Don’t you just love Spring, with its feeling of renewed energy, trees and plants blooming everywhere and summer just around the corner? Do you wish Spring could last forever? Now it can, if you use the color “Spring Forever” in your home or office!
Color Marketing Group, an international association for color design professionals and authority on color in the marketplace, puts it this way:
Celebrate the confident side of nature with “Spring Forever.” This green, with a strong yellow influence, is a hue reminiscent of a cool morning in the garden, as well as a fresh take on your local produce aisle. This is not a fragile green. This spirited color denies any mention of the doldrums, instead appearing self-assured and bold whether appearing in fashion or adapted for home décor. It makes a statement of authority that says, “The difficulty of winter is over! Long live Spring!” Already energizing women’s and men’s wardrobes with a crisp burst of color, “Spring Forever” is arriving in homes and auto showrooms with the power to invigorate a space as well as the highway. From glowing silk, to timeless matte wool to glistening metallic, this green will be with you now and forever.
If you want to use Spring Forever in your interiors but don’t know how to go about it, we can help!
If you’re looking to choose paint colors but don’t know how to make them look their best, contact us, the San Francisco paint color experts for a personal color consultation.
With April showers bringing May flowers, we’re still in the rainy season with gray skies. Luckily, drought ridden California has been getting a bit of rain this past week, so we’re here to celebrate the cloudy weather with 5 Shades of Grey that celebrate misty skies. With thanks to the Color Marketing Group, here’s a guide to 5 shades of grey that will perk up your peepers while watching the drought quenching rain sprinkle down onto dusty ground.
Silver Mist
This is a tonal hue that carries through changing seasons. It stands between chaos and mindfulness, balancing everything with which it is coordinated. It is as diverse as the grey sky of a looming storm, the rich flannel of a suit and the deep metal of industrial tools.
Maybe
This warm grey is caressed by chocolate, a hue that works well with others, coordinating with everything from cool blues to ochre to plum. It is a grounded, stable color with a luxury edge, enhancing velvet, cashmere and wool.
Re-Blued
Reminiscent of clear skies and warm seas, Re-Blued is a fresh take on environmental colors. Blue is embraceable, reliable, sometimes mysterious but ultimately familiar. With roots in indigo-dyed denim, a perennial favorite, Re-Blued is as casual as a breeze in creating a subtle bedroom retreat.
Intimate Shadow
As its name suggests, “Intimate Shadow” resides in moments of repose. Let this sensory hue offer solace, peace, and the luxury of quiet. It is a counter to a busy world and offers an intimate color experience in which to c0coon. They greyed-off purple is discrete and maintains a sense of mystery. It will subtly grace interiors in leather and velvet.
Smoky Cashmere
A color that imbues luxury, comfort and contentment, Smoky Cashmere can be as demure of mischievous as you wish, but wraps an aura of richness around whatever it touches. It is the evolution of warm, brown-influenced grey and create a hue that is intriguing and new, one that effortlessly coordinates with others. Pair with pale pink, copper metallic or amphibious green for either a softer side, edgy or earthy feelings.
If you’re looking to choose paint colors but don’t know how to make them look their best, contact us, the San Francisco paint color experts for a personal color consultation.
KIMBALL STARR INTERIOR DESIGN RECEIVES “BEST OF HOUZZ” FOR CUSTOMER SATISFACTION – 3 YEARS RUNNING!
Houzz.com is a popular online resource for sourcing and saving inspirational ideas about residential interior design, locating your next designer, and sharing feedback.
The Best Of Houzz Award is given in two categories: Client Satisfaction and Design. Client Satisfaction honors are determined by the number and quality of client reviews a professional received in 2014. Design award winners’ work was the most popular among 16 million monthly Houzz users.
TOP: Tiny House Flexible Use Dining Space. CENTER: Vintage Bungalow featuring Adrian Pearsall Rocker. BOTTOM: St. Francis Bathroom Remodel / All designs by Kimball Starr Interior Design / All photos by Eric Rorer except CENTER by Marija Vidal
The top photo shown here of flexible use dining space in a tiny San Francisco apartment was saved to over 3,500 ideabooks! There are 135 photos uploaded, which have been added to a total of 57,498 ideabooks worldwide. That’s a lot of homeowners looking for new ideas!
You are invited to borrow some of Kimball’s ideas for your home, by visiting her Houzz San Francisco Designer profile today!
From Ghirardelli Square to the Palace of Fine Arts, architecture and design are very prominent in the City by the Bay. It is literally impossible to walk around in this city and not find stunning examples of these things. There are many prominent and talented interior designers all over the Bay Area as well, and we wanted to highlight 15 of the best.
We’ve been nominated as one of the best interior designers in San Francisco along with some other great talent by the design savvy team at Build Direct. Can you help us out by casting your vote?
