painted furniture

Annals of Bad Design: Giant Wardrobe in a Small Room, With a Fix

Many of the design suggestions in Remodelista’s “Expert Advice…for Creating the Illusion of Space” are indeed effective. Not this one. So we figured out some solutions…

Ghost armchair designed by Paola Navone for Gervasoni

deconstructed slipcovers like paola navone’s fab ghost chair

Recently at Style-Files, Danielle de Lange was mulling whether to buy the pricey ($1,000), chic or a Ikea’s cheap, rather clunky and traditional alternative, the Ektorp chair ($199), below. She inadvertently pointed out a great lesson in slip-cover assumptions: the usual, standard approach with piping or neat seams is NOT the only way to go. Paola Navone devised a…

chic diy graphic design tees (+ furniture)

On Sprinkles and Springs, we came across this diy striped tee inspired by the modish tee-shirt Marc Jacobs recently featured in his chic, stripey collection. It is a great example of I COULD MAKE THAT thinking that has infiltrated many a clever head. Sprinkles and Springs saw it and figured out how using a plain…

miracle water-base paint formula for kitchen cabinets, bookcases + furniture

Recently, a friend mentioned her attempt to paint her wooden kitchen cabinets white using latex paint. Several months after she’d completed them, they’d yellowed and were difficult to clean. We’ve heard that complaint before about latex-painted furniture, and experienced the way it can remain “sticky”, a serious problem with bookshelves. We’d always thought that oil-base…

two-tone chairs, using paint or upholstery

A rather ordinary chair with good simple lines becomes much more interesting with an assymetrical two-tone paint job. We love that color-blockish thing! Here’s a chair transformed by two-toned upholstery: mattress ticking and velvet in tandem:

Vintage staggered and stacked crates in blues and white

inside-out painted shelves and drawers

We’ve been amassing quite a collection of pictures of stacked boxes and crates being used as shelving. And lately, they’ve included crates and boxes that are painted on the inside, outsides left their natural shelves. This simple embellishment presents the colors as a sort of surprise, that lends a lot of charm to the plain box…