Picking the RIGHT paint colors to go with the wood in your home…Color Theory

Posted on March 9, 2013 by

Picking the Right color paints, fabrics, and carpeting to go with your wood furniture and woodwork

Picking the Right Color paints, fabrics, and carpeting to go with your wood furniture and woodwork

Too often people don’t give a bit of thought about the color of their wood furniture, or woodwork in their home when interior decorating. They pick out paint, fabrics, wallpaper and carpeting, put them in the room they are decorating, and for some reason something is off, but they can’t put their finger on it. The truth is wood is a color too; not the neutral element people think it is.

When picking paint colors, fabrics, carpeting colors, etc, a person has to first figure out if their wood furniture is either yellow based (warm) or blue based (cool), and adjust their color choices from there. Continue reading →

Posted in Interior Decorating Principles | 2 Comments

Planting a Garden Room on Your Property

Posted on February 17, 2013 by

Plant a Walled Garden like you would see in England

Plant a Walled Garden like you would see in England

The idea of dividing the outdoor space around your home into what the horticultural world is calling rooms has really been around for hundreds, maybe thousands of years; even though it seems to be a trendy and new concept. As a kid my mother and father brought my sister and me to Mount Vernon; the home of George and Martha Washington in Virginia (USA). The Washingtons had two garden rooms there (walled gardens). One was devoted to flowers, the other to vegetables. Martha and George were enthusiastic gardeners of their time, the 1700′s. They probably got many ideas for how they wanted their home and land laid out from books that came from Europe. Those kinds of books, most likely, covered architectural and landscape / gardening principles that were fashionable at the time, inspired by classical Greece and Rome. Continue reading →

Posted in Garden Design Principles, The Autumn(Fall) Garden, The Spring Garden, The Summer Garden, The Winter Garden | 4 Comments

It’s Easy to Decorate a Room with a Tall / High Ceiling

Posted on February 3, 2013 by

Decorating a Room with Vertical Tension in mind

Decorating a Room with Vertical Tension in mind

When most people go to decorate a room with a tall ceiling, they seem to arrange their furniture and decorative accessories around the bottom half of the space. A lot of their choices for decorations seem to be horizontal format (wider than tall). By choosing horizontal format furniture, art works and accessories, those items are not / can not in any way accentuate the most important feature in the space its height. When you pay extra money for taller ceilings, or are lucky enough to have a room(s) with high ones, you don’t want your furniture and decorative choices going against, in a negative way, the asset of height that you have. You want to accentuate height, not diminish it. In this post, my objective is to get you thinking about ways of adding vertical tension to your rooms. Continue reading →

Posted in Interior Decorating Principles | 17 Comments

Hanging a collection of Plates/Dishes up on the Wall

Posted on January 19, 2013 by
Step-by-step instructions for hanging plates like a pro

Step-by-step instructions for hanging plates like a pro

Diversity of elements adds visual interest in interior decorating. When you hang a collection of plates up on a wall, you have something else to look at other than the often seen paintings, prints, photos and sometimes tapestries. Hanging a collection of plates is not just limited to dining rooms, breakfast rooms or kitchens, Plates can be hung in living rooms, bedrooms, libraries, bathrooms and halls as well.

In this post, I cover (1) stacking plates up a wall and looking at visual weights, (2) directed action of images on plates, (3) looking at different groupings of plates that might inspire you, (4) grouping plates around a center item “focal point”, and (5) composing an arrangement on the floor and getting it up onto the wall. Continue reading →

Posted in How-to, Interior Decorating Principles | 5 Comments

Some pictures of me, Fred Gonsowski, Writer of this Blog

Posted on January 8, 2013 by

img252 Friends and family have been telling me that with the thousands of people reading my posts monthly, and having had hundreds of thousands of page views / articles read to date, people are going to want to know who is this Fred Gonsowski who is writing on all the different gardening and interior decorating topics?? So, for the first post to start the 2013 blogging year, I’ve decided to put together a montage of picture of me, taken over the past few years. The photos show me in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, Saratoga Springs and Cooperstown, NY, and north-west Connecticut. I tried to put together a mixture of the whimsical-funny and casual, along with a few high-brow for you to look at. My life has always been about the Yin and Yang / simple and fancy, but both aspects are enjoyed equally. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Interior Decorating with BUFFET LAMPS

Posted on December 19, 2012 by

The difference between Accent, Table and Buffet Lamps

The difference between Accent, Table and Buffet Lamps

In the world of surface placed lamps (end table, chest, dresser, etc) there are three categories; they are Accent, Table and Buffet. This is the third in a series of three articles covering the different kinds of lamps. Continue reading →

Posted in Interior Decorating Principles | Leave a comment

Interior Decorating with TABLE LAMPS

Posted on December 12, 2012 by
Table Lamps, the most used source of lighting in interior decorating

Table Lamps, the most used source of lighting in interior decorating

In the world of surface placed lamps (end table, chest, dresser, etc) there are three categories; they are Accent, Table and Buffet. This is the second in a series of three articles covering the different kinds of lamps. Continue reading →

Posted in Interior Decorating Principles | 3 Comments