Add to Del.icio.us
Digg this Article
Add to Mixx
Express Yourself
For Designer Deborah Kalkstein, “red and green is not the story.” It’s all about emphasizing bliss. Her ideal blend of pleasures includes hosting friends, viewing fine art, and cuddling up in a cashmere sweater with her miniature schnauzer, Hilton, and a cup of tea.
To finesse her ultra-modern scorched concrete fireside, she gathered a few choice items from Contemporaria, her Georgetown store, a black gnome table from Philippe Starck for Kartell, a daybed by Mies van der Rohe, a cowhide rug through Contemporaria and a sculpture by Jacques Lenantec.
When decorating, Kalkstein urges: “Follow your interests. When something is copied or done just for show, it doesn’t have meaning.”
Joyful, Joyful
When she saw a stately stone fireplace, Designer Camille Saum set out on a mission to find toys.
“I wanted everything to be funky and whimsical,” she says, and the fireplace, designed and installed by Botanical Decorators, was a wide-open canvas. Her first stop? Marston Luce Antiques in Georgetown, where she immediately fell for the 19th-century carnival ball-toss game, sitting front and center on the mantel. From there, Saum built a pastiche of antique clowns, figurines, rocking horses, an old-timey sled, and other colorful odds and ends found at Marston Luce or the AmericanEye showroom at The Washington Design Center. Saum’s sister, Beth Fraser Junium, helped style, bringing in her collection of primitive wooden evergreens and a large faux tree they painted bright red. Flat, oversized wooden ornaments play with scale.
Saum advises to have fun when decorating, never to fear color, and to enhance the unexpected. For example, for the interim between fires, why not paint a set of logs bright yellow?
The Tuxedo Room
Designer Lori Graham believes decorating should be more conceptual than thematic – so she offset Jim Weinstein’s masculine, medallioned marble fireplace with sculptural accents and vintage pillows and fabrics from Old World Weavers and Timothy Paul Carpets + Textiles.
“I create juxtapositions: masculine and feminine, bold and neutral, old and new,” Graham says. “I try to make it happen at every level – funky fabrics meeting classical lines, antique things mixed with shiny new things.”
In that vein, a row house with a neoclassical fireplace (through Westland London) was like a formal suit – it did best with low-key accessories: wire baskets, weathered fabrics, and slouchy French Tampico bags (through Timothy Paul Carpets + Textiles) stuffed with goodies.
Remixing tradition
The mise-en-place involved in decorating a prominent, black-and-chocolate-brown mantel in a Venezuelan household demanded that Designer Christopher Boutlier think outside the norm. The scale of the fireplace, designed and built by Architect Rob Morris with Morris-Day Design/Build, was enormous.
An idea was born from mosaics created from blue and white pottery shards that Boutlier had seen at the Freer and Sackler galleries. He filled apothecary jars with small blue and white porcelain pieces, which reiterated the colors of the tile floor. The hand-painted wallpaper and checkered tile invited interplay of patterns, so Boutlier filled more jars with strips of blue and white silk-screened Japanese and Indian paper – “I am a Paper Source addict!” he confesses. He wrapped vases of flowers from Allan Woods in more handmade paper, and rather than a floral centerpiece, he filled a pewter dish from Baker with blooms and a small, unframed painting of his grandmother’s.
Boutlier says the holidays are less about impressing, and more about inviting. “Too often the goal behind the decorations gets lost – it’s about being together,” he says.
