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How to choose the right wall colour

November 10, 2011 by Axiom Mortgage Posted in Design

Colour is tricky—a bad wall colour can often set the stage for bad design choices. The colour of your walls dictates where you can go with your design —pick a bold, arresting colour and you are gravely limited to what you can work with in your room.  Working with colour takes some finesse, yet it is easier than ever to make good colour choices.

 

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Think neutrals are boring? Think again!

October 26, 2011 by Axiom Mortgage Posted in Design

Neutrals - blah! Right? Not a chance, not if you know what to do with them, that is. Neutrals play a big role when decorating your home, and they play an even bigger role in extending your design dollar.  

 

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Creating the “Wow” Factor

September 26, 2011 by Stella Severin Posted in Design

What distinguishes a really great, “wow” room from a bland, forgettable, “just okay” room is it's personality. Great rooms have a well-balanced combination of the standards—couch, coffee table, chairs—and the unique, such as mementos, collectibles, treasures. To truly stand out, a room should be a collaboration of found pieces and thoughtful purchases and not just a show room display.

When thinking about furnishing your space, think outside the box. Shop around and explore your options and consider personality. It is easy enough to go to a show room, like the display and say " this is it!", but bring that display home and it is still just a display until you jazz it up and make it your own.

It is easier than ever to find unique, lovely items for your home at great prices if you take some time to look around. Stores such as Winners and Home Sense offer fabulous finds for fantastic deals, bringing magazine-worthy looks to you for a fraction of what they would cost at other specialty stores. Antique stores, flea markets and garage sales offer a fun and quirky array of knick-knacks which indubitably lend a new home that lived-in quality. Stores such as Ikea offer contemporary, well conceptualized items which can stretch your decorating dollar. Open any magazine and inevitably an Ikea purchase has been used to smarten up a fashionable room.

Personalizing is key—the ability to take the mass-produced and customize it to make it your own will give your rooms presence. This is what designers do best—they are able to take the commonplace and tweak it just so in order to customize it for your space and your style. Add moulding to an ordinary book case and, voilà, it is a custom piece which which will have visitors asking "where did you find that?" instead of thinking "oh, I saw that in the flyer the other day."






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Creating the house of your dreams

August 17, 2011 by Stella Severin Posted in Design

Buying a house is the easy part, making it a home sometimes gets tricky. Where do you start? How do you imbue bare walls and empty spaces with your own personality? How do you go about making your house representative of who you are? How do you make a house a home?

It’s hard to know where to start, and that’s where the concept of an idea book comes in. It’s the first step towards managing your vision—it helps to narrow scope and pinpoint such things as style, colour preferences, fabric choices, window covering possibilities, and hard surface details such as flooring options and counter top materials. An idea book is also a tool which will help you relay your message to a designer. It is a way to definitively show what it is you like and what you want your home to feel like when the design is completed.

Starting an idea book is easy and fun. Start by investing in a few choice design magazines. Buy the gamut at first and flip through them all, ripping out anything that appeals to you. Before long you will begin seeing a pattern—a focus on what you really do like and a clearer vision of what you do not want. Your pile of magazine cut outs will start to tell a story about you and your home. Soon you will be able to eliminate the types of magazines that do not fall into your 'like' category and the ones you are left with will be the ones that define your 'style'.

Quickly you will amass a treasure trove of great ideas, things you would not have thought of, and clever design tricks. Gather these together in a folder, binder, scrapbook or the like and your idea book is born. This will be your starting point, and with a more focused design strategy, the next steps will be easier, clearer and more enjoyable.









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