Losing Weight. In Your Interiors.

No my friend, this curvy Bucks County interior designer is not lamenting over the size of her   lower end…though i could.  I’m not talking about my unending subconscious quest to lose weight while i try to see how much food i can actually cram into the twenty puny points Weight Watchers wants me to subsist on. (Hey, are green m&ms fewer points than red ones by the way?). No, I’m   talking about a much easier weight loss arena to tackle…your home’s interior.

Here are the guideposts to trim down and thus beauty up any room.

1) lose the fat couch.  Seriously, why are people cramming oversized furniture into average to smaller sized spaces.  Only a designer can do this well, and she’ll do so only by compensating for such a scale-pusher with other strategic choices on color, texture and pattern elsewhere in the room, not to mention the prudent selection of the other  furnishings in that room.

2) starve away 30% of the accessories.  We Americans love our stuff.  We are the supersize me culture, to include the supersized amount of stuff we collect and somehow feel the need to display.  Editing accessories to a meaningful and impactful minimum will make the accessories themselves more beautiful and the room itself lighten up and  come alive.  There will still be a plentiful feast for the eye to enjoy, but it will no longer be forced to gorge.

3) Learn to Push The Plate Away.    I designed a truly beautiful room for a client once.  They loved it.  I loved that they loved it.  But over time as I returned to their home for other project work, I saw this room slowly fill with what seemed like every plant known to man, some even on plant stands.    It became a jumbled greenhouse, not the the warm and beautiful  room they had initially told me they craved to entertain family and friends.  This space would not beacon to a single human occupant….only philodendrons and ferns. Too much of a good thing is…too much.

4) Exercise moderation.  You can have it all…just not all in the same room.  Even though you inherited it, got a steal on it, paid a fortune for it, just bought it or have had it forever, sometimes the best thing one can do in design is show restraint. Find new locations for things.  Make selected  furnishings the star of the space, but not too many stars or you risk a bloated show.

Good luck my svelte friend on your journey to lighten up.  Trimming down may be painful during the process….but think of how good you’ll look…in your “new” home once you do.