Offering everything from space planning to full-scale design, Starr employs an inventive and sensitive use of materials, believing that comfort holds the key to successful design. Her firm work with clients to create successful interiors tailored to client needs in both residences and commercial spaces. She has been featured on television and published in a couple hardcover books, such as Country-Style Residences and Zen Residences. Kimball Starr is a top contemporary interior designer in the San Francisco Bay Area, providing creative interiors for both homes and commercial spaces.
Welcome back to the 2nd part of Kimball Starr televised on the PBS TV series “Creative Living” with Sheryl Borden. Kimball Starr is the featured San Francisco interior design expert teaching how to visually reshape a room’s proportions. She wraps up this second segment with how to make a small bathroom look more spacious, along with integrating color and reflective surfaces to visually maximize a small home.
– [Kimball] [The first example is] …In a very small bathroom, which is a very common problem in any urban area.
– [Sheryl] Yeah, very small usually.
– It’s very small. This is, shower… there’s no tub. There wasn’t room for a tub. But on the flooring, if you use large format tiles and you angle them, it will actually make the space seem bigger. So if you run planks front-to-back, it’s going to make your room seem longer.
– Right.
– If you run them side-to-side, it’s going to make it seem wider.
– Wider.
– And then if you run it on the diagonal, it widens AND lengthens the room.
– I’ve seen places where they were at a diagonal, but it was usually a large entry or something. I wouldn’t have thought about using a big design in a bathroom.
– And that is a misnomer where people think, “Oh, it’s a small bathroom. I have to use small tiles.”
– Right.
– But it’s a thing with all those grout lines, every time you see a grout line, that’s your eye saying ‘stop, stop, stop, stop’. And if you just see much bigger tiles and maybe there’s only six or eight of them, your eye just flows across the floor.
– Flows. I guess so.
– It seems more spacious. And same thing with the glass shower, instead of having a corner shower jutting out, you chop it so it’s angled and that helps keep the flow open as well. And for little small dining areas, you can use cabinetry floor-to-ceiling, and that’s going to increase your ceiling height. And the thing about this is, it’s all monochromatic using the dark colors of the cabinetry and using the dark island. All the color just flows and the floors are dark. So actually, this is something a lot of people don’t know is dark floors actually recede. So your floors will actually feel more spacious if you do a dark color because the floor is dropping away.
– And I would’ve thought maybe using the black or a dark grey, or whatever, would make it seem so much smaller.
– Yeah. Well, you know, it’s also because we have wonderful glass windows that lets in the light.
– Okay.
– I mean if you have …
– That probably counters it, doesn’t it?
– You do need to take into consideration what else is going on. If you don’t have any windows in the room and you did everything black …
– It would be a tomb.
– That probably wouldn’t be advisable.
– Yeah. I see. Okay. Yeah, I can see that.
– And then this last…
– Oh, I love this.
– Oh, thank you!
– I love these colors.
– And then this last example, it’s a very contemporary space. There’s no molding or trim. It’s very straightforward. So it’s very architectural and there’s very sharp lines. So by doing this built-in banquette, instead of doing a right…
– Oh, it softens it, doesn’t it? That’s why I like that.
– You’re hired!
– I’m hired? Good!
– That’s right. So instead of having a sharp right angle, by creating this curve, it just softens the flow.
– It does.
– And then the other trick is, if you notice, outside the window there’s always greenery.
– Yes.
– If you bring in a color from outside that’s visible from your room and use it as a major color as here, so we have all the greenery and I use…
– So it just extends the room indoors, outdoors.
– That’s right because…
– That’s a great idea.
– Because it feels like the patio is really part of your living space.
– Now, one other question, what about lighting? Is it true that if it’s a smaller space, you need more lighting or what’s the secret there?
– That’s a great question. So when I said the cabinetry, if you go all the way up to the ceiling it makes it seem taller…
– Right.
– If you drop the cabinetry from going all the way to the top, it will make your ceiling seem shorter. But, if you put recessed lighting on top and light up the ceiling, that lifts up the ceiling.
– I can see how it would do that.
– So up-lighting is really important if you want to increase the height of your ceiling.
– And that seems like more and more of the newer houses that I’ve been in have that … is it called cove lighting or something?
– Yes.
– And it does.
– Yes.
– It just looks like it goes on forever.
– Yes. Exactly.
– And some of the rooms aren’t all that big.
– Cove up-lighting is an excellent way to increase the space in your room.
– Well, these are great examples. I can see how people would want to apply these if they had a small space, especially, and make it seem larger. Thank you very much, Kimball.
– Thank you so much, Sheryl. It was great to be here!
Does your room feel too small, too large, or just not bright enough? Kimball Starr was featured on this televised series of “Creative Living” with Sheryl Borden. In this first video segment of 2, Kimball teaches and shows examples of how to trick the eye into making your interior spaces within your home look bigger, lighter, and better without having to remodel.
Check back tomorrow for Part 2!
Below is a transcript of the video:
♪[music]♪
– [Announcer] With your host Sheryl Borden.
