Aug 05, 2011 | Posted in How To & Decorating Tips |
How many times have you looked at a piece of vintage furniture in a shop and thought “Geez, that’s ugly”, or “It would have been such a nice piece if they hadn’t done THAT to it.” Or what about your own furniture; you’re just tired of looking at it because you’ve outgrown the style. As an interior designer, I can tell you this happens a lot.
Well, we can’t turn back time on design atrocities or interior design styles we’ve outlived. What we can do is tweak pieces into something that’s great in both look and price. For many of us, interior decorating tastes change as we grow and this is an easy way to update your home interior furniture without breaking the bank.
Roaming through San Francisco interior design shops, I find vintage pieces at great prices that perhaps offset other luxury design pieces I’ve selected. Below are a few examples of San Francisco Bay Area interior design projects where I’ve shown some furniture examples of pieces of recycled and made new again.
Here’s the finished product of a vintage coffee table I updated. The beautiful Italian marble was there, but it was glued to a painfully ugly base of heavily scrolled wood.
Knowing the marble was a find with its round shape, I took a simple steel base that was a stock purchase, and replaced the wood base with a contemporary steel frame. Bringing together traditional and contemporary interior design fit the homeowner’s aesthetic perfectly.
Super easy, super results!
You can also feel good about purchasing vintage furniture or re-purposing your existing pieces because you’re creating a green and eco-friendly design interior for your home. Less consumption means less waste. It also means a healthier interior as new furniture can have highly toxic off-gassing depending on how the piece was made. But older pieces have had years to dissipate any harmful fumes.
This desk started out as a black metal army desk. I took it to an auto body shop and had it sprayed with chocolate brown automobile paint for a hard-wearing durable finish. The homeowner loved sailing, so I decoupaged images of sailing and the San Francisco Bay onto the desktop. After varnishing and sealing, the images on top were protected from moisture and wear.
Now he has a desk that not only is functional and inexpensive, but also a one-of-a-kind piece that’s very personal. It’s a great conversation starter and nobody else will ever have one like it!
Here I updated the homeowner’s existing dining chairs. Originally, the set of 6 chairs were covered in brown vinyl. Certainly durable, but not very attractive with the overload of brown vinyl, dark brown wood table, and brown chair backs. So, I set about creating a cheery color palette and upholstered the set of 6 dining chairs into 3 different colors.
This is a great way to turn a set of ho-hum chairs into something that’s unforgettably unique. A great solution that matched these newlyweds’ youthful style while designing with what they already owned.
Now that I’ve shared some of my interior designer secrets, take a look around at the endless possibilities sitting in your own home or the nearest antique shop.
Do you like the ideas and want something fantastic and unique but not interested in the legwork? Contact me and I’ll be happy to help!
Happy hunting!
San Francisco interior designer, Kimball Starr, is a commercial design and residential interior design firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kimball works to “change lives one room at a time” through designing creative and innovative interiors across the country.
Labels: creative interior design, recycled furniture, vintage furniture
Aug 01, 2011 | Posted in Starr Spotlight |
I’d like to thank the lovely Rachel Thomas over at Raenovate for featuring Before & Afters of our Pacific Heights interior design project in San Francisco!
Here’s a snippet of the article with the before & after images shown below…
“We’ve revealed so many fantastic San Franciscan transformations on Raenovate we thought we’d nearly exhausted the city’s entire cast and crew of designers! That is until we realized that we’ve never featured the one and only Kimball Starr. Known for her tremendous attention to detail and innovative money-saving DIY projects, Starr is a star.
Her recent revival of a handsome Edwardian residence in Pacific Heights beautifully highlights these qualities, after scooping the coffee table’s marble top at a thrift shop, Kimball paired it with a steel base from Room & Board, creating a big look for less. She and the homeowner also produced the 9-grid canvas piece that sits above the sofa in the living room. It was an inexpensive way to tie in the room’s color palette, fill the expansive wall, and to give the homeowner the opportunity to create his very first piece of art. With a view of Alcatraz island, the home and its designer are true San Francisco staples.”
Aww shucks, I’m blushing…
Thanks Rachel!
This San Francisco Pacific Heights home interior showcases the power a can of paint can have on a home interior. Creatively applying paint to your walls can transform your space into something fantastic. Love the look, but don’t know where to start with color? Contact us for paint color consultations where we’ll visit your home anywhere in the San Francisco Bay area.
San Francisco interior designer, Kimball Starr, is a commercial design and residential interior design firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kimball works to “change lives one room at a time” through designing creative and innovative interiors across the country.
Labels: before and after, color, paint, Raenovate
| Posted in Starr Spotlight |
Kimball Starr has recently been featured on the design article 10 Places to Go Bold with Pattern.
Below is an excerpt from the article:
“Lampshades. A big trend is to bring color and pattern into a room through lampshades, and this is a gorgeous example. Such an approach to bringing in bold pattern requires very little commitment, and is therefore a great place to start if not accustomed to living with bold pattern.”
