Interior Design Spotlight: Century Furniture

Century Furniture is one of our favorite lines; and pieces from their various collections coupled with the right interior design can make any room look spectacular. Century Furniture is a privately owned upper end furniture manufacturer that is well known for their craftsmanship and elegance; with home furnishings for every space in your home and a style to match.

When we design with Century Furniture,  we are able to allow our client an outlet to express his or her own individuality. Century Furniture even has your outdoor needs covered with a special selection of patio and pool furniture. Century Furniture allows you the freedom to furnish your entire home, a single room or a complementary piece for your existing decor.

The craftsmen at Century Furniture will allow you to customize your home furnishing. With over 2000 fabrics to choose from and over 50 different wood finishes you can create that custom design you can call your very own. With Century Furniture you are actually purchasing a work of art that has been handcrafted for you by one or their renowned artisans.

Interior Design Ideas - Incorporating Feng Shui Part IIII

Making your house welcoming and warm is a top priority to any homeowner. We’ve covered some quick tips to implement Feng Shui in your home, as well as covered how to make the most important room in your home, the living room, more guest-friendly without sacrificing the family space.  We try to incorporate several elements into interior design - and making them comfortable and stylish is often the biggest challenge.

But what about your bedroom? Few guests see this special room, but it can be argued that this is the most sacred room in any house. So could Feng Shui be helpful there? Absolutely.

First off, use a headboard. This design element can be one of the most overlooked elements of a beautiful bedroom. Materials to look for are warm and friendly, like wood or leather. Line up the headboard in the middle of a wall, so that equal space are given for both people to enter and leave the bed.

Colors in bedrooms are equally important, so use warm colors like reds, oranges, dark greens and browns to create a more comfortable atmosphere. Spice up the romance in the room by adding artwork in pairs to reinforce the sacredness of a room for two special people.

See some examples of beautiful bedrooms in our Dallas furniture showroom. If you’re going to have a TV, computer or other electronic device in the bedroom, follow the same principles laid out in the living room: hide them when not in use.

Gorgeous Gourds Of Holiday Decor

Preparing your home for the Thanksgiving Feast can be difficult at best - there will be tons of people in your home, and busy work creating fantastic meals to be shared around a family table. It's the start of the most wonderful time of the year. Decorating with pumpkins and squash may sound funny - but it is - every year, a reliable and relevant trend in holiday decor.

There are many different ways to incorporate gourds, pumpkins and squash into your interior design during Autumn.

According to Martha Stewart (and she is in authority on this sort of thing...) Autumn is the easiest season to decorate your home because of the use of a just even a single pumpkin, some squash and a little creative thinking can make a huge difference in the entire atmosphere of your home.

Sur la table, you can clean out your pumpkin and use for a dip dish, and place on a nice platter with your favorite crackers. You can also use a cleaned out pumpkin for soup or chowder.

Use the big pumpkin for your Thanksgiving Day feast centerpiece. Place in the center of your beautiful dining table and place some small squash, random leaves scattered around it. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

The great thing about pumpkins and squash are their unique and wonderful natural fall colors. Decorating your home or work place with these wondrous fall colors such as the different types of pumpkins can not only be unique but also will save some money. You can use these decorating tips from mid-September up until the day after Thanksgiving.

Visit a Farmers Market to get some great unique and no-two alike pumpkins and squash to scatter on the front porch steps to give that inviting and warm welcome to friends and family.

Interior Design Ideas - Incorporating Feng Shui Part II

Two rooms we don’t want to neglect when applying the principles of Feng Shui to our interior design are also rooms that are quite useful: the home office and the kitchen.

HOME OFFICE

For those with a home office, it can be difficult to make this room more than just a 'storage space' for files, paperwork and computers. Implement some of these changes to make your home office more room-energy friendly.

Align your desk so that it is facing the door. It creates a presence of power, you’ll be the first to greet anyone that enters.

Eliminate sharp edges, whether that be furniture or artwork and replace them with rounded shapes and sensual objects that encourage productivity. File all of those papers! Create a storage or filing system that is easy to use and clean for those who happen to stumble upon them.

KITCHEN

Lastly, homeowners spend a majority of their time in the kitchen. Kitchens now serve as entertaining spaces on top of the need to be a room for preparing and serving food. Use some of these quick kitchen tips to optimize your space.

Similar to the office principle, you want to face the entrance to your kitchen while you’re cooking. This can be done by hanging a mirror on the backsplash or by installing a stove top on an island.
Organize pantries, especially if using cloudy glass in pantry doors. It gives you the opportunity to present dishes as artwork.

Lighting is very important in the kitchen, so utilize warm lighting from halogen bulbs or incandescent lights to make food more visually appealing on top of being tasty!