– [Sheryl] Kimball, it’s so nice to have you here. I’m gonna pick your brain on everything I’ve always wanted to know working with an interior designer and do people come to you with unusual requests like “I have a small room but could you make it look twice as big?”
– [Kimball] Sometimes they do. I mean, I can do some miracles but I’m not a miracle worker!
– I see, so you have to work with what people have.
– That’s right.
– Okay, you have some examples that you’re going to show and if you’ll point out things that maybe would help us to reshape a room or how to live with what we have but maybe make it look better.
– Absolutely. So, when you want to reshape a room size, this is not doing major construction but design tricks to make it look like it’s a little bigger than it is. So we have three categories, we want to talk about color, which you can use to change a room size. Warm colors will come closer to you and cool colors will move away. And then patterns, which you can use in your flooring or walls, and then also reflective the surfaces. Reflective surfaces…
– Oh, like mirrors?
– Yes absolutely. Reflective surfaces, –things like glossy finishes — reflect light and make the space feel bigger.
– Oh okay, that’s good tips, good tricks, okay.
– Yes, so these are some examples illustrating that. Here I’ve used the dark blue color in this bay window to push the bay window out. It was a very narrow bay window so I wanted to make it feel deeper and then also if you notice, the planks are running crosswise, so that helps widen the room.
– Uh huh, I can see how that would do that.
– Yeah, so that’s a good example of the power of paint and pattern. And then here we have another bay window in a bedroom and the bay window you notice we have two colors. We have the dark chocolate and the butter scotch and the dark chocolate frames the bay window and then I actually did the bay window in butter scotch because the wall continues into the bay window and makes it feel like one big continuous space.
– Oh, instead of big chop, stop and start.
– Exactly. If I had done the bay window and that whole sitting area in the dark chocolate, it would’ve felt like an add-on to the room and it would not feel nearly as big as it as it does here.
– Oh, okay.
– And then another trick is, if you notice there’s the picture rail, this molding, the white line, so really it’s a way to guide your eye where it should be looking and that elongates the room. And so, a trick you can do to make your ceiling seem taller or lower is I put this molding here because I felt that the ceilings were a little too high for the room in proportion to how wide it was.
– Oh, too high, uh huh.
– So by bringing the molding down, it drops the ceiling height.
– Your eye comes down.
– Absolutely. And another trick is, if you want your ceiling to also feel lower, you could take the ceiling color and paint here so you actually create a band.
– Oh, bring the ceiling down, it would look like it was down lower.
– That’s right.
– Oh that’s a great idea!
– And you can do the opposite, where you could actually take the wall color and bring it up into the ceiling about 12 inches so you create a border around the ceiling and that will actually make your walls seem much higher. So lots of little fun tricks to do.
– Really and that’s just with paint?
– And that’s just with paint.
– I mean, how easy could that be, if you know what you’re doing.
– Well you know what, I would say paint’s the easiest way to make a change and it’s the simplest and the least expensive.
– Least expensive, right.
– So definitely experiment.
– Okay.
– Here’s an example of using a reflective surface. By using the mirror, it helps double your space, wherever the mirror covers it doubles that area and also by the long rectangular shape of the mirror it helps widen the dining the room because it was…
– Instead of it being turned vertical.
– Right. I mean, I could’ve done it vertical but that would’ve made it feel higher.
– Higher, uh huh.
– But it’s a lowered ceiling where it’s only a little area that the dining table could fit under, so I wanted to make it feel like it was a little bigger and more gracious.
– And I think we’ve all known about restaurants, we walk into a room and it just seems so huge but it’s really one walls of all mirrors.
– Yes, that’s right.
– So you realize how that can make that seem twice as big…
– Or dance studios or yoga studios.
– Yes, uh huh.
– It feels like this huge spacious room and it’s… you know, maybe…
– It’s really tiny.
– That’s right.
– That’s a good idea though.
– So you can definitely use that, you know.
– Reflective surfaces.
– Right, but don’t go crazy. Don’t do your whole house with mirrors.
– Right. [both laughing]
– So here is an example of a hallway where the base board trim has been painted the same color as the wall. So… instead of…
– Oh I see, I didn’t realize that was the base board. Now I can see that.
– Yeah, so there’s a good six-inch base right there. So the hallway is very short and narrow and by using the same color all the way up, it unifies the wall.
– Because you will have a brown or white or something along there and that would be… that would chop that up.
– That’s right, it’s very contrasty. It’s the same technique I like to say with fashion. So if you wear all black you’re gonna look really thin and it’s all the same color. If you wear purple pants, an orange top, a green hat — besides questioning my fashion sense — it also chops you up.
– I see, ideas.
– So it’s the same idea.
– Good point.
– And then there’s also doors in this hallway that I’ve also painted all the same color. So they’re all…
– Uh huh, so it’s monochromatic.
– The trim is blue, the doors are blue and then it just blends away.
– Uh huh, and the white thin [line] is sort of showcase as an accent.
