The Washington Design Center unveiled its Fall 2008 Design House yesterday, allowing members of the press to see the eight rooms that carry the theme of “Casa Couture: Designers in Vogue.” The Design House opens to the public next Friday, Sept. 26, and runs through Dec. 13. Unlike designer show houses that raise money for charity, this tour is free.

Here’s a sneak peek of the rooms and their designers (all photographs by Timothy Bell). 

Entry/Foyer: Yvette Piaggio, Piaggio’s Loft
“European Transitional”

Living Room: Emily Bishop, Emily Bishop Interior Design
“Think Café de Flore meets Studio 54 meets Velvet Lounge”

Family Room: Brad Weesner, Brad Weesner Design
Combines looks from the last century with cutting-edge gaming technology.

Dining Room/Bar: Michelle Pilon, Michelle Pilon Interiors
“Dining Menu: Yesterday – Today – Tomorrow”

Kitchen: Todd Martz, Todd Martz Interiors
Clean style of the cabinets and furniture is warmed by the collection of outsider art.

Bedroom: Michelle Miller, Jenkins Baer Associates,
Natural fabrics such as silk, linen, velvet and wool in tonal shades of gray.

Gentleman’s Retreat: Wayne Breeden, E. Wayne Breeden
Textiles from Kravet and Lee Jofa in shades of moss, cement, putty, ivory, and celery.

Photographer’s Study: Tami Hatch and Pattie Gunter, Gunter-Hatch Design Group
Inspired by runway trends with dressmaker details for world-traveling photographer.

Designer Barry Dixon, whose new furniture collection and book we feature in our fall issue, is becoming more relaxed in his personal style, according to the current issue of House Beautiful.

Dixon and eight other designers were asked to comment on how their homes have evolved over the last 10 years. Here’s what Barry said:

“My home is a lot more relaxed, less rigid. As I’ve ‘matured,’ I’ve gotten comfortable with the serendipitous migration of things. I’m less of a slave to putting things back where they belong. The chairs used to have to sit at perfect right angles to the sofa, but, you know, it’s nice when they’re angled so I can look out the window or see the TV more easily. It’s great to loosen up. And I notice that people are more at ease when they come over because it’s not all too-too perfect.”

Here’s his family room – I’d definitely feel relaxed in here! This and other images of Barry’s home, Elway Hall, are in his new book, Barry Dixon Interiors.

Here’s another thing Barry Dixon fans will love – you can be his friend.

Barry recently jumped on the social networking bandwagon and opened an account on Facebook. He really needs friends, too – he only had 38 at last count, but we know he has so many more!

Photography by Jay Pigeon, Integrated Media Systems

Many from the Washington, DC, design community, including architects, builders, and interior designers, who gathered last Friday night for a luxurious party at Charles Luck Stone Center in Chantilly, VA, were wowed by the sophisticated showroom that greeted them. Unlike most stone warehouses that have huge slabs of raw stone with few refinements, this one is in a league of its own. This is the second bash Charles Luck, Integrated Media Systems (IMS), and Washington Spaces has hosted within two-and-a-half weeks to highlight their products and services.

Nancy Colbert of Design Partners LLC and Marilyn Burroughs of New Leaf Collaborative Architecture & Design PLC both commented that the clean-lined space, which looks as if it evolved over many years from one small red stone building that could have originally been an old factory, would be a wonderful resource to work with a client.

“I’ve seen some stones here that I’ve never seen before and I thought I’d seen everything,” Colbert says. “When you take a client to a granite yard, it’s overwhelming, really mind-boggling. To come here and see the same stone with different finishes – well polished stone or a honed stone or a stone that’s been flamed – is great.”

Laura Lim, sales and marketing manager of Morton’s The Steakhouse – Tysons Corner, gets the scoop on semi-precious gemstones held together with epoxy resin from William Shifflett of Charles Luck Stone. Great minds think alike, the same cool Bendant lamp by MIO Culture that is featured in the showroom graces the What’s New page in the current issue of Washington Spaces.

