How do average people create (and afford) rooms that look like they came straight out of a decorating magazine?
The answer is: That’s not the right question.
“I don’t think the point is to have your rooms look like that,” says Dylan Landis, who has built a career on demystifying design and who readily admits that most “magazine houses” are fabulously unattainable.
She goes on: “I really believe the point is to look at the picture a little longer and try to figure out what elements have gone into this room that you might be able to borrow and adapt.”
One of the keenest observers in the decorating business today, Landis has spent the last 13 years writing about wonderful homes-and the making of them.
Emphasize that last part.
She gets design professionals to share tips and tricks for those of us who have more determination than dollars. She gets good stuff-like a designer’s recommendation (down to brand name and paint number) for the perfect shade of English country house yellow to paint on walls or a contractor’s exact recipe for ebonized floors or another designer’s trick for making windows look bigger.
Her interiors stories, which are often infused with such trade secrets, appear regularly in Metropolitan Home magazine, where she serves as a contributing editor. She has three decorating books under her belt, and another three are scheduled to be published next spring. She has written for The New York Times, and if her name sounds familiar, count yourself a veteran Chicago Tribune reader. Landis worked as a Home section reporter before moving to New York with her family in 1990.
Landis was back in Chicago recently giving decorating seminars and talking about “Metropolitan Home American Style” (Clarkson Potter/Publishers, $50), her latest decorating book, which was published in the spring and includes 39 glorious magazine homes. We asked her to talk decorating tricks and to help us “borrow and adapt” some of the best looks shown in her new book.
Q–Give us a quick and easy trick–something you learned from designers that all of us can do to make our rooms look better.
Landis–One thing, which really gives a room a shot of self-assurance, is to make sure every room has some element of black in it and some element of shine, which can be gilt, silver, steel, mirror, crystal. Black gives a room a little gravity. It anchors the room the way a rug does. Black chairs are a great idea, but it also could be in the frames around your photography collection, in the carpet, in throw pillows. There is a lot of sophistication to black, but it’s also easy to live with. It goes with everything. And with shine–when you have shiny surfaces that bounce the light around, it subliminally makes the room feel airier.
Q–You showed a lot of examples in the book of homeowners who were so amazingly prepared for remodeling or adding on to their homes that they actually had stashed away windows that they bought from a surplus window supplier or scraps of marble from a stone yard–all at great prices. Is this how the savvy homeowner approaches a remodel?
Landis–It’s fine for people who live in farmhouses with room for storage. I don’t think you could fit all those windows in the garage. Where would you put them?
Most people planning an addition hire the architect first. They don’t buy the windows first. And that’s the more logical way to do it. But I do think that it’s a great idea to build something old into a renovation.
There is this example in the book of a new house in Austin, Texas. New Orleans decorators Ann Holden and Ann Dupuy incorporated a plaster bas-relief that looks like a Roman frieze into the chimney breast in the library. It’s a new bas-relief. But it looks old. And they didn’t just hang it. They built it–literally recessed it–into the chimney breast and made it look like this prized antiquity that’s been mounted the way a museum would mount it.
Q–What does “old” add to a new room?
Landis–A sense of history and a sense of place and a sense of you. New construction can often look like it came out of a box.
Q–I noticed a lot of concrete floors and countertops in the book. What’s the story?
Landis–Concrete is this material that people are discovering has warmth to it–and you can do a lot to it. . . . First of all, you can add pigments to it.
There is this wonderful house in Texas that has all concrete flooring. I don’t remember if this was an accident or on purpose, but some leaves fell into the concrete. . . . Well, they have leaf fossils in their house. It’s wonderful.
Q–Would concrete be a viable material in Chicago homes?
Landis–Oh, I think it would be great in Chicago, because it is such a city material. It does not look like a sidewalk when it is poured indoors. Again, you need someone who knows what they are doing. I am not a concrete expert and, probably, nor is your decorator. You really need a contractor who has worked with concrete indoors before. Because once it’s done, it’s done.
Q–Let’s talk about the color white–white walls, in particular.
Landis–I have very strong feelings about white. I think all of us grew up in houses with white walls. And all of us got told either by our mothers or everyone around us that if you want to make a room look bigger, you paint the walls white. And all of us got told that rooms should look bigger.
