Sunday, November 29, 2009


: : my Swedish friends .hans & tina. were just here visiting. they stopped by new york city as well and found the .highline., a section of old railroad tracks raised above street level that have been turned into a park and opened in June 2009. what a cool idea! I'll have to give it a try next time I'm in NYC.

photos from .here.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Luxury Spanish House Design Ideas Contemporary Styles

This is Spanish house design ideas from James Glower for your house remodeling inspiration. This is absolutely modern Spanish house design combine with classic traditional styles. Here it is best sample Spanish home design photos gallery with luxury and contemporary styles for your inspiration.

luxury spanish interior design ideas
luxury spanish interior design ideas

luxury spanish interior decorating
luxury spanish interior decorating

luxury spanish house interior
luxury spanish house interior

luxury spanish home interior layouts
luxury spanish home interior layouts

classic spanish house design
classic spanish house design

Office Interior Designers

Interior designers often enter a home armed with a veritable arsenal of creativity and subcontracted resources. In many cases, the secondary services a decorator brings in under his or her invoice adds a certain specialized expertise to robust décor. Professional lighting equipment and lighting design services are crucial to this mix. With the right levels of light, both glare and shadow are dispelled, and the texture and color of artwork springs to light.

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Phantom Lighting Representatives, located throughout North America, Central America, and South America, are available to help the interior designer utilize some of the world’s most unique and aesthetically superb lighting equipment on the market.

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If you are currently working with an interior decorator or interior design firm, we recommend you point them in our direction if they encounter any of the following scenarios relative to fine art and display lighting systems. While a great many interior designers are already working with Phantom Lighting products, many are still discovering us for the first time.

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Your interior designer will most likely recommend new artwork as part of his or her overall plan for creating a new look within your home.

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Private art collections can transform an interior into a realm of sophistication with very little physical change to the room. The trick is to find equipment from a lighting fixture manufacturer that will maximize the impact of your new collection without damaging the artwork itself or interfering with general room lighting. Any interior designer will tell you that the two biggest aesthetic obstacles to overcome when lighting art are shadows and glare. Any curator or experienced collector will also add that the greatest technological threat to art lighting is ultraviolet radiation and infrared heat—both of which can literally destroy priceless works of creativity and many hours of hard work on the part of your designers.

Office Room Designs

Tired of finding colored pictures among your invoices? Have you ever discovered random lego pieces among your inventory? If so, you must own a home business, and you must be working from anywhere in the house but your very own office. So you need a home office. How does a home business owner move successfully from the living room to the office?

First, the home business owner needs to establish his or her own space for an office. Find a spare room or a room you can easily concert into an office. Even a corner of the garage will do for a first-time home business owner. Remember to start small and invest little at the beginning, and then when you can afford it, you can build or create the office of your dreams. If you do not have your own space, however, you will be doomed forever to finding peanut butter smeared on important documents, and you will sacrifice the professional look that you need to exude to have a successful home business.

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Secondly, once you have your space chosen and established, organize your goods. Invest in some organizational materials like shelves (cheap from the hardware store), categorizing materials like labels and sharpies, colored boxes, and a filing cabinet. Once you know what you need for organizational materials and invest in them, organize your office with two frames of mind: organize it so that it makes sense to you, and organize so that if something should happen to you and those you love most would need to find important documents quickly, they would be able to. So your system should not just make sense to you, but it should make sense to just about anyone. It should be simple enough that your fifth grader can understand it.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Modern Pendants from Lights Up

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that we have a soft spot for pretty, colorful things. We love decor that is fun, happy, and bright.

Our sales rep emailed us yesterday about Lights Up, a lighting company based out of New York. We love the line and thought we should share it with you. They make pretty, colorful pendants, which are really inexpensive and really fun. Lightsup's lead time is 10 days. The fabric can be customized.

Here are some of our favorites:








The fabric selection is adorable. Here are a few (you can see the rest on the site).





These pendants, as we mentioned previously, are totally inexpensive. They run between $200-$400.

To see the complete line, check out Lights Up web site. We'll be putting them up on our lighting section soon, so check our site in a few days...

Monday, November 23, 2009

About Us

The year was 2001. We were working in sales for one of those high-tech software companies in Silicon Valley. This was the year of the dot-com boom. The Internet was taking off and people were making money left and right.

We had a little money to play with and decided to decorate our own house. Mind you, we knew nothing about decorating then. We proceeded to waste a lot of money from overpaying for furniture, hiring worthless interiors designers (note: not all interiors designers are worthless, just ours) and whatever else. It was a complete disaster.

So we proceeded to find our own sources for decorating, and in the process, found some amazing places where you can get good stuff for cheap.

It was in one of those boring ass, trying-to-make-some-sales trips that we decided that maybe we could turn what we learned into a viable business. We quit our jobs.

Little did we know, it's a hard, hard business. Especially if you try to run a retail store. Especially after 9/11. Especially if you don't have any clue on how to run a business.

We started out as an online store only; then had this brilliant idea of opening a retail store, which we had no business doing. It almost undid us. Physically. Mentally. Financially.

So we got back to our core business a few years ago, which is to create an e-commerce site for home furnishing products that are pretty and affordable.

