Your Heritage and Personal Decorating Style

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Your Heritage and Personal Decorating Style

Your Heritage and Personal Decorating Style

Ethnic traditions, customs, and attitudes carry forward our family values. Paying tribute to family heritage and tradition also gives our children a strong sense of family ties. Our roots make us what we are, and showing respect for ancestral traditions gives the interior of your home a special individuality.

Vernacular Heritage

Regional architecture, called the vernacular, designs structures to harmonize and blend with the environment. Designed to reflect the past, using historical influences, vernacular houses complement rather than dominate their settings. These homes recreate the traditional neighborhoods of the past with a strong sense of place.

Many vernacular structures provide friendly zones and foster a relaxed lifestyle. For instance, Santa Fe stucco and adobe block homes often have central courtyards. Friendly porches customarily found on Florida cracker houses invite neighborly chats. Key West's wood-framed "conch houses" and North Carolina's "low country" houses feature broad verandahs and large windows to take advantage of the area's cooling breezes.

Vernacular homes provide sheltering transitional space from the outside to the inside, but homes without such transitional spaces can benefit greatly when structural or landscaping details are added to bring the private interior space of the home into harmony with the outside world. If your home lacks a covered entry, consider adding a wood or iron framework or an awning to create a feeling of protection and shelter.

Ethnic Influence on American Architecture and Furnishings

Since Americans have always constructed houses that mimicked their native homelands, it's not surprising that Italian and Mediterranean villas, grand English country houses, and simple French farmhouses can be found across the United States. From the earliest days of our nation, Americans have taken design details from all over the world and copied, adapted, and redesigned their ethnic patterns and furnishings.

Patterns originating in Africa, such as animal prints and intricate geometrics, have been duplicated in many ways. Mexican antiques, Danish and Swedish furniture, and Oriental-influenced accessories have intermingled in our homes. From New England Cape Cods to Santa Fe adobes, our diverse heritage has influenced American architecture and interior design, while log cabins, rustic western interiors, and American folk art have suggested distinct American origins.

Style and Emotional Ambience

Style is the end decorating result of the combination of detail characteristics reminiscent of an era, an artistic movement, or a particular region, such as the Victorian era, Art Nouveau period, or Midwestern Prairie style. Mood or emotional ambiance is the personal interpretation of style to evoke feelings, whether they are cleanly slick, elegantly formal, cozily informal, or romantically eclectic.

Architectural Styles: Structure and Furnishings

Rooms all of one period or style are best left for museums or exhibitions. Eclectic rooms mix furnishings from different periods, such as a contemporary sofa, a silver maple Chippendale side table, and a gilded Louis XVI mirror. The beautiful and the bizarre, the exquisite and the commonplace, mixed with frivolity and delight, create joyful homes.

Architectural style may refer to a structure or to a type of furnishing. Mixing period styles with today's lifestyles is called New Traditionalism. Combinations of styles with a light? hearted flair create elegant, unpretentious rooms. A few grand pieces, interspersed with simple furnishings, will bring informality to an otherwise stodgy home.

Architectural style also influences interior design. Understand the architectural style of your home and use it as a reference point for your decorating. In my own case, our modern furniture looked totally out of place in our 1878 home, so we traded our glass dining table for a traditional wood one, and replaced a modular sofa with a squishy antique one.

Some Victorian homes look magnificent when furnished with contemporary furniture, but this is harder to accomplish than the reverse, which is a contemporary house, furnished with antiques. Grand old houses decorated with modern furnishings look better with plain, simple wall finishes and un-frilled window coverings.

Juxtaposing styles from your heritage with other styles that suit your fancy makes for interesting rooms and homes. Not all rooms in your home need to incorporate the same style, but some blending from room to room ensures harmony. Mixing heritage styles according to those who share your home also creates a harmonizing aura.

Your Personal Style

If you have a strong affinity for a particular architectural style, incorporate it into your total design plan. Encourage respect for your family traditions by surrounding yourself with ethnic furnishings and family heirlooms. Any style can be adapted to your way of living, whether it's serenely sleek, traditionally formal, or casually informal, by either dressing up or paring down your decorating embellishments.

Professor Jeanette Fisher, author of Doghouse to Dollhouse for Dollars, Joy to the Home, and other books teaches Real Estate Investing and Design Psychology. For more articles, tips, reports, newsletters, and sales flyer template, see http://www.doghousetodollhouse fordollars.com/pages/5/index.htm

In The News:

New and now country
Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier
What she got is a home with classic good bones, a relaxing “put-your-feet-up” attitude and the “new country” style touches she loves. With two young daughters, a husband who loves golfing and a yellow Labrador retriever, it's an active household where ...

Workshop will focus on staging your home to sell
Gettysburg Times
Victoria Manton, ASP, IAHSP, of Victorias-Stage, York, will share proven techniques she's learned from her years spent in fashion, retail merchandising, and office and interior design. According to Manton, home staging is a marketing tool that's more ...

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Free Workshops in Interior Design
Santa Barbara Independent
In addition to event planning, the company will offer Professional Organization, Interior Design and Feng Shui Design. Ms. King is a recent graduate of the Sheffield School of Interior Design and has over thirty years of event planning experience.

whathouse.co.uk
Decorating your new home – Sofa beds
whathouse.co.uk
Here are just a few of them: If you found the perfect sofa bed for your home, you should clean and maintain its new look as long as possible. Sofa beds are usually made from fabrics, genuine or ecologic leather or a combination of leather and fabrics.

Trad fusion: Collaboration forges shift from traditional to contemporary design
Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier
The collaboration between Parker and the homeowner has forged a friendship — and a home in a design style the Interior Chic design firm owner describes as “transitional.” It's the fusion of traditional with contemporary or modern elements.

Portland Interior Designer's Foursquare Redecoration: A Study In How To Design ...
San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Portland interior designer's space planning, furniture design, and interior décor take a neglected Portland Foursquare home and transform it into a model of family-friendly interior design. Portland, Oregon (PRWEB) May 21, 2012 Portland Interior ...

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Mascoutah couple built 'green' from ground up
STLtoday.com
Construction on the home began in 2008; from the basement to the roof it is made with Insulated Concrete Forms. The exterior is brick veneer, and the interior is textured plaster. Jay lays claim to "75 percent of the design," drawing plans and having a ...

Decorating Den Interiors: The wonder of Mother Nature
Chambersburg Public Opinion
In the last column, I discussed bringing our interior comforts outside. On the other side of the spectrum, there is continued interest to bring a little bit of the outdoors inside. Our increased awareness of the environment and the quest to preserve ...

Award Winning Interior Designer Lori Gilder Named New eHow Home Design Expert
PR Web (press release)
Award winning interior designer Lori Gilder was recently selected as a home design expert for eHow.com. Gilder will share her design expertise through a series of videos on the popular online network. Now offering her invaluable design advice across ...

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Coffee, tea, table?
Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier
Kathy Flack, ASID, of Flack Interior Design Associates, a division of Simpson Furniture. Once the repository of drinks and remote controls (and your feet when your mom wasn't looking), the coffee table has renewed function.

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