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Deploy: You Better Work!

This phase is ultimately about creating the furniture layout that will become the foundation for your room. Assess the shape and size of your room. Is it long and narrow or is it more square? Is it odd and irregularly shaped? Think back to the first chapter. What do you wanna emphasize and what needs to be minimized? For example, let's say your room is long and narrow. A great way to counteract that is to float the furniture so that it runs perpendicular to the long walls by de emphasizing the length of the room. You're tricking the eye into thinking that the room is actually wider than it really is. If a fireplace is the thing that you want is your focal point place your largest piece of furniture, which is usually the sofa, either opposite it or to the side of it and then build the rest of your seating around that. If your room is asymmetrical or regularly shaped, you'll need to define the space by creating different zones so that all of the areas feel intentional. For example, desig...

nate one part is a living area. Another part where you may have a desk or a games table and yet another area where the piano might go. This will help to clarify and unify the space. If however, you have an amazing view just outside your window, it's likely that you wanna make that your focal point, consider how you could arrange your furniture in such a way to take maximum advantage of the view, the light, the sunsets or whatever assets that direction has to offer, measure the overall length and width of the room and place the rug pad, the under layman for the rug with equal amounts of floor showing all the way around. If the room is in a regular shape, you'll need to make accommodations by using an additional rug in that separate area. That is only if you feel that a rug is even needed there once that's down and measured again, for accuracy, place the area rug directly on top, be sure the rug is straight. I find that if you fluff it a little bit from underneath and you get some air under it, it will help to make the adjusting easier measure again to make sure you have equal measurements from front to back and side to side. This will be your last easily accessible opportunity to straighten the rug before the furniture is placed. So make sure you've got it right. Very often wool and silk rugs will have a lighter and a darker side due to the nap of the rug, which is the direction of the fibers, take a look at the rug from both ends to see if there's a noticeable difference when I'm working in a more neutral room. I very often position the rug so that you can see the lighter side as you enter it. Conversely, if it's a bolder color, I'm after I might choose to have the darker side facing the entrance. Generally speaking, it's best to run the rug the length of the room to cover the largest amount of space. However, in rooms that are particularly narrow, it can be very useful to run the rug perpendicular to the long walls to emphasize its width. Once your rug is in place, bring your biggest pieces into the room. My strategy for rebuilding a room is to work from big to small. I start with the sofas, bookcases, piano cabinets, et cetera. Once I've arrived at a workable skeletal arrangement slash floor plan, I'm ready to move on to the next layer. Contrary to popular belief, a sofa does not need to sit fully on a rug. In fact, I actually prefer to place the sofa's front legs on the rug and leave the back legs off when arranging all the upholstered seating. I like to imagine that the furniture is in conversation with itself. Can all of the pieces speak to each other? Getting these building blocks to fall into place will take a bit of trial and error. In fact, the entire process of rearrangement is a constant reshuffling and tweaking until everything kind of settles in and feels right. I like to call it intentional experimentation, which means making thoughtful choices that attempt to create a better outcome. And that's really what it's all about as hard as this may be to believe. You will actually know when you've reached the point where things just feel right. So continue to experiment with the furniture placement until that time comes, once you're satisfied with where the biggest pieces are reintroduce the next largest group of furniture, the chairs, if you have a pair of club chairs, try placing one on each end of the sofa at a 90 degree angle to the sofa arm. Alternatively, you could also try placing them parallel to one another opposite the sofa. If you're a fan of asymmetry, try one chair off the sofa arm and then another opposite the sofa and see how that feels. I'm always interested in having the maximum amount of seating. So try to allot for at least one pair of fully upholstered club chairs and one pair of open armchairs. Perhaps the pair of club chairs would be on either side of the sofa arms and a pair of open armchairs could face into the sofa at a four, five degree angle. This is always a very comfortable seating arrangement for conversation and helps to round out the seating plan. If you have a sofa and a love seat, you might place the love seat at a 90 degree angle to the sofa arm and place a pair of club chairs side by side opposite the love seat. This arrangement would still allow for an additional pair of chairs to float at a 45 degree angle into the sofa. If you own a pair of same size sofas, you could also float those in the center of a room. Chairs can be placed at either end facing one another. Having the furniture float maximizes the width of the room and makes it easy to comfortably circulate provided that you have the width in the room to do. So when placing furniture, you wanna be able to seat as many people as comfortably as possible, you wanna create great circulation for conversation and you wanna make the very best use of the space in the room. Having everything clustered into the center of the room will only make the room feel smaller, spread the furniture out by giving it some space to breathe. The room will paradoxically feel simultaneously larger and more intimate. Please don't ask me to explain the reason for this. I just know it to be true. I've seen it and I felt it myself and it's very often the feedback I get back from clients when they see their rooms reimagined. Good furniture placement has a kind of indefinable alchemy. This is why we keep searching for the best placement. These are some examples of the best possible configurations you might use but don't feel restricted, continue