When Patty Brotman was shown a duplex condo in a vintage courtyard building on the Near North Side, she knew she’d found her new home. It was everything she wanted– “homey and romantic, with pretty moldings and a beautiful fireplace.”
It was also sans furniture, so the rooms appeared large. It was an illusion that brought her perilously close to committing one of the most common mistakes made in furnishing a home. She was about to become a victim of scale.
With no set direction in mind, Brotman blissfully set out to buy all new furniture for her 11-by-15-foot dining room and 14-by-15 foot living room, deciding to go for the “overstuffed look” in upholstered pieces.
Fortunately, Brotman was snatched from the brink of decorating disaster by an interior designer who steered her toward an Art Deco sofa and two chairs– and, perhaps more important, explained the role that scale plays in decorating.
“We didn’t realize how small scale the rooms were,” says Brotman, who found interior designer Marlene Rimland through the American Society of Interior Designers. Rimland, says Brotman, helped “us to understand these big, cushy chairs wouldn’t fit and gave us some options.”
“We were looking for an eclectic look … We are getting what we want, but in a dffferent way.”
Many others aren’t as lucky and wind up with furniture looking as though it were bought at the Green Giant’s garage sale but crammed into a Lilliputian living room–or perhaps they find the right sofa, but put a short and squat end table and lamp next to it, which makes it a Jack Sprat-and-his wife pairing.
Scale the balance between a room and its furnishings–is all-pervasive in a decorating scheme and includes color, fabric patterns, window treatments, floor coverings, artwork on the walls, accessories and some elements amateurs might not even think of. Which is why it can be so easy to go so wrong.
Most people “just don’t go through the process,” says Joan Blutter of Blutter-Shiff Design Associates in the Merchandise Mart, whose design work in author Barbara Taylor Bradford’s Connecticut home was featured in December’s Architectural Digest.
Back up a minute
The first step in successfully decorating a room, says Debi Reinhart-Kenlay of Surrey House Interiors in Glenview, is to adapt the scale of furnishings to the architecture and function of the room. Many times the decision of what scale furnishings to use is made for you by the architecture, she says.
For example, a huge overstuffed sofa is right at home in the middle of a high-ceilinged great or family room, but wrong in, say, a Victorian cottage with small, narrow rooms.
Other times the spaces are extremely mundane, “a rectangle,” says Reinhart-Kenlay, and the problem is how to make it special and, at the same time, reflect the owner’s personality.
“For one client you could do white walls with mahogany period furniture that would open that room up and make it look proper and restful,” says Reinhart-Kenlay. “Someone else might have a bold personality. For that person, you could paint the same walls charcoal gray, which would be smashing with overscale artwork on them and two overstuffed chairs, and that would be it.”
The artwork and chairs would grab the spotlight while the neutral gray on the walls would make them visually recede, and take the eye away from the shape of the room.
Attention-getter
Once those considerations are taken into account and the basic approach in style is decided, Reinhart-Kenlay says attention should be turned toward establishing a dominant feature.
“Where a lot of amateurs fail is they don’t realize something has to dominate and something has to be subordinate in a room-just as in relationships,” says Reinhart-Kenlay.
“There’s got to be a star or a focal point,” adds MJ Kamin of MJ Dvorak Design Interiors of Riverside, so the eye’s attention is not scattered all over the place.
“Sometimes it is the windows, sometimes the fireplace. You choose something-an open etagere, a very interesting piece of upholstery or a plain couch with some wonderful pillows on each end, and determine where it is going to go.
“If you’re floating a sofa in the middle of a large family room, you can do a lot more. If you are dealing with small spaces you have to be a lot more careful” in choosing pieces that are more exact in scale, adds Kamin.
Heroic proportions
Some designers, like Richar of Richar Interiors, intentionally use overscale art to provide drama in a room.
In his Lake Shore Drive apartment, Richar uses an enormous mid-19th Century rococo-style gilded mirror, which nearly fills the 10-foot-high space from floor to ceiling, as a focal point in his living room.
“People describe my apartment as having a heroic quality,” says the designer, who has done interiors for many prominent Chicagoans, such as commodities trader L.T. Baldwin; WXRT-FM owner Dan Lee and his wife, Karen; WLUP-FM radio personality Jonathan Brandmeier; and Arlington Toyota president and owner Tony Vicari and his wife, Ann.
“Overscale art does work in small spaces, giving it a new dimension when it’s mixed with contemporary furniture. It can make the room dramatic or larger than life and can give it (the room) a different allure.”
Still, balance is key.
“If you just put unimportant little pieces with a big painting it won’t work,” says Richar, whose sofas are appropriately Brobdingnagian, with end tables graced with massive African ankle bracelets. To balance the scale of the massive mirror, the designer has placed before it an antique Indonesian warrior’s jacket armour on a custom stand, which places it at the height of a human being. “Other elements in a room have to have a lot of presence to balance large-scale artwork.
