Does that seem like an oxymoron? Designer Liz Levin was asked to design a front parlor and back room of a home in Alexandria, VA, that would do several things:

• Use a baby grand piano as a focal point
• Incorporate an existing art collection, in addition to a newly commissioned piece that takes up almost the entire wall of the front parlor
• Accommodate the couple’s 4-year-old daughter
• And stand up to the family’s two dogs.

Before, the front room had dated, oversized maroon furniture in it, and the back room “had a dangling chandelier and a lot of toys in it,” Levin says. “They wanted it to be adult- and entertaining-friendly but still safe for a 4-year-old.” The answer: use the piano to turn the front room into a parlor, with chairs for adults to listen to music and/or enjoy cocktails, while saving the back room as a place for the child to play and the husband to watch TV. The home already has a family room, so this back area would be an alternative hang out spot.

The piano enjoys top billing in the revamped area. Levin used Ultrasuede on the chairs that can stand up to stains, and Roman shades on the windows that can stay safely out of reach from small hands and dog paws.

… And in case you are looking for a fabulous cocktail table, this one is Liz’s “secret table.” She gets this Catalina table, which is available in 20 finishes, from Hickory Business Furniture,  “I love that it has a shelf underneath.”

The rug from Galbraith & Paul (whose textiles we blogged about in May), is a nod to the adults. The wool pile on a cream silk loop background isn’t made for lots of heavy traffic, but the Cool Zinnia colorway beautifully incorporates the piano, chairs, and commissioned artwork.

The family’s existing artwork, along with the new chair and ottoman, help blend the two spaces. The rug is a nylon blend, so it cleans easily.

The rooms flow from a pale green and blue in front to a tan color scheme in the back, but the furniture in each area ties the spaces together. Benjamin Moore’s Celery Salt covers the walls in the front (the commissioned artwork is at the right), while Moore’s Golden Hills covers the back walls.

As a rookie gardener, I am still learning from my frequent mistakes and intermittent triumphs. There was the failure of the Bonsai tree that seemed impervious to my attempts at care-taking – augmented, happily, by the basil that is slowly-but-surely entering edible territory. Bolstered by these experiences, I’m now thinking about what to plant as the weather changes, and I had some basic questions as to which specimens will flourish as the weather cools.

“Fall is a great time for planting,” says Emily Tettelbaum, assistant general manager at American Plant in Bethesda, MD. Cooler temperatures are less stressful for plants – and for the human beings that tend to them. Early September, she says, is the ideal time to start populating your fall garden with plants that are a bit tougher than their warm-weather counterparts, but no less vibrant or flavor-packed.

“Mums kind of scream fall,” she says, and “people love to plant them” as temperatures begin to drop. She also cites pansies, my moon-faced favorites, as a strong flower to accompany the seasonal change. “In terms of winter color, you really can’t beat pansies.” They also come with a bonus of sorts: After an autumn bloom and a period of winter dormancy, they’ll blossom again in the spring.

Of edibles, Tettelbaum says, “lettuce, broccoli, and kale can go in starting now.” Lettuce and kale are especially hardy and can be harvested well into the winter, especially with the help of a protective cold frame. (Kale is delightfully substantial, too – sauté it with lemon and garlic or wilt it in some tomato sauce for an easy, hearty meal.)

Now is also the time to look into planting a cover crop – little guys like clover and alfalfa that will prevent soil erosion. Plus, in the spring, they can be turned into the dirt, infusing a bed with life-giving nitrogen.

At Spaces we’re finding that “green” is no longer a recurring story thread – it’s becoming fundamental. Our impact on the earth is a deeply resonant issue, with architects, builders, designers, and scientists leading the way for the next generation of sustainable products and homes. As Bruce Mau of Bruce Mau Design said to a rapt audience of his peers at a green design conference last year, “Almost all of life experience is a design experience. There is no edge to nature – there is one nature, and we’re in it.” He went on to note that the dwindling amount of space and natural resources are a fine challenge that may be addressed by one seemingly boundless resource – human innovation. 

Bruce Mau

The speech had a lasting effect on me. I wrote about it in our green issue this time last year, and as we finalized our upcoming Fall issue (a pretty impressive gallery of well-executed green principles; on newsstands this Friday), those thoughts recurred. One of the more elegant and interesting concepts Mau discussed was biomimicry, an arm of science that looks at how other organisms solve problems we humans keep stumbling over. The key to the process: Designers and biologists brainstorming at the same table.