Thanks Janell! We love you too!
Kimball Starr Interior Design is now on Houzz representing the San Francisco Bay Area. A great website full of ideas for everything related to designing your home interior.
The daily blog is written by a multitude of designers covering anything interior design related, and is rich in imagery for everything from kitchen and bathroom design ideas, paint colors, to designing outdoor spaces and gorgeous vacation homes.
San Francisco interior designer, Kimball Starr, is a commercial design and residential interior design firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kimball works to “change lives one room at a time” through designing creative and innovative interiors across the country.
Labels: bedroom, color, Houzz, pattern
Sep 19, 2009 | Posted in Inspirations |
These symbols for man and woman restrooms on a door caught my eye and gave me a laugh for the obvious reasons, which started me thinking about the power of symbols.
Symbols encapsulate so much meaning without the use of any words and they aren’t hindered by language barriers. Ever notice when traveling in a foreign country where you can’t speak the language how important those simple symbols become to you?
Symbols of a train or luggage, a martini glass, or a bed can make the difference between a great vacation travel day and a not so great one.
Symbols make great personalized art in your home. If you used playful symbols that speak to your interest, what would you hang in your home interior? Food and drink symbols are a relaxed way to give personality to a kitchen design.
Personally I love being outdoors, so a trio of adventure sports symbols hung in a rec room or at a vacation home are a perfect match for me. I especially adore the surfer girl crossing symbol shown below.
If you can’t find the symbol that you’re looking for, they are simple and uncomplicated to create. Draw the outline, create a stencil, and lay it over any surface and spray paint, stipple, or fill in with a metallic leaf. So just think of what you like and then create a symbol for it…the possibilities are endless!
San Francisco interior designer, Kimball Starr, is a commercial design and residential interior design firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kimball works to “change lives one room at a time” through designing creative and innovative interiors across the country.
Labels: art, signage, signs, stencils, symbols
Sep 03, 2009 | Posted in Inspirations |
Often times great art can come about by accident. For instance, I was driving along and wanted to capture the sky at twilight, but with my limited knowledge of camera apertures and the use of one unsteady hand to take the photo while driving resulted in… accidental art.
How many of you have taken a photo at night and didn’t have the camera on the correct setting, or couldn’t keep your hand steady? Your photo probably looked a lot like this image below.
Photo from BestFamilyPhotographyTips.com
A photo out of focus can be a beautiful accident. The energetic motion of the streaks of light will command attention in any urban living room design. For a visually powerful piece, dramatically enlarge the photo to cover an entire wall.
To accomplish the enlargement , transfer the image onto painter’s canvas for a more textured and abstract effect. Not only does this provide a more artististic feel, it allows some wiggle room for loss of image resolution from the enlargement. Split the image up onto multiple canvases, allowing for an interesting geometric configuration and ease of installation. Wrap canvases over 2″ deep frames for visual weight and then hang.
You now have a unique piece of photo art to decorate your home interior created by you! So go out and make a mistake, and create art from your own happy accident!
San Francisco interior designer, Kimball Starr, is a commercial design and residential interior design firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kimball works to “change lives one room at a time” through designing creative and innovative interiors across the country.
Labels: art, photography, wall accents
Aug 05, 2009 | Posted in How To & Decorating Tips |
When I think of palm trees, images of sand beaches, tropical water, and lazy days pop into my head. Needless to say, I’ve always had a penchant for these trees. So when I came across a tree-lined driveway of these tropical weather trees, I just had to show this early morning image.
A tree often associated with tropical destinations and informality can have the opposite effect of importance, formality, and create a sense of arrival and anticipation when used in repetition.
What’s especially wonderful about using these towering palm trees is the sense of grandeur they impart when driving between them and their versatility that makes them look right at home leading up to a Beverly Hills resort, a seaside home in Hawaii, or in the California countryside as seen here.
The key here is the immense height which gives the sense of importance, the repetition of the same size and shape to create a rhythm and formality, and of course the fact that they’re well maintained.
Duplicating this effect doesn’t have to be limited to palm trees! Any tree or hedge, such as junipers, that are trimmed or shaped in a strong geometric shape and repeated along an entrance will give you this sense of anticipation of arrival, and the taller the tree, the grander the sense of arrival. So go ahead and create your own exclamation point and make a grand entrance!
San Francisco interior designer, Kimball Starr, is a commercial design and residential interior design firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kimball works to “change lives one room at a time” through designing creative and innovative interiors across the country.
Labels: driveway, entrance, outdoor
Here’s the finished product of a vintage coffee table I updated. The beautiful Italian marble was there, but it was glued to a painfully ugly base of heavily scrolled wood.
This desk started out as a black metal army desk. I took it to an auto body shop and had it sprayed with chocolate brown automobile paint for a hard-wearing durable finish. The homeowner loved sailing, so I decoupaged images of sailing and the San Francisco Bay onto the desktop. After varnishing and sealing, the images on top were protected from moisture and wear.
