Interior design

[Mike C.]

I will soon move into a new apartment in New York, and am looking for ideas on decorating. I've decided to paint my bedroom walls a dark burgundy color and keep the white trim on the doors windows and ceiling.

I'm trying to figure out what color the curtains should be and what color the bedspread should be. Any suggestions? All my furniture is a light birch color.

 

[faustian bargain]

how big are the windows/curtains? what are the room dimensions? floor/ceiling colors?

also i would suggest considering a glossy finish for the burgundy. could be really nice. ...or as long as you're painting, do a hand-troweled plaster coat on the walls, then paint that. it's work, but the texture looks really good. (integral color plaster is another option, but i'm not certain you can get a dark enough color.)

/andrew

 

[Mike C.]

Room is 12' X 14' with 10' white ceilings. The floor is hardwood, light wood color. The windows are only on one wall, which measure 9' across and 6' high. Or, I was thinking of going for a leather look for the walls instead of the burgundy I was thinking of doing this. But I'm not sure how much work I want to get involved in.

 

[Renault78law]

Mike, just noticing your new avatar. Sweet.
So maybe you're a good person to ask who wrote "the moon rules #1," on my car, with a key.

 

[faustian bargain]

dat avatar dere, it's just friggin' AWESOME.

"The innocent shall suffer, BIG TIME." the leather look would be really nice. i did a textured, glazed finish for my first daughter's bedroom, in our old condo a couple years ago, and i was very pleased with the result. (not leather-look, but the process was similar.) it was indeed a lot of work - however it gave me a lot of pride, especially when guests would say how great it looked. i used a couple of those popular 'paint recipe' type books as reference - there are many techniques you can use to get various textures, some more labor intensive than others. really for the effort of two coats of paint you can get great effects...you can do a base color, and then a glaze. the glaze is where the great effects come in. you can even get off-the-shelf glazes, ready to paint. in the burgundy family, a deep color like oxblood would be nice. if you make it mottled with a darker color, such that the corners and edges fade into darkness, the walls will gain depth. (be aware of venturing too far into jewel tones...you might end up looking like a 'pier 1' catalog, nobody wants that.) --- for the curtains - you might do well just to stick with white, since the room is not huge and you don't want to make it too busy. white sheers (which you can find with or without patterns) and something like a white linen for the curtain. if light blocking is an issue, you might consider blinds or shutters. (in fact wood shutters by themselves are really nice.) depending on the way the window is configured, you could hang the curtains from ceiling to floor, or from the window head casing to the floor. i probably wouldn't cut the curtains at the window sill, but again it depends on the situation. and for the bedspread i'm inclined to suggest white for that as well...although if you can find something to match your walls, that might be nice too. maybe like a charcoal field with a pattern that contains the burgundy. i think it'd be cool to have a duvet that looks like grey flannel trousers. but then i'm married and that might not pass muster. assuming you're single, go for a masculine pattern, geometric, linear, or maybe even harlequin if you're wild and crazy. and don't forget to put mirrors on the ceiling. Â

/andrew

 

[Mike C.]

Andrew: Thanks for the great advice. Plenty of good ideas in there. In the end though I'm probably going to have the decorator that just finished my parents home to take a look at the room. I'm going to with some nice, thick, white linen curtains; with pull down blinds to block the maximum amount of light. Oh and check out these Ralph Lauren sheets. They seen to go along the same lines as something very masculine like flannel as you mentioned. I think it's 100% I'll get this bedset. It seems as if there is a bit of purple in the sheets, so that may change the color I paint the walls. I don't know. Thanks for the compliments on the avatar, Aqua Teen Hunger Force rules.

 

[faustian bargain]

that's funny. i think we have those same IKEA curtains in our bedroom. very similar anyway. thumbs up on the herringbone blanket. i guess you can work with the purple...it's kindof an eggplanty color. i would use a darker tone, similar hue, for the walls - that much bright purple would get tiresome after a while. having a professional see the room in person is prudent. (assuming you like the work he/she did on your parents' house.) /andrew - should not walk, so that a child may live... **edit: How about these airstreams?

i had no idea they were part of the RL lifestyle...funny.

 

[VMan]

I have nothing to add to this thread other than this:

"Master Shake told me to go in the freezer, because there was a carnival in there. There was no carnival, it was a damn freezer. I got freezer burn, and I got mushed up against that chicken."

Oh, and this:

"I got a tattoo - it's a clown. It symbolizes street warfare."

 

[faustian bargain]

that tears it...i now have a friggin' avatar.

 

[pejsek]

The herringbone alpaca blanket looks really nice, but I would look elsewhere for sheets. Nice sheets are one of the great pleasures, but I've never been that impressed by RL sheets and they're not generally a good value for the money. The piping is a classic design that you can surely find somewhere else. Williams-Sonoma used to have a division called Chambers that offered some very nice sheets at good prices, but Chambers is now being folded into WS Home (or something like that) and there's no on-line presence yet. I'd look into it, though. Bluefly sometimes has some nice sheet deals. Don't get hung up on thread-count and remember you don't need to go after Pratesi or Anichini (unless you stumble into something great--always possible). Just look around a bit. You'll know it when you feel it.

 

[Don Carlos]

I would advise strongly against painting a small room a very dark color. It tends to make the room look smaller and more cramped.

 

[gomestar]

Originally Posted by Don Carlos

I would advise strongly against painting a small room a very dark color. It tends to make the room look smaller and more cramped.

I really hope your sage words get to the OP on time

 

[Find Finn]

Originally Posted by gomestar

I really hope your sage words get to the OP on time

If he hasn't painted 6 years later he never will

 

[Don Carlos]

Lawl. For some reason this was briefly living on the top of the page this morning. Weird. Obviously I wasn't quite caffeinated yet.

May have been (now-deleted) spam that bumped it up.

 

[Matt]

yup, spam bumped to the top. I just saw it and was about to welcome Mike C back. He's OG, still lurks but very rarely posts these days...