If anyone knows, it’s Steve Nobel, co-founder of the Luxury Home Alliance and a consultant to luxury brands such as Kravet, where he recently started a blog.

“Luxury today is a state-of-mind or state-of-the-soul, rather than a statement on the size or elasticity of one’s wallet,” he writes on Inspired.Talk. “We believe that luxury is really much better described as an intimate and exclusive experience with time, quality, and imagination.”

Huh? He goes into laborious detail about what time, quality, and imagination mean, but he lost me. As they say, though, a picture is worth a thousand words, and the few images he’s chosen to illustrate luxury (shown below) say it all. Steve, please post more of them!

The grouping of art, along with the dramatic black sculpture and statues on that huge coffee table, frame the luscious colors and shapes of the rest of the room. Luxury is the ability to pile on objects, patterns, textures, colors, and shapes into a whole that is perfectly cohesive and not … piled on.

You don’t have to be a dog lover to appreciate the exquisite layering of fabrics and patterns here. Luxury is wrapping yourself in deep, dramatic folds – everywhere you turn.

Only an artist can successfully mix all the prints you see in this room. Non-interior designers, don’t try this at home. Luxury is achieving this stupendous balance of pattern and hue in a way that makes your heart sing.

This space is so cool and confident, yet serene in understatement. Luxury is knowing how to edit a room down to the barest and most beautiful essentials.

We’ve all heard it by now – this weekend is going to be a scorcher. Yuck. However, there is a breath of fresh air on the horizon: Saturday, Aug. 2nd and Sunday, Aug. 3rd, DC’s Mid-City neighborhood is hosting its 9th annual Dog Days of Summer Sidewalk Sale. The event, which started out as way to “celebrate the heat,” says Mid-City Business Association intern Seth Blume, and the notorious emptiness of DC in late summer, and grew into “something that is really looked forward to” by a growing number of the city’s residents. Most of the neighborhood’s shops will be offering discounts on their wares, which run the gamut from antique to new, funky to modern, and bargain to high-end. However, all of these shops are most definitely cool – something you’ll be grateful for with the weekend’s rising temperatures!

Here’s a short list of some of our favorite home stores in the area (which runs from 7th to 17th streets and from W to P streets in Northwest DC).

Owner Daniel Velez of the 10-month-old and much-discussed Greater Goods, which sells environmentally friendly home products and can also fill your eco-friendly contracting needs, says the store will be serving refreshing summer drinks along with surprise sale items.

Charlie’s Soap. (We love the old-fashioned packaging.)

Both Timothy Paul stores are offering sales: the Carpets + Textiles location (which stocks rugs, linens, furniture, and lighting) will take 15 to 40 percent off the entire rug inventory, while all the merchandise at Bedding + Home (carrying tabletop items, linens, home accessories, and accent pieces) will be discounted 15 percent. (Select items will be 20 to 30 percent off – even better!) The stores carry everything from “worldly vintage pieces and textiles” to “organic linens made in L.A.,” says Manager Brooke Loewen. Their inventories are united by the aesthetic sensibilities of owners Timothy and Mia Worrell, marked by “a love of color and texture,” the “found and the old,” and an affinity for “neutral, contemporary clean lines.”

The vibe at Timothy Paul.

The Garden District has outdone itself – the interior store is taking 25 percent off all plants and pottery, and 50 percent off all clearance items. The exterior store, not to be outshined, is discounting all plants 50 percent and all pottery 30 percent. “We have a lot to clear out,” Manager Sarah Vasil says. “We’ve got to turn over a lot of stuff” to make room for new seasonal items.

The Garden District’s exterior shop

Miss Pixie’s Furnishing and Whatnot is taking 20 percent off the store’s entire inventory – an excellent deal, says Owner Pixie Windsor, “because our prices are really good already.” We agree! Domino blogger Nick Olsen swears by this lovely eclectic shop, with pieces dating from the late 1800s to present day.

A five-piece garden dining set, available at Miss Pixie’s.

Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams’ annual clearance sale just happened to fall on a weekend when all of its neighbors were having a sale, too! The sleek, transitional (“comfortably in the middle of traditional and contemporary,” says Assistant Manager Page Collins) furniture and lighting store is offering up to 70 percent off select stock items and discontinued floor samples.

