic Provencal fabrics for hundreds of years; the swatches shown at left include several typical designs and color palettes.

Now that Jane has asked for my help in decorating her bedroom, I have given her a palette of colors similar to the Easter-like hues in the Campano pattern at bottom left. Jane has a collection of hats – colored hats that will contrast nicely on an ivory wall – plus half a dozen natural-colored straw hats. Jane wanted to feature the hats in her bedroom design, and I thought that the three dimensionality of the hats would add interest to an otherwise boxy room. The straw hats looked dull on the ivory wall, but they contrast nicely with a lavender accent wall. The wall picks up the color of a mantle above Jane’s bed and the tones in several of her photos – photos that she picked from her collection – so that everything fits together with the feminine style and colors of the new bedroom design.

You may have heard that colors have different symbolic meanings in different cultures – for example, black is the color of funerals in the US and Western Europe, but in China, white is the color of mourning. Brides in China, however, wear red. Because this symbology applies mostly to clothing and furnishings, you needn’t concern yourself about it when choosing wall color.

Tried and True Techniques

Interior designers frequently use a recipe that calls for a 60/20/10 distribution between three colors in a palette, with the 60% portion allocated to a neutral or light color. This is called a triad palette.

There are plenty of other palettes that are also fairly fool-proof, and they are used often enough to even merit names. There’s a tone palette that uses monochromatic shades of a single color. There’s an “adjacent” palette, which is illustrated by the photo above. There are also complementary and split complementary palettes – the link at the beginning of this paragraph will take you to a primer about these.

The International Style gave rise to a palette that you will frequently see in modern interiors. It mixes neutrals, particularly textured natural materials such as wood, stone, and metals with a single accent color. Originally, that accent color was red, but currently, the modernist accent color seems to be lime green.

There are also classic palettes that are associated with interior styles, and the timid or tentative won’t go far wrong if they choose within those palettes (particularly if the house and/or its furnishings are in that style). There’s a nicely subdued palette that is associated with the Arts & Crafts style, an Art Deco palette, and Victorian palette, among others.

Another nice way to create a palette for a room is to key it to a dominant painting or textile. I did this recently for my client Cathy, who wanted to decorate her guest room around an oil painting. The painting featured gold, orange, and purple shades, but her room also included a blue braid rug that didn’t seem to relate to the painting. The painting did include shades of green, including a palm green that is subtly repeated in the blue rug, and that green is the complement of the more dominant orange in the painting. The room is now a pastel shade of that green – almost white at first glance – and the painting now coordinates with all the furnishings.

I used this same color strategy to develop the palette for my own living roon, which is pictured above. The room takes its adjacent palette from the colors in my Naked Ladies watercolor – a huge painting that is more than three feet high and four feet wide. You ca view it detail on my website.

Resource Links

• Understanding the color wheel
• Taking your color temperature – blog post about psychologists’ experiments on how color influences mood
• Learning about the effect of color on your mood
• About warm and cool colors
• Interior design tutor: color palettes

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Nicolette’s Cool Photoshop Visualization Trick

(It’s as easy as taking pounds off of Katie Couric!)

The room that "looked like the inside of a refrigerator"	Smoky rose accent wall
Mauve accent wall	And the winner is...this one!