Now is the perfect time to reassess! After stripping the home of holiday detritus, and with a spare weekend courtesy of this New Year’s middle-of-the-week interruption, a stress-free perusal of your uncluttered abode may help to revitalize a tired dwelling.The year 2014 gave us plenty of new trends to inspire (or, for some, repulse), but none seems so radically charged as the darkening of the kitchen. After at least 30 years when the all-white kitchen has ruled supreme, an ode to this sanitized, medicinal, white room may not wax as poetically as sea-spray green, pepper gray, stormy teal and waxed ebony. Black kitchens have become the ultra-rage in the Second City and the Golden City on the bay. One truly wonders if Chicagoans and San Franciscans have superior night vision, or just eat lots of carrots.
Revitalizing your kitchen may simply be an exercise in relacquering the cabinetry. A high-gloss finish remains hugely popular, though a dead-flat texture also looks fresh. A well-painted milk paint in flat slate blue with brushed nickel fittings or, even better, the newest brushed-copper handles, is the ticket.
And speaking of a metal finish scraped up from the bottom of the barrel—copper is clawing its way to the top of fashion cravings. Served up in bulkier handles, copper is adorning the squared-off inset cabinetry of the newest kitchens. Its cozier warmth appears surprisingly at home with the darker, cooler spectrum. Larger copper hardware and a new paint job are a surefire renewal, even if applied only to the kitchen island—a stand-alone star in a background of chem-lab white.
A new area carpet can also transform, though caution might be advised. Catalogs, rug merchants and home goods stores are standing sentinel with an abundance of radical choices for those not satisfied with mere geometrics, stuffy Orientals or even discernible repeat patterns. Clothing our floors seems to have encountered Abstract Expressionism at best—or Spin Art mediocrity at worst. Rugs now appear with splatters, streaks and slashes of aggressive color. Sometimes painterly veils of dye sweep through to the edges, inviting star status. With such attention-grabbing floors, neutral, patternless upholstery, glass coffee tables or king-size beds work best, encouraging a peek at this horizontal stimuli versus an all-out open assault.
And speaking about rejuvenation in the bedroom (referencing decorating, of course), duvets and their covers are still popular, but the bedspread is micro-quilting its way back into our hearts. The retro-mod, reverse sham bedspread, where the pillows are folded envelope-style into the cover, now appears photo ready for a hip ’60s Holiday Inn advertisement. Plop on some Jonathan Adler pillows and you are so tongue-in-cheek cool! The height of modern elegance, though, allows the thin bedspread to drape all the way to the floor, just skimming the shag. (Note: Nothing looks so dated as the coverlet politely skimming the top of the flouncy dust ruffle.)
I will always yearn for waxed walnut floors, but I am in the minority. Revitalizing your floors may require a degree of wood torture. First sand or scrape the floors, then bleach them. The first step of this process is staining the wood and when the paint and wax are applied, Both get caught in the crevices, and then they are wiped off the raised areas, which will leave some of both in the crevices, resulting in the wildly popular “cerused” finish, an attention-grabbing throwback to Italian/French 1940s furniture. Two thousand fourteen’s obsession with “Fifty Shades of Grey” has infiltrated every corner of our market, including fabrics, carpets, wall color, metal and even wood floors.
Of course, since gray has been so popular, blue is not far behind and combines so effortlessly. Rooms of blue, white and gray have conquered the shelter magazines, so a new year’s attention to this may also inspire an idea or two.
I have made my new year’s list as I enjoy the last of my East End holiday respite. Perhaps a bit daunting, I have set forth recovery of my monochromatic furnishings with pattern and splashes of blue and yellow. I will be painting my dining room periwinkle and slipcover my mother’s Hepplewhite dining chairs in a brown and white chintz. (Sounds awful, doesn’t it? Well, we shall see.) I will be lacquering my New York living room a deep forest green and papering my bedroom in a taupe, gray and white Gracie wallpaper that I bought on sale early in my career when I was an assistant (and it took a whole month’s salary back then!). I will attack my 1912 (yes, the year the Titanic went down) bathroom, and revitalize my 1950s kitchen. Perhaps my kitchen will become stormy teal and my floors cerused gray. I want to reupholster my doors in soft caramel leather with copper nail heads and paint my moldings charcoal. And perhaps …
And perhaps my list has gotten too long. I have to say I am so blessed to be in a field where not only can I dream, but I can dream for my clients as well—and though I may not always get to my own list, I always get to theirs. Design is not an essential aspect of life, but creating an inviting, renewing, welcoming and sometimes inspiring home can be an essential. The new year is a perfect time to revitalize your personal sense and appreciation of home.
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