Keep it clean. Always clean your stove top and countertops after making dishes. Nothing is more unappealing than caked out foods from dishes cooked weeks before. A quick swipe with a paper towel can often to the trick. 

Interior Design Elements: What Is Color?

There are so many different colors in the vast world; such as various shades of colors found in nature, or brighter hues and tones of paint on a canvas. But, how do we get all of these colors? Well it might surprise you to know that we actually get all colors from the way our eye perceives light and the way materials either absorb or reflect this light.

How could this be? Well it’s simple – you just combine the lights in different ratios. By changing the brightness in certain different colors you can get every color you could ever imagine. Millions.

In the world of painting, we use additive coloring to get lighter tints (basically, we mix white with the color to get a tint), and to get a shade, we would add black to produce shaded versions of the same color.

But in other industries, and in color theory itself - additive coloring is a bit different, where for example, combining all three additive primary colors in equal amounts will produce the color white itself. Good examples of this include televisions and computers.

What happens, though, when the source of your color is not light, but instead is something like a book or photograph? Well it’s easy – we just use Subtractive Coloring instead. Subtractive Coloring’s colors are Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. What makes Subtractive Coloring different from Additive is that in Subtractive the three colors are used to make darker colors, and when all three are mixed together they create the color black. For all you Photoshop experts out there - this is what happens when you 'invert' an image.

In essence, all colors are made up by how we, as individuals, see them. So, in theory, colors do not exist in nature, but instead are something that we perceive as color given three different situations: white light, the way materials absorb or reflect light, and by the sensibility of the human eye. This would also mean that colors do not exist in powders and paints or fabrics.

Some eyes can be more sensible than others, though – and at J. Douglas Design we know that we have the right eye to help you combine any types of different colors that you may want in any kind of home décor.

Interior Design Ideas - Incorporating Feng Shui Part III

Feng Shui can help create an atmosphere of 'welcome' and make your living space more inviting. We laid out some quick tips to implement Feng Shui into the home in recent posts, now we’ll cover the most important room to focus on: the living space.

The living room is the focal point of the house and the center of entertaining and family fellowship. Above all other rooms - it should be the most welcoming room in all of your home. For most of us, the living room serves not only as the greeting room when guests come over, but also the main space for our families to thrive - toy trucks, video games and dolls normally lay sprawled across the floor. It doesn’t have to be hard to make this versatile space more friendly - these interior design and layout tweaks will show you just how easy it is to make a change that is very impactful.

Electronics: It all starts with the TV. Don’t make the TV or other electronics the focal point of your living room, instead hide electrical equipment from view when not in use by using cabinets and other furniture for storage.

Face to Face: It’s also a good idea to “marry” furniture together, meaning set up furniture to face each other so that conversations can happen naturally within the room. Make sure that the furniture in your living room is appropriate to your own personal style, so browse the best furniture lines before making a decision.

Deck the halls - but where? Hanging objects on walls at the same height, as if lining them up on a horizontal line, can make walls seem much longer and ceilings much taller. When hanging artwork, look to create grids or shapes with pictures that can make the hanging frames art within themselves.

Go light on the doo-dads. Stray from using too many decorative items  or small home accessories outside of your main furniture or small collections or items grouped together. A side note, too many pillows on a couch can be downright overwhelming!

How have you made your living space more 'inviting'?

Interior Design Ideas - Incorporating Feng Shui Part I

We all want a home that looks beautiful - but it must also feel right. A home with personal energy flows well from room to room, with each room offering it’s own personality.

By learning the principles of Feng Shui, a Chinese system of harmonizing environments and elements - you can create any desired atmosphere in your home.

Let’s start by covering some simple things you can do to implement Feng Shui into your home today:

Be Clean 
Simple. Clean your home. Nothing makes a home look more inviting and welcoming than a clean living room with some magazines laid out upon a coffee table. Keep the clutter out, by organizing your things and keeping things where they belong.  Dust the floorboards and ceiling fans and change the light bulbs on the porches to create a more safe and visible atmosphere.

Be Strategic and Open Channels
Don’t leave furniture or items in the middle of rooms or entryways, these can block the "flow" of energy that moves into the home. Do you have a wall or dead end in your home that seems out of place? Add a floor-length mirror to create an illusion of a bigger room or space.

Add Shapes and Colors
Shapes and colors are both core elements of design and can do wonders to a home to revamp the interior design. To stay strict to Feng Shui principles, use rounded or oval tables and white plates to allow the food to be the focal point of the meal and room. Opt for wooden tables and soft fabric chairs instead of glass counter tops or metal table tops.

Have you tried any of these in your home? Stay tuned for more Feng shui principles you can incorporate in your home today to help create a personal energy in your living space.