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The thing I most enjoy about the interior
makeover business is taking a sow's ear and turning it into a silk purse.
And when I can accomplish that mission in the condominium apartment
belonging to one of my very best friends, and work with my talented
friend, interior designer Margaret Mohr, then it is also fun - as well as
satisfying!
This makeover project was published in
American Homestyle Weekend Decorator. The combination living/dining room
is both traditional and up-to-the-minute, using Laura Ashley fabrics on
the slipcovered seating, throw pillows, dining chair skirts and valance
window treatment, and filling in with Laura Ashley accessories - like the
candlestick lamps, needlepoint pillow and pleated lampshades.
When my friend Lynn moved into this
two-bedroom condo, she had a bookcase (which we built in to the right side
of the patio door), a beautiful antique dining table and chairs and an
antique china cabinet with which to begin the decorating process. She had
jettisoned most of her other upholstered furnishings, and thus was
starting with a nearly clean furniture slate.
We went shopping together, and at at a
neighborhood antiques shop found a pair of comfortable English armchairs
trimmed with beautiful bouillon fringe. Next, we found a tuxedo style sofa
from a trendy resale shop, for $150 - perfect pieces for a magazine
slipcover makeover project!
"One tip when buying 'gently used'
furniture is to replace the worn cushions' 'insides,' as that is what
usually sags and is uncomfortable to sit on," Margaret explains.
"Here, the loose seat back and seat cushions on the sofa were
replaced with new, thicker, dacron-wrapped foam core cushions and the
large armchair seat cushions were replaced with new, down-wrapped foam
core cushions," she notes.
Next began the fabric selection process.
Lynn, who loves red and wanted an environment conducive to entertaining
friends, gravitated towards the colors you see here - soft greens and
reds, with check and floral fabric accents. A tiny blue check was selected
for the lamp shades and to trim the window valance.
"The warm reds are perfect compliments
to the verdant treetop views that Lynn enjoys," Margaret says,
"so Joetta and I fine-tuned the selections with Lynn to create a
fabric grouping that was not 'matchy-matchy' but rather blended, as if
pieces were slipcovered at different points in time." |
Trade Secrets
- Don't be afraid to mix tone-on-tone
stripes, like the red sofa fabric, with florals, checks, leaf patterns
and small diagonal diamond fabrics.
- Do use the dining table as a
library/sofa table right behind a sofa in a small space. For a dinner
party, the table pulls away from the sofa, and the armchairs from the
living room and the other dining chairs are moved around it.
- Display your collections - use plate
stands or hanging plate holders to display pretty plates and platters.
Group like things together to increase their impact. No one, including
you the homeowner, can enjoy such treasures if they are stored behind
closed cabinet doors.
- Do use antique accessories to soften and
add charm to a room - like beautiful old books, a cut-glass goblet
used to hold flowers, and an antique silver dish - all add beautiful
texture to the wicker trunk table.
- Soften the starkness of host and hostess
dining chairs (and sidechairs, too) by adding whimsical pleated skirts
- then pull them into the living room for extra seating.
- Use large-scale accessories, especially
in a small space. Here, oversized, framed antique engravings, a huge
wooden birdcage and a large, fanciful iron candle sconce punctuate the
long living room wall. The birdcage keeps the rather diminutive china
cabinet from looking so short!
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| Slipcovers
were designed to not "look" like slipcovers. Velcro, that handy
hook-and- loop fastening system, was a way to accomplish this look,
achieving a snug fit that appears to be upholstered, rather than
slipcovered.
Lynn first carefully removed the bouillon
fringe from the armchairs, had it hand dry-cleaned. Then the seamstress
sewed it by hand onto the bottom of the new slipcover skirts.
For the turn-of-the-century Renaissance
Revival host and hostess dining chairs, we had whimsical pleated skirts
made. They now reside in the living room as convenient pull up seating.
Even the upholstered fabric back panels are attached with Velcro to the
chairs' wood backs.
The round, skirted table is a sturdy
plywood "X" base, with a custom-cut, 36-inch circle of plywood
on top. One tip is to pad the plywood top by draping it with an old
mattress pad, so it looks soft and less hard-edged, before draping it with
the lined and interlined skirt - important to give the fabric a luxurious
hand.
In this case, the skirt puddles a good ten
inches onto the floor for a sumptuously full look, and the generously
scaled, lined square topper in a complimentary Laura Ashley print is edged
in both eyelash fringe trim and gimp braid. It's a good idea to select the
largest-diameter wood circle that your room will accommodate - the 20-inch
rounds that are sold with attached bases in discount stores just look
skimpy - and aren't large enough to put a lamp and a teacup on at the same
time!
Another custom decorating idea is to paint
a design onto a rug. This custom sisal rug, made to fit the long, narrow
living and dining room's dimensions, was edged in neutral twill tape.
Margaret Mohr designed a dramatic
large-scale diagonal pattern in a leaf green paint, with pale yellow
painted fleur de lis patterns punctu-ating the thin-lined crosshatch
intersections. The design mimics the elegant look of men's suiting fabric,
popular in the l930's. To paint the rug, Margaret and I first snapped
chalk lines to mark off the entire design, then placed masking tape along
each side of the lines. Using a stiff stencil brush and Plaid Enterprises
Dry Brush stencil paint, we painted between the taped-off diagonal lines
of the pattern. Using an X-acto knife, Margaret cut a custom stencil for
the fleur de lis designs, and we stenciled them on last, using a neutral,
yellow-tan color.
Since we knew Lynn loves dress-maker
detailing, we used a variety of different gimp braids, eyelash fringes and
rope fringes to dress pillows and table skirts, selecting all the trims at
Leggett's Fabrics.
For a textural coffee table, we found an
antique English wicker trunk (and the green tole tray on top of it) at
another antiques shop and had a sturdy wooden base and inner frame made
for the trunk. The wicker echoes the texture of the sisal rug, warming the
room and taking the edge off its formality.
The window treatment was adapted from a
treatment in The White House, minus side panels. The valance gives the
bare expanse of sliding glass doors some character - and disguises the
unattractive metal door track. The window needed the fabric's softness,
but because the bookcase comes to the edge of the window on the right
side, and the window dead-ends into the wall on the left, architecture
really dictated the valance design. It was deliberately designed to hang
at the ceiling line, covering the blank furdown wall above the window, but
not the window itself, as we wanted as much light to enter the room as
possible from the covered porch beyond.
Another decorating idea is that everything
does not have to match perfectly. "Lynn had a large collection of
blue and white porcelain and pottery," Margaret explains. "While
there is just a touch of blue in one of the checked fabric patterns, the
collection looks perfect in the room, adding warmth as only a collection
can. It even spills over into the kitchen, visible through the
pass-through behind the dining table," she says.
We chose an intricate, colorful cathedral
window quilt, from one of many made by Lynn's mother, to hang as a
dramatic piece of artwork for the entry hall. The colors echo, but don't
exactly match, those in the adjoining living spaces.
Says Lynn of the finished room: "One
of the things I like most aboutthe space is that the minute the project
was finished, I felt like I'd lived here for years."
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