Project Details: Master Bedroom

It's been a busy couple weeks. Not that I'm complaining - I'm so lucky to be working on some fun projects with great clients. In the midst of everything, I did have a chance to visit a project that finished up this fall where I helped redecorate at dated master bedroom. Here are the results:

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Striped Pillows at Ralph Lauren

Some of my favorite: Design Drawing Tools

As a designer I need to convey my ideas to clients and the best way to do this is through pictures. Luckily there are some great tools out there to help me and my clients visualize the potential of their houses. Here are my favorites:

AutoCAD
I use this software for all my design drafting. I draw floor plans, elevations, electrical plans, construction documents, etc. with it. It's fast and easy to use once you learn it.

Revit
I use this in conjunction with Auto-cad to create 3-D models of my drawings. This tool is really helpful to clients to visualize designs.

SketchUp

This is a free Google tool that I love. When I first start to design something this tool is useful to block out the shapes and forms in 3D. It's super fast to use and is more like sketching than drafting, so you can quickly get an idea of what works and what doesn't before getting too committed to a drawing.

Photoshop
This tool is perfect for my decorating projects. It allows me to compile a bunch of photos of decorative elements and display them as Project Boards to clients.

Hand drawing
This is probably the best "tool" that I have because I can take it anywhere (even to client meetings) as a way to quickly share a design idea. Hand drawings are also less stiff and more free-form so clients seem to relate to them better. Plus you can add shadows and texture very easily as well as the decorative elements that make a drawing more realistic. I also find that knowing the basics of perspective design drawing help to make the software tools above easier to learn.

You can find some of these drawings tools here:

In the News: Cottage Style

A friend of mine tipped me off that a house that I renovated has been featured in Cottage Sytle Magazine. I went off to the bookstore in search of it and found the 2010 issue on the newstands.

This is a house that I renovated a few years ago - my husband and I fixed it up and lived in it for about 4 years and then sold it. We're now living down the street working on another fixer, but it's always surprising to see this one back in the news. Thanks to Michaeal Partenio for the photography and Donna Talley for the styling.