This is all a big myth–all of it.
First of all, if you paint the walls white, you will set up a higher degree of contrast between the walls and what’s in the room–the art and the furniture. And as a result, the room will look a little bit more crowded and a little bit smaller.
The second part of the myth is, why would you want a room to look bigger? Why wouldn’t you just want the room to feel and look incredible? Who cares how big it is?
If you do want a room to look bigger, you have to make the whole room white–not just the walls, but slipcovers, pillows, draperies, ceramics. Not everything but the majority of the room has to fall somewhere in the white palette. But when I say white, I mean from stark white to a camel color.
There are so many shades of off-white. There are off-whites that lead to pink or to green or venture into a very pale sky blue. There are off-whites that have a pearly gray cast. There are warm whites. There are cold whites. The wealth of colors and moods that you can get from the range of white paint is extraordinary.
The way designers do a white palette is by mixing a lot of these whites and a lot of textures. Otherwise, the room just blanks out. So maybe your moldings are one shade of white. But then the walls might be a linen white and your slipcovers, a buttermilk-colored linen. Your club chairs might be a taupe-on-taupe stripe and the throw pillows might be a very faded floral–faded as if they had been dyed with tea. The draperies could be plain linen or a biscuit-colored silk or canvas. You might have a sisal area rug and a faded Chinese needlepoint on top of it.
The idea is that no color is strong, none pops out. If you do white this way, you will have a serene, a larger-looking, beautiful room–especially if you then add your accents of black and shine. Maybe you put a black mohair throw over the arm of that sofa. Or maybe you have your sisal bound in black canvas at the edges.
That’s the way to use white. To just paint the walls white–it’s what landlords do. You should choose white because it’s your favorite color.
Q–OK, say you decide to paint the walls an actual color. Won’t that darken the space?
Landis–Mark Hampton–he was this great New York designer who died recently–took me to see the apartment of the president of Chanel. I was doing a piece on halls and foyers, and he wanted me to see the red entry foyer. Now this red foyer was larger than my living room. My living room is maybe 16 by 20 feet. The foyer had dark red walls, and it was gorgeous.
I asked him (Hampton), “What about this myth?” because I love hearing designers talk about it. And he said that when you have a room that does not get a lot of natural light, and you paint it a dark color–and by dark he didn’t mean dark red or dark green only (he’s also painted rooms yellow), but a true color–then the room feels enveloping and warm, and it glows. If you take that same room that does not have a lot of natural light and you paint the walls white, he said, it will then look like a room that really needs a window desperately.
That’s a huge difference.
Q–Tell us a few great colors that designers have shared with you.
Landis–For the walls, Mark Hampton gave me Benjamin Moore & Co. 311, which is a real lovely English country house kind of yellow.
Tracie Rozhon is a design writer for The New York Times. She gave me Pratt & Lambert Paints 2140/Moth Gray. It’s the color of raw linen, unbleached linen. It’s really delicate and lovely. She has renovated scads of her own houses and uses that in a number of them.
And then I like Benjamin Moore & Co. HC-1. I got that from a design firm in Boston called C&J Katz. It’s one of Benjamin Moore’s historic colors. It’s a sage green, but when the light changes in the room from morning till night, the color changes, which is really lovely. It is a complex color that goes from a very delicate sage green to a more acidic sage.
And finally on ceilings, a well-known designer named Thomas Jayne from New York gave me Benjamin Moore & Co.’s HC-4. He used it on the ceiling in a showhouse, and it was really nice. It’s a very breathy yellow. And it just looked like the room had a wash of sunlight coming in, when, in fact, it was on the ground floor and it didn’t.
Q–Why do curtains always look so much better in the magazine houses? What do designers do differently?
Landis–They hang them higher than mere mortals do. If you look at the distance between the top of your window frame and the ceiling, a designer would probably hang the rod either halfway up to the ceiling or higher. It just draws your eye up. It makes the room look higher.
Designers also hang curtains wider than we do. One designer I know extends the curtain rod so it is wider than the window frame. That way, when he opens the curtains, the entire window is revealed.
A lot of us, when we open the curtains, you still don’t see the entire window. But the window is a precious thing. This trick makes the window look bigger too.
And, also, designers hang curtains longer. Floor-length curtains should kiss the floor or clump just a little bit.
