Decorating Diagnosis

Do you ever look around your room and sense that something is off, even if you cannot quite name it? Maybe you painted the walls a lighter color hoping the space would feel brighter, yet somehow it now feels flat. Maybe you sit in your recliner and study the rest of your furniture and wonder if new pieces might fix the feeling. Maybe you think back to the home you left behind and remember how everything there felt just right, while here in Florida the room never seems to settle into itself. If any of this sounds familiar, your space may be asking for a closer look. When something feels wrong, there is usually a reason, and the room is waiting for you to see it. The challenge is that if you do not know what to look for, it is hard to understand what the room is trying to tell you. This is when a professional eye can help diagnose the problem and offer clear, practical solutions. With that in mind, let us step into a courtyard villa and see how one homeowner reached out for guidance and how the space became a warm, welcoming room with the addition of a single new element somewhere in the heart of The Villages.

  •  The problem
The homeowner just had the main body of the home painted. The color went from a mid-level warm gold to a light warm white and it looked nice but now the living room felt so colorless. The artwork did not pop, and the furniture placement looked very uninspired. The homeowner said she wanted color and she felt that she would have to buy new things to achieve that goal. We felt she already had plenty to work with, and the room simply needed a different emphasis.

  •  Check around the house
The first thing I like to do is walk through every room to see what the client already owns. In this home, she had lovely colorful art tucked away in the side rooms. I told her we needed to bring that artwork into the main living area. I see this often. Homeowners are unsure how to blend colorful art into a space, so they hide it in rooms that few people ever see. Yet these pieces are usually the very things that can bring a room to life. The process of pulling it together is always enjoyable because the client gets to be surprised. My helper and I asked her to relax in a room of her choice, and we told her we would call her in a few hours to see a completely refreshed space.

  •  One new thing
The room needed one new element, and that came from my private stash. On my first visit I remembered a rug I had that pulled all of the colors together, and I was eager to see how it would transform the space. The rug leaned a bit modern with its abstract pattern, but the colors were perfect because every shade already existed in the room. This rug would become the cornerstone to visual cohesion in the space. To keep it securely in place, we used Alien Tape on the corners. This rug is not going anywhere. These floors were tile, but I have used the same tape on my bamboo floors for years and it holds beautifully without causing any damage.

  •  Furniture placement
We needed to reposition the furniture to create a stronger sense of color in the room. The homeowner had two attractive swivel chairs covered in a rich burgundy fabric, but they were separated from each other, which weakened their impact. We moved the two swivel chairs to the back of the room, so they sat together and became the first thing you see when you enter the space. Their color appears in the rug, and that connection creates a natural starting point for the entire palette.

  •  Blue chair
We moved the blue recliner from the back of the room to the front, placing it on an angle so it looked into the room and toward the TV. The homeowner had mentioned that this was the most comfortable chair in the house, yet it was also the hardest for her to use because it had been positioned only for conversation. Once we brought it forward, the blue immediately felt connected to the space and became the opening note in the color story. The rug carried the same shade of blue in its abstract pattern, which reinforced the color and helped the room feel unified.

  •  Artwork
We pulled colorful artwork from the side bedrooms and created well planned groupings in the main living area. The subject matter of each piece was different, but the colors were shared, and those colors were already present in the rug. We hung a large, framed Thomas Kinkade piece on the left side of the fireplace and placed two abstract pieces, stacked vertically, on the right side. The large window was flanked with two vibrant sunset scenes, and their colors tied naturally into the chairs and, once again, into the rug. Remember, the subject of art in the space can be different if the colors tie them together visually. Also, there should be some visual cohesion in the frames, for example, they are all dark or they are all light. These frames were all of the darker variety with touches of gold, so they all worked together.

  •  Large accessories
The homeowner had a few large accessories that were sitting on the floor, so we lifted them onto tabletops and plant stands to give them presence. A large horse sculpture placed on the table beneath the Kinkade painting made the homeowner especially happy, as it was one of her favorite pieces. The homeowner was very happy with the way we re-claimed color in her space.
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