“People like to touch stone, it’s a very emotional buy,” says William Shifflett, director of operations of Charles Luck Stone, adding that the center can custom make just about whatever a client desires. “Someone can say, ‘I grew up in a house with a huge limestone fireplace,’ and we can replicate that,” he says, mentioning that people bring in paint chips and fabric swatches, and plan their projects in the showroom.

“It’s exciting to be here,” says Michael Roberson of Michael Roberson Interior Design, who has brought clients to Charles Luck Stone in the past. She and her husband, Rob Roberson, enjoyed the wine tasting provided by The Vintage Vintner, among other amenities.

Michael and Rob Roberson relax in a conference room with stone planking that looks like a hardwood floor.

A custom made limestone fireplace and intricate mosaic hearth are integrated into the Charles Luck Stone Center showroom.

Lynn and Mark Fernandes - he’s president of Charles Luck Stone Centers - exchanged ideas with Daniel Steinkoler, owner of Superior Home Services Inc., who says he had a “blast” that evening.

Left to right: Washington Spaces Senior Account Executive Emilia Philip, Associate Publisher Heather Heider, Greg Powell, sales manager and hardscape developer of Lewis Aquatech, Don Gwiz, vice president of Lewis Aquatech, and Beth Powell, enjoy the evening.

Susan Utley of Design Studio of Bethesda chats with Randy Gore of Charles Luck Stone.

Randy Gore of Charles Luck Stone escorted interior designer Susan Utley of Design Studio around the showroom, while her friend, Lisa Tureson of Faux Creations Inc., a decorative art firm, explored and looked for particular stones. John Kiernan of Blue Line Studios, which also specializes in glorious decorative finishes and murals, enjoyed the many luxurious elements of the evening, including the Lamborghini, Maserati, and GranTurismo from Ferrari Maserati of Washington that were parked just outside the building. IMS provided six Sharp LCDs placed around the showroom that played a continuous loop about luxury providers Charles Luck, Ferrari, Maserati, and IMS.

Lisa Tureson of Faux Creations Inc. examined the beautiful selection of stone.

Maureen Morris, co-owner of Morris Stone Inc., Tom Wells, president of Integrated Media Systems, and Heather Heider, associate publisher of Washington Spaces, shared a few laughs.

Many raved about the delicious jumbo shrimp and delectable crab cakes that Laura Lim and her crew from Morton’s The Steakhouse Tysons Corner served. Heather Heider of Washington Spaces ate one irresistible bite-sized cheesecake by Fresh Confections and said she thought she’d died and gone to heaven.

Lee Odess, director of marketing and sales for IMS, takes a tasty break with his fiancée, Jen Ingberg, owner of Fresh Confections.

Left to right: Front row, Jim Colbert and his wife Nancy Colbert of Design Partners LLC, Rebecca Hubler of Designed Interiors and her husband David, and back row, Paul Parker and his wife Jennifer Parker of Patera Home LLC enjoyed the festivities of the evening.

The intriguing architecture of the building, designed by Andrew Moore of Glavé and Holmes Associates, impressed Architect John Burroughs of New Leaf Collaborative Architecture & Design, the most. “You would really want to bring clients here,” Burroughs says.

John and Marilyn Burroughs admired the architecture of the Charles Luck Stone Center, which he says reminds him of an old mill.

Mark Fernandes had the last word as he pointed out that the red stone at the core of the building was hand-tooled Chinese sandstone from the same province where Confucius was born. Now that’s impressive.

Photography by Magenta Livengood

The line between being respectful to a home’s history and being a slave to it is always thin, but it’s one on which Chryssa Wolfe of Hanlon Design Build Inc. comfortably perches. She recently completed End Lane, an impressive renovation in Chevy Chase, MD, that merges reverence for history with the informal way we live now.

End Lane at dusk

“I didn’t want it staid,” says Wolfe, “I didn’t want it serious.” So she brought in lively colors wherever possible – Donghia daybeds, William Morris wallpaper, vibrant tile in the mudroom, and surprisingly successful purple walls in the dining room. Wolfe took risks throughout, and they paid off.