Arabesque Mirror

You could also head over to Vastu to take advantage of an offer they only make once a year – 15 percent off any new custom upholstery orders, in addition to markdowns on select floor samples. The refined shop specializes in “warm” or “comfortable” modern, offering upholstery, casegoods, shelving, tables, and lamps – plus full residential and commercial decorating services. The store also doubles as a gallery space that features work by local artists.

A penthouse on 14th street decorated by Vastu.

I love this man because he has built an empire of styling, advice-giving, and window-dressing around his delightful and witty personality – which is why I practically sprinted over to the Corcoran last night when I found out he was giving a talk about his new book, Eccentric Glamour.

Although he’s not an interior designer, we like what he has to say about the topic. Through his New York Observer column, he warned us about the pitfalls of decorator bullies (“One client was…forced to embrace an overly ironic Rumplemeyer-esque ice-cream parlor scheme in her kitchen.”), the phenomenon of Color Me Beautiful (“Why do Winters love to cast nasturtiums on us Autumns?”), and the see-and-be-scenery that is New York’s Winter Antiques Show (“Avail yourself of this unique opportunity to observe these Park Avenue incroyables at close range.”)

In Eccentric Glamour, the Barneys New York creative director and VH1 talking head isolates three types of women: the Gypsy, an ethereal bohemian with a penchant for all things flowing, the Socialite, a classic preppy who loves sweet, bright color, and the Existentialist, a brooding, intellectual type whose attire reflects the wearer’s cerebral nature.      

These three styles translate easily to home decor, he says.

Cheers to Diane Gordy of DGI Design Group, who is the featured designer in The Washington Post’s House Calls today.

We have a special fondness for her, too, as she was one of our winners in the Washington Spaces 2008 Best of Interior Design competition. Her winning bedroom/loft project was inspiring.

We wrote about Pottery Barn last month. When it was catching the eye of design watchers for using ultra-chic Hable Construction fabric on its nursery rockers,  and also for its style uptick in general, as you can see with the “Shop By Room” function on its Web site. 

But it’s in the news again this week, both in the blogosphere and also in publications such as WWD. This time, they’ve put videos on the site called “Where I Live,” which give us tours of the cool kids’ homes, such as Domino Editor in Chief Deborah Needleman, Domino eco-style blogger Zem Joaquin, and New York designer Bob Weinstein. During the narrated tours, each slips in items from Pottery Barn that are part of the décor. Pottery barn used the homes to shoot photos for their latest catalogue.


Watch the videos HERE

What do you do with an oddly angled tiny kitchen in a high-rise, anchored by a bulky refrigerator eating up valuable space? You get really creative, as Custom Crafters recently did for an apartment in DC’s Penn Quarter.

“The idea was to modernize it and make the finishes much more appealing and get the appliances under the counter to get them out of the way,” says Brian McGarry, who shared pictures of the final product with us.

Here, you see nothing but a swath of natural cherry cabinets, uninterrupted by appliances save for the range and microwave oven. There’s not even a refrigerator in sight. That’s because almost everything is cleverly disguised.

Modern design fans, take note: There’s a new book out on Tord Boontje’s designs, signed by the master himself and available at Moss.

As the Moss web site says:

“This is the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to the work of Dutch designer Tord Boontje. The book is a textural experience, printed on a variety of different papers, perforated pages and papers with fabric overlays.”

Sample pages from the book.

I would buy the book for the tactile experience alone, but the signed edition makes the deal even sweeter.

If you want to take a trip down Boontje lane in the meantime, here are some of my favorites, all available at Moss:

On this day, the 101st birthday of Charles Eames, the U.S. Postal Service is releasing a new collection of stamps depicting furniture, art and architecture from the famous couple.

(Stop by Design Within Reach through Saturday for a sale on all Eames furniture and other lines produced by Herman Miller.)

But the coolest thing about these stamps is that Derry Noyes, the Washington, DC, designer who conceived of and created the stamps, grew up with the Eames. They were close friends of her parents, and some of the furniture Noyes portrays on the stamps furnished her childhood home.

