The Abstract Life

Have you ever traveled to Italy and purchased a lovely little painting by a local plein air painter on the street? Have you been to Greece and brought home local pottery? Do you have any Egyptian papyrus framed and hanging in your home for the memory? If you have any of these things then you have been curating. Curating is the act of collecting art and intentional items that can be displayed in a thoughtful manner. Once they are displayed in your home, they create a well-traveled look that is known popularly as the eclectic look but what if you wanted to bump it up a notch? Let’s take a peek into the living room of a Gardenia model in which we have added abstract art and an abstract rug. These additions created a fresh look while using time honored traditional pieces. This juxtaposition of different styles created a room that is interesting and inviting somewhere in the heart of The Villages.

  •  Things that stayed
The home was purchased with a few things that remained, and the new homeowners inherited. Those pieces included the entertainment unit and the black curtains and black valence. The black window treatments were too heavy, and they would have to go. However, we were able to salvage the roman blinds used for privacy on the windows that hid beneath the black valence.

  •  Windows
To make the window look up-to-date and pop, we trimmed them out with large molding and added a tall white wooden valence at the top of the window. These valences look like they are a part of built in woodwork, but they can be removed to service the privacy treatment underneath. The large sliding glass door received trim work as well, but it received a new privacy treatment. The Hunter Douglas Vertiglide is a honey combed blind that slides across the window and meets in the middle to create a soft wall of fabric at night. However, during the day, the blind is virtually invisible because it blends into the molding surrounding the sliding glass door. Adding molding to the windows adds value to the home and once it is added you will not have to touch the windows again.

  •  Entertainment Unit
For those of you who read my column frequently you are going to wonder why we left the entertainment unit between the windows. The unit is dark, and I usually do want to move the entertainment unit to lighten the room. However, the homeowners wanted to leave it between the windows and in these cases I do have to do what the homeowner wants. The one thing they did to lighten the entertainment unit was to remove the dark backing on the unit. By removing the backing, the piece did appear a bit lighter.

  •  Furniture placement
We were able to keep the space open by adding a sofa and a chair angled inward to each side of the room. The room stayed open and by having the same seating pieces on each side, the room felt very balanced and symmetrical. We needed that balance if we wanted to shake it up a bit. We placed the owners’ well-traveled side tables at the end of each sofa near the chair. Each person could be seated and remain quite comfortable whether they were in the chair or on the sofa because each person has access to the table.

  •  Lamps
The lamps are all different but work well together. Two of the lamps have an Asian motif with green, pink and coral colors. The other two lamps are brass. One brass lamp is shiny with a black lamp shade and the other lamp is aged brass with a crème lamp shade. I like the addition of the black lamp shade because it elevated the brass lamp and a touch of black works great in this space. Finally, the brass lamps have a visual connection to the beautiful gold framed mirror hanging on the angled wall.

  •  Art
The homeowners did have a nice collection of art and many original pieces. Their taste moved from Asian scenes on the countryside to abstract paintings that had interpretive value depending on who was looking at the piece. The beauty of such an art collection is that the space had some unexpected and lovely moments. The abstract world and the traditional world can complement each other because the common ground they will share is color. You can bring most worlds together in design by blending colors. The Asian scene over the sofa looks amazing in the space with the abstract painting by the sliding glass door because the colors of both pieces of art complement each other. The greens and blues that are in the artwork can be referenced in the Asian lamps and the swivel chairs.

  •  Rug
The rug is the piece that pulls it all together. The homeowner found a beautiful abstract rug that pulled all the colors in the room together. The colors in the rug add that bright pop that makes the room come to life with a fresh breathe of modernity.

  •  You can do this too
You may be reading this thinking that it sounds so easy when I am reading this, and I think I can do it too. You can! I find that so many people worry about so many things that they get lost in the weeds of their own mind. They worry about it not working so much that they never try to make it work. You do not have to see a picture to know that things will work. If you know that color is the thing that combines different styles, then lean into color. Trust that if you put a space together relying on color combinations that it will work out when you are done. You can do it!
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Before and After Pics Below