Donghia daybeds in the library

Fans of Wolfe’s work will recognize some signatures: masterful millwork and mouldings, impeccable color choices, and effortless blending of new and old looks.

The formal living room

A sitting area adjoining the foyer and dining room

Modern conveniences, country charm in the kitchen

“In China, they’re tearing down all these old homes,” Wolfe says, and since this home was nearly a goner itself, she decided to bring in some relics from Chinese teardowns as a nod to the value of reinvention.

Chinese shutters and doors

And this is just a taste. The home is rich with ideas, from Wolfe’s paintings of trees that had to be torn down for the project to cork footrests in the theater to children’s suites that brim with personality. For Wolfe and her team, End Lane is a home run.

Shanon Munn, Ambi Design Studio LLC

Here’s a sneak peek at one of the rooms that will be featured in an interior design show sponsored by The Women’s Committee for the National Symphony Orchestra, called Beyond Dragons: An East-West Fusion of Interior Design.

The NSO is back in its second year of sponsoring a scaled-down design show at The Woman’s Club of Chevy Chase – not to be confused with the huge decorators’ showhouse events it put on for years but discontinued after 2006, in part because of bureaucracy and liability issues involved.

The committee is hoping that the best things come in small packages. Unlike the month-long decorators’ showhouses of old, this collection of designer vignettes will run for just five days in October (22nd – 26th).

In keeping with the Asian theme, each designer involved will receive assistance from the wives of diplomats and ambassadors from the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The 10 designers participating in the show – mostly young up-and-comers – were formally introduced today at a luncheon in the elegant Circles Lounge at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House. Keep reading for details on each designer and their “east-west” decorating plans for the show.

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.

This spring, we profiled John Kiernan and his Blue Line Studios as part of a story on ceiling décor.  His ceiling mural portraying icons of American history was stunning.

Kiernan just sent us an e-mail with photos of his latest project, a kitchen in a McLean, VA – an example of your basic upscale kitchen getting a treatment that makes it really unique (the sky might have been more realistic without pendant lights hanging from it, but it’s a kitchen, after all). The walls, meanwhile, were also painted and textured by Blue Line. Very cool.

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.

It was so exciting to see the piece in Sunday’s Washington Post about modern architecture in DC, which includes profiles on the work of Simon Jacobsen and Travis Price. It’s great to see other publications celebrating DC’s modernist gems.

Our current issue’s Best of Remodeling competition awarded Simon Jacobsen for  “Washed in White," a breathtakingly spacious, light-filled, and thoroughly modern interior.

Remodel by Simon Jacobsen

In 2006, we showcased his work on a Watergate condo, where he reorganized the awkward floor plan to create a clean and streamlined space.

Watergate condo design by Simon Jacobsen

In 2005, we examined the very house where Simon spent his childhood, which was designed by his father, architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen.

Home of Hugh Newell Jacobsen

In fall 2006, we recognized the creative breadth of Travis Price, whose projects included a space that he “psychologically doubled” in size using glass and natural light.

A renovation by Travis Price

Washington Spaces always has its eye on modernism, noting local standouts such as the cool, colorful Arlington home of Jack and Cathy Gerstein,

… and the minimal-but-tactile Maryland Apartment of Irene and Alfred Roth.

A few nights ago, my boyfriend and I weathered a minor squabble about the functionality of our coffee table – a hand-me-down hurriedly acquired when we moved into our apartment over a year ago. (He: "It serves a purpose!" Me: "It’s ugly!") If I had my druthers, I would pick up the phone and place an international call to the nice people at Hida, the Japanese furniture company, and order the scaled-down version of their Giulie dining table.  Being bound by an unforgiving budget, however, I was in no position to do so. 

It was quite serendipitous, then, when Jennifer told me that the domino blogger and affordable-design guru Nick Olsen would be speaking at the Corcoran. I went to his talk, hoping to glean some knowledge on how to punch up my home in a way that would not distress my checkbook.