If you passed on purchasing items at the DC Design House last month and other show houses in the past, here’s your second chance to get some of them at a huge discount, in addition to dozens of other pieces DC designers are donating next week to raise money for the Center for Family Development. The Designers Tent Sale is hosted by Kelley Proxmire of Kelley Interior Design.

Proxmire poses in one of four black and white dining chair’s she’s offering at the sale, which she featured with her tabletop setting in last year’s Georgetown Jingle.

Proxmire went through her vast storage areas and produced this green club chair and throw pillow from a past showhouse.

She is also donating this stunning blue ottoman and slipper chair.

If you don’t already have an invitation for the “1st Dibs” opening reception on June 19, head out to Bethesda on June 20 or 21, where you might be able to snap up this chair, which designer Page Palmer featured in the guest room of the DC Design house. Hickory Chair, the maker, sold it with brass nailheads, but Palmer found a craftsman to replace all 450 gold-colored heads with silver. Original retail price: $1,650. Tent Sale Price: $850.

Thirty percent of all sales go to support the Center for Family Development, which runs marriage prep classes and marriage counseling programs in addition to parenting and relationship counseling and youth leadership programs. Some of the designers who are participating are donating the goods, so all of those sales benefit the center.

When you enter Valerianne, the scent seduces you right away. Spicy, sweet, and fresh, it pulls you in, away from the heat and into the airy expanse of the newest home boutique on Church Street, in the quaint, unassuming heart of Vienna, VA. Owner Aimee Wedlake opened the shop as a second location to the original Valerianne in Scottsdale, AZ.

Wedlake will likely show you to a wooden cabinet stocked with world-renowned soaps and home fragrances from Santa Maria Novella, a line handcrafted in Florence by Dominican monks, which includes a delicate, pomegranate-shaped terra-cotta diffuser, molded out of clay infused with pomegranate oil.

Terra cotta is formed by hand, fired halfway, and then dipped in pomegranate oil for a week and fired again, sealing the fragrance inside, which will last 9-12 months.

100 percent beeswax, with the scent of rosemary, orange, and lavender oils with natural cinnamon bark

It is with the same attention to quality and aesthetic that Wedlake curates her impeccably merchandised shop, choosing pieces that she knows “will withstand the test of time” but also feel of-the-moment.

The big retail news this week is that Pier 1 Imports made an unsolicited bid to buy Cost Plus World Market in a deal worth $88.4 million. Wall Street analysts are mostly down on the idea, but style-wise, it makes perfect sense.

Both companies have a strong Asian/Polynesian feel, with unexpected delights popping up now and again that don’t always fall into that category. Walking through Pier 1 or World Market always yields cool discoveries.

High-end designers are not above using them, either: Kenneth Brown used a World Market screen in a family room he designed for a Los Angeles music industry executive, which was featured on his HGTV show. Thom Filicia of Bravo’s Queer Eye fame used to be the spokesperson for Pier 1. Pier 1 also offers discounts for interior designers.

So, let’s compare:

World Market has these great Thai floor cushions

And Pier 1 has these colorful damask throw pillows

World Market has a strong, contemporary picnic table:

And Pier 1 has these sweet rockers:

World Market has a lovely outdoor pitcher and glasses,

Which would go great with Pier 1’s outdoor tableware:

World Market offers a beautiful Honeycomb screen,

While Pier 1 has a louvered Plantation screen:

World Market has a handsome round rattan vase

And Pier 1 sells a jaunty turquoise one:

Meanwhile, both stores have some beautiful items that are unique to them. Keep reading to see more.

YES. As I looked lovingly at the antique twin beds in designer Victoria Neale’s girls’ bedroom at the DC Design House this year, I was surprised to hear that the sweet-but-elegant pink and green bedding came from Pottery Barn. It was a crisp foil to the rich Osbourne & Little fabric covering the walls and gracing the headboards. (You can see Morgan Howarth’s fine photos of this room in our upcoming issue, out later this month.)

I had stopped shopping at Pottery Barn a while ago, because their look had become SO predictable: blocky shapes, chunky furniture, and lots of neutrals. But believe it or not, the chain has been popping up a lot in the design blogosphere this year for gettin’ its groove back.

One of the greatest developments: Pottery Barn, along with sister company Williams-Sonoma Home, has a new feature on its site. You can shop by room, and if you like the paint used in a room, it will tell you which Benjamin Moore color was used.