“It is a balancing act. The presence of the piece, the tone of the apartment, the quality of the materials, all contribute to creating this grand effect.”
On his walls, a linen color is used as a neutral foil for Richar’s overscale paintings and the floor is a rosewood color to blend with his sophisticated French and Italian Deco furniture.
Color, Blutter points out, also affects the scale in a room. “Light colors will expand your vista. Dark colors will bring the walls in closer.”
Rimland, in fact, solved one scale problem in the Brotman home with color.
The duplex had a living room and dining room that are separate but connected.
“We wanted to unite them, give (this area) a sense of airiness, wanted to make it elegant and dramatic,” says Rimland. The basis of this room was the wood floor, she says, which in its original state was very dark. Rimland bleached it and gave it a whitewash stain with a peachy cast to it, then made the walls the same coloration, and added a Roman shade window treatment in peachy tones.
The drama came from “wonderful bold patterns in jeweled silks in the pillows (in the living room), and dining room chairs in the same colorations. That brings the color from one room to the other. The only thing the eye rests on is these colorations,” says Rimland.
The biggest mistake people make, however, is a big one.
And Kamin blames the big-is-best culture that we live in for the overscale syndrome that plagues so many homes.
“Look in the furniture stores at what’s being sold,” she says. “The scale of the couches is huge and overstuffed and they have arms that are 12 to 18 inches thick.
“Most of my work is Middle America and most of them have 11-feet-by-12-feet or 12-feet-by-14-feet living and dining rooms. You put a couple large sofas and a huge coffee table in one of these rooms and it is full of furniture.”
Yet most Americans seem to believe more is more in furniture. “People equate size with quality from the same standpoint that big cars are the expensive ones.
“The answer is being aware that the size of a piece-a 40-inch-deep sofa from which you can’t get up unless you use a crane-doesn’t necessarily equate value.”
With so many pitfalls, putting together a room in a way that it is as balanced as a fine-art painting and its flaws are disguised might seem impossible to the non-professional.
It’s not hopeless, however. “You can achieve a sense of scale by looking. None of us are born with it. You get it by paying attention,” says Kamin.
And once one knows the rules, then it’s possible to divert from them to add excitement to a room. “There are times when it works to have one oversize piece,” says Blutter. “I don’t say it is a no-no all the time.”
But generally, says Reinhart-Kenlay, “breaking the rules is much harder than following them.”
DO’s
– Mirrors enlarge a space, but they have to be handled in an appropriate way. Take into consideration what the mirror is reflecting because the reflection will determine scale. says designer Joan Blutter.
– When hanging art and accessories in a room, Chicago designer Stefano Marchetti draws an imaginary horizontal line at approximately eye level. He then takes every paining, mirror object he hangs and places its center on that imaginary line. “It anchors everything and makes things work,” he says.
– Scale of pillows on a sofa is important. The trend is to have mountains of big pillows, but be careful they don’t overcome the beauty of a sofa.
– Be sure to measure the sofa you are considering. If the arm is 18 inches of rolled end, it may fill the space but look too massive.
– Non-professionals should begin with a floor plan on 1/4-inch graph paper. “You must work with a plan,” Blutter says. From brown paper, cut to scale little templates representing furniture pieces and experiment with moving them around on the graph paper.
“Measure the room, measure the area that is required to be filled,” says Blutter. “Remember to take height into consideration-ceiling heights are also important.”
Take the floor plan and measurements with you to the furniture store. Ask the design staff to help you.
– Use of larger floor tiles will enlarge a room.
– When you extend drapery panels to the floor, it elongates them and gives them more importance, a trick from designer Gail Prauss of Gail Prauss Interior Design Inc. in Oak Park.
Prauss also has used a large piece of artwork in a long, narrow room or hallway to stop the eye. On several jobs, Prauss has painted an entire wall of a narrow or small room with a trompe l’oeil mural of a window looking out on an English garden to gave it more spatial depth.
Don’t’s
– If you overstuff a smallroom yor are going to make it look smaller, Blutter says.
– Things that are to small are just as guilty of violating the rules of scale. Too many of them and it becomes clutter, Blutter says.
– A painting should not extend over the ends of a sofa.
– Scale of patterns is important too. Many large-scale patterns don’t work together.
“A big victim of scale is area rugs. They are usually too big or too small,” says Blutter. “I don’t love furniture that sits on or off the rug; I think it should be one or the other.”
Avoid oversize shades on little lamps.
– Don’t scatter a group of small collectibles such as little Limoges boxes all around a room. They will not capture the eye. But grouped together in an etagere or cabinet, they will.
– Scale is very important when you lay a plank floor. Lay the planks the wrong way and it’s like wearing a horizontal-striped dress, says Blutter.
– Don’t, unless you really know what you are doing, use a bright plaid on a large scale in a very small room.