to shuffle the decks until you arrive in an arrangement that feels right to you. The next phase is to bring back tables and lamps. It's absolutely essential to take into account functionality when creating any space. The old adage form follows function means that a room may look great. But if there's no place to put down a glass, you failed. For that reason, one of my basic decorating rules of thumb is to have a table with an arm's reach of any seat you happen to be in. I always have end tables on either side of a sofa, a cocktail table in front of it. And I like to use smaller tables or garden stools next to chairs for resting a drink or a book tables that go on either side of a sofa do not need to match in either color or size. And when in doubt, go big, if you have a drop leaf table using it with one leaf up or even both leaves up, if you have the space creates greater surface space that will accommodate a lamp, a collection of photos, objects and possibly some flowers, somehow larger tables always look and feel more correct than more diminutive ones. And from a practical standpoint, a larger table will accept a larger lamp and many more objects than a smaller table. Would I aim for even distribution of light throughout the room? Begin with a pair of table lamps on either side of a sofa being a fan of symmetry. I like to use a pair of matching lamps to bring cohesion to the arrangement. If I'm floating a sofa, I like to use matching floor lamps and snake the cords underneath the furniture to plug into an out of the way outlet or floor receptacle. If you're lucky enough to have one, if there's a desk in the room, put a lamp on it. If there's a piano in the room, place lamp on the music stand or even a floor lamp behind it. If you have a single chair in a nook, put a floor lamp next to it for reading an up light creates great atmosphere behind an indoor tree or a piece of sculpture. A picture light on a piece of art showcases. It, there are even non electrified options available. Retail, a slender lamp on a bar cart is functional and makes the glasses and bottles. Shimmer lighting and bulbs are a topic for an entire chapter. But suffice to say three way bulbs and dimmer switches are your best friends. They both allow you to modulate the amount of light that you like in order to create the atmosphere and the mood you wanna create in the room. Once you've placed all the lighting, do a quick scan around the room, make sure you spread light evenly throughout eliminating any dark areas. Putting bookcases together is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle to make them visually interesting and prevent them from looking like stacks at a library. You want to incorporate objects and photos, how you do that is the tricky part. Here's how I like to approach it. I like to make the top shelf a bit more dramatic so that your eye goes up creating greater height and verticality. If you have one single bookcase or an age air which is open shelving, you can create whatever composition you like. However, if you have a pair of bookcases, I find it's best to create some symmetry so that the weight is more evenly distributed. In other words, create a pattern that you repeat in both bookcases. A good way to start with a pair of bookcases is to isolate a series of books or a series of objects and place them at the top. Remember I said that there's power in numbers. This is a perfect example. If you have a collection of anything, books, pottery baskets, et cetera, this is your moment to showcase them hard cover books can be organized by subject color or height. It's your choice. If I'm working on a bookcase on the left side of the room, I might start with the tallest hardcover books and work my way down and then mirror the same arrangement in the opposite bookcase for the next shelf down. Why not stack some coffee table books horizontally and place some objects either on top or on either side, don't forget what you do on one side will look great. Repeated on the other side. By the time you're down to the fourth shelf, you should be at eye level from a seated position. This is a great shelf for family photos because you can actually see place the tallest pictures in the back of the shelf and then graduate them down in height to the front. This way, you'll be able to see all of them. Don't be afraid to mix in some nice objects, nothing too small because that will just get lost and that will help to create a lot more visual interest. You should be close to the bottom shelf by now. Stacks of coffee table books always look nice on the bottom row. But if you have more hard covers, that's another option. I'm not a big fan of displaying paperbacks. They're small, often dog eared and decoratively speaking, don't really bring much to the party. I usually pack them away in base cabinets or tuck them away in clients' closets. I recommend that you do the same. However, if you absolutely cannot live without them and please ask yourself why that is tuck them in the back of the shelves where you display photographs, they'll be there but disguised by all of your pictures at the front of the shelves, which will get the most attention. Hanging art is yet another topic that is of course unto itself. However, for the sake of what we're doing. I'm gonna stick to the basics. One of the most important things to bear in mind when hanging art is height, people often make the mistake of hanging art too high and not taking into account the vantage point from which it will be seen, which more often than not will be from a seated position as with the height of a TV. Make sure that your images are more or less at eye level. Creating a sense of ease in a space is one of the secrets to decorating a beautiful room and making art easily viewable. Contributes greatly to that feeling scale is another essential thing to take into account. When hanging art just is with the go big theory for scaling a rug. You wanna go with the largest pieces of art over your largest pieces of furniture. Having a small piece of art over a ft sofa will make the piece feel lost, lonely and in search of other friends. If you want to build a salon style arrangement, a grouping of many pieces of art to comprise one large arrangement. My advice is to lay out your pieces on the floor to create your favorite arrangement before committing them to the wall by adjusting and switching the composition. You'll come up with something that you like before putting a ton of holes into the wall. This idea of spacing or breathability is yet another