Olsen’s attire spoke volumes about his aesthetic – neat suede shoes, trim khakis, and a fitted, tongue-in-cheek prep-school blazer provided a canvas for eye-popping accent pieces, including a skinny striped tie  (my current favorite men’s piece at J. Crew) and bright green socks. Speaking conversationally, he offered up a breezy, funny take on his “Cinderella story:” after four years at Columbia, where he read Vogue while his architecture textbooks collected dust, he was hired as the assistant to Miles Redd, creative director for Oscar de la Renta home.     

After seeing Olsen’s beautiful and painstakingly cultivated apartment (Olsen waited a year-and-a-half to throw a housewarming party), Redd called domino editor Deborah Needleman. Three months later, the apartment was on the cover of the magazine.

Olsen imparted common-sense decorating wisdom while bringing some innovative ideas to the table – a mix of opposites that has become his trademark. He marries a jaunty haute-couture sensibility with a budget, Louis XV with Eames, and Ikea pieces (Olsen’s “blank canvas”) with just about anything, working with the belief that an “expensive” look is firmly within the realm of thrifty possibility.

Last night was a big night for us at Washington Spaces, as we helped host two events to celebrate fabulous design.

The Washington Spaces staff at Boffi Studio DC

We started at Morton’s The Steakhouse in Tysons Corner, where we honored the winners of this year’s Washington Spaces Best of Interior Design competition.  We presented them with framed layouts of their projects from our Spring issue and toasted them with free-flowing wine while enjoying delectable hors d’oeuvres.

Then we dashed over to Georgetown to Boffi Studio DC,  where we co-sponsored a reception to celebrate its first anniversary in Cady’s Alley. Paolo Boffi himself came from Italy for the occasion, where he introduced a new version of the Minikitchen, originally designed by his friend Joe Colombo in 1962.

Keep reading for a rundown of the Seen and Heard.

If your design sense leans modern, you might want to check out the new model units at 22 West in DC’s West End.  Even if you’re not in the market for condos (which range from $783,500 to more than $3.8 million) in EastBanc LLC’s newest building, you’ll get some great ideas from the two models, which were designed by Jason Claire at Vastu and Contemporaria’s owner, Deborah Kalkstein.

There might be a trend afoot here. Last summer’s Design Star winner on HGTV, Kim Myles, was a hairstylist by trade before winning her own show on that network called “Myles of Style” and becoming a major design celebrity.

Meanwhile, hairstylist Heidi Johnston of Warrenton, VA, was posting images of her DIY decorating on HGTV’s “Rate My Space,” and becoming a minor celebrity under her screen name, hpj185.

Her spaces have received tens of thousands of visitors who have posted hundreds of gushing comments about her elegant style. So we decided to take a virtual visit to her Warrenton home and talk some shop.

So, what is it about hairstylists who have great decorating and design sense? “It’s all creative,” says Johnston, who has owned The Secret Garden salon in Warrenton for 21 years. “You’re really kinda working with fabrics either way, whether it’s hair or upholstery.”

Johnston and her fiancé moved into a new home last October, and like her previous home that had gotten rave reviews on Rate My Space, she decorated the new one within three months. Here’s how she did it:

The Kitchen
Johnston hated the dark cherry cabinets in the home’s kitchen, and set about immediately to change them. Refacing turned out to be almost as expensive as replacing the cabinets, so she turned to decorative painter Cindy Mueller, who painted and glazed them to give the space a French Country look. “That, to me, single-handedly transformed the house,” she says.

Renowned designer Mario Buatta is known for many things, from his heavy English-country style of decorating, to his penchant for all things chintz, to his love of dog portraits.

But stand-up comedian? Who knew? Those who came to the Georgetown House Tour benefit last week looking for a dissertation on design must have been deeply disappointed – and drowned out by all the laugher – because most of Buatta’s one-hour talk consisted of improv, from making fun of his Italian name to needling members of the audience – and making note of who the pretty ladies were.