factor to take into consideration hanging a large photograph, just an inch or two above a console will probably not give the photo enough room to breathe. Chances are it won't put it at eye level either further more, this placement will likely inhibit your ability to see it clearly as it will undoubtedly be obstructed by the objects just below it. Think about a picture that's going to be hung over an entry console or a sideboard in your dining room. Take into consideration the height of the bowls, vases or any other decorative object you may place there before you decide how much clearance you'll need color. Of course, plays a huge role in deciding where to place art. Even though you'll hear it said that one should never decide on art based on the decor. The reality is if your room has red accents, then art with some reference to red will most likely sing in that room. I absolutely select art based on how it will work with the scheme of the room. It's just good decorating. If your scheme is neutral and you're aiming for a monochromatic look, you'll probably want your art to reflect that rather than using big bold saturated colors. Conversely in a very colorful room, neutral pieces may appear too washed out consider color and by all means, work with the color in the room. This will reinforce your scheme and in so doing pull things together which brings me to trial and error. The only way to know whether a piece of art will work in any given place is to have your friend handyman or art installer. If you're willing to pony up for one, hold a piece up to the wall, so you can step back and take a good look at it. If the first thing you try is a winner, you're golden. If not keep trying until it's a fit, the art will tell you what really belongs there because of its scale color and subject matter using collections can be extremely effective to bring cohesion to a room. For example, if a client has a lot of black and white photos, I'll group them to create a statement. If the client is a collection of oil landscapes, that could be the perfect jumping off point for creating a scheme. A client of mine had giant French art posters. So those receive pride of place in several places that were all open to one another. Another client had blue chip seventies artwork. So that became the theme and those pieces were evenly distributed throughout the room. Having great art to work with is an obvious plus, but it's not at all a necessity in creating a beautiful space. Finding a set of vintage botanicals or maps at a flea market and putting them in its simple store, bought museum frames can be an incredibly effective way to incorporate color pattern and interest into a room. Reintroduce your largest accessories. First maybe it's a tree in a planter or a large basket. A piece of sculpture, either freestanding or on a pedestal, large urns or jars, fireplace screens, fire tools and big baskets, et cetera. A tree will want to go close to a light source urns or jars look great on top of or underneath a console or big end table and look very dramatic on top of a cabinet, play with these objects until they fall into place, we'll deal with placing all the smaller accessories later when I talk about Tablescape. Now that you have the plan in place. How does this arrangement feel? Is it pleasing to the eye? Does it have good flow? Does it breathe? In other words, is everything space far enough apart so that nothing feels cramped or lopsided. Will your guest be able to speak comfortably with one another? And most importantly, what is still missing? Now, we come to one of the most important facets of this entire process shopping your home. Sometimes you don't need to look any further than your own proverbial backyard to find these completer pieces you're looking for. It's very possible that you already have everything you need. Whether that's a mirror to go over an entry console, a pair of lamps for a living room and tables, a series of prints or rug whose color works better in the space, it's all about repurposing and upcycling. What you have of cycling is the new recycling now is the time to pillage and plunder your home. I'm forever in ruthless pursuit of buried treasure. I go where no decorator has gone before. No closet cabinet, cupboard, basement, attic, crawl space or garage is off limits. When I'm on the hunt. Over time, you become accustomed to seeing your things in the context for which they were originally intended. Really look at these things not only for what they currently are, but for what they might become. For example, bedside tables could become living room and tables, floor lamps in a den could become a lighting source on either side of a sofa, those decorative chairs that you have in a guest bedroom could help to round out a seating area in the living room. Maybe a pair of blue lamps. Now in the master bedroom will be just the thing to punch up this color scheme in the living room. Is there a small area rug in a hallway that would look amazing under the cocktail table? Would that Eames chair be just the thing to shake up a more traditional room? What about that fabulous mirror that's been outside in the garage waiting for its big moment. That might look incredible over an entry console or a fireplace. Stay open. Consider everything. If it piques your curiosity, try it, what have you got to lose in my experience. When you introduce these new additions, you'll know when it's right because it will feel like a natural fit and you'll get excited after all these years. This is the part of the process that I find most rewarding when I discover something and find a new and improved home for it. It's magical. It's an injection of B 12 to a formally sluggish space. A room can suddenly come alive with the addition of just one piece. The ability to stay open to the possibility of repurposing things is essential to this process. And the more willing you are to try different options, the better your results will be. I've looked countless things into rooms over the years and never ceased to amaze myself by the way, these things have worked and not in the way that I originally intended them to really give yourself over to this process. And the benefits will surprise you. Experiment. Keep trying new ways to use what you have and you may end up amazing yourself too. Your curiosity about trying different configurations of furniture placement, table top arrangements, art installations, etcetera will pay off tremendously. So get obsessed and experiment as much as you like until you feel fully satisfied.