This turns out to be the best business decision we ever made.

We now operate two online stores. Inside Avenue is our main store and carries mostly furniture and accessories. Inside Fabric is our first niche store, carrying only upholstery fabrics and wallpapers. We plan to add more niche stores in the future- time and money permitting.

This blog is born out of our love for decorating. We love finding new things and tell you about it.

We love discovering new vendors, especially the small and emerging ones, and write about them.

As we find new resources that are interesting or useful, we share them with you. They are not all neccessarily about decorating. Sometimes we write about food,travel and fashion too.

We hope you enjoy our blog. Thank you for reading.

P.S. Your thoughtful comments are always appreciated (note we said "thoughtful"-read into that as it was intended).

Sunday, November 22, 2009

retro colors


: : I'm browsing a lot of wedding blogs these days and came across these .love photos.
I just love the colors, their outfits and the old gas station they chose for the photo shoot. and where can I get that orange skirt?

found on .snippet & ink.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Monday, November 16, 2009

Efficient Framing for House Plans


Fine Homebuilding has a new article on the future of framing house plans. For many years we have been framing houses basically the same way. And this way is not necessarily the most energy efficient or material efficient. The article makes the following recommendations to increase energy efficiency and to reduce material and labor costs at the same time:
  • use 2x6 wall framing at 24" o.c. (in lieu of 16" o.c.)
  • use 1" rigid foam insulation in lieu of traditional sheathing
  • eliminate headers where they are not necessary structurally - where they are necessary size them properly (it is common practice to use the same size header throughout)
  • eliminate all the corner framing - let the drywall hang loose or use clips
  • use header hangars in lieu of jack studs
  • eliminate one of the top plates
I happen to agree that all of these ideas are good energy savings tips. Some builders however would argue that they are not necessarily cost savings. For instance eliminating one of the top plates may complicate the drywall installation. Eliminating the wall sheathing means using other methods to ensure shear strength. So before you implement any of these ideas on your new house make sure you talk through the implications closely with your builder. I also suggest having a residential structural engineer look at your new lightly framed house to make sure it won't tip over when the big bad wolf blows on it.

You can see the entire fine homebuilding article at "The Future of Efficient Framing"


Friday, November 13, 2009

Design Challenge for a 2000 SF House Plan

Lately I have been getting inquiries for modestly sized new home designs that feature main floor master bedrooms. A search of the web reveals a gazillion main floor master bedroom plans - but most are massive or ugly or both. So I decided this might be a good opportunity to design a new plan fitting this unique need, and to illustrate for you a little bit of the design process at the same time. So let's get started.

The design process I use typically involves the following phases:
  • Programming
  • Schematic Design
  • Design Development
  • Construction Documents
Today we will start with Programming. Programming really means just identifying a list of functional needs and qualities that you would like to see in your home. I'll start with a list that reflects the kinds of requests I have been receiving.
  • Modest plan size - as close to 2000 square foot as possible.
  • Open floor plan - Living, Dining and Kitchen spaces very connected with each other.
  • Mudroom with space for hanging coats and sitting for putting shoes on.
  • Laundry space should be on the main floor.
  • A main floor master bedroom with walk in closet and bath. The bath should have a walk in shower, but not necessarily a tub (the days of the jacuzzi tub seem to be over).
  • Spaces that are functional, but not over sized.
  • A reasonable sized entry porch.
  • A screen porch with spaces for eating and sitting.
  • A main floor powder room.
  • Possibly a den or away room - if space allows.
  • An attached 2 car garage - possibly with some additional storage space.
  • 2 additional bedrooms on a second floor.
  • A shared bathroom for the 2 upstairs bedrooms.
  • A basement that could allow future expansion space.
  • Beautiful home but not overly complex. Should be reasonably economical to construct. The house plan should be simple, yet unique.
That's a pretty good list for now. But I wanted to leave room for your thoughts. So please feel free to comment. Did I miss anything? Throw your 2 cents in.

Next posting I will update the program with your relevant comments - and we'll see some initial design thoughts.

Friday, November 6, 2009

How to design a bay window!

I have had many clients in the past tell me they want a bay window. Sometimes I have been a bit reluctant to the idea because I have seen so many bad examples. The image below is a very typical example of the contemporary application of the bay. To me this just looks like they cut a hole in the wall and slapped on the window unit. It just doesn't look integrated.

Don't do this!
On the other hand my recent trip to the Napa Valley area reminded me that the bay window can be a beautiful design element when properly integrated with the architecture of the house plan. Here are a few examples on mostly craftsman style houses - all discovered in the town of Napa.

Square box bay instead of the typical angled sides. Simple shed roof with exposed rafter tails and supporting brackets. Shingle siding wraps the box out.

Here the bay walls simply extend up until they meet the roof overhang, which is deep enough to receive them. The continuous trim above the windows and the cedar shingles also help to integrate the bay properly with the house. The brackets below help to give the bay a sense of support.

Here is an angled bay window fitting below a square gabled form. This gable integrates with the house in much stronger way than our "don't do this example". Also note the small window below the bay. This completes the composition and reinforces the idea that the bay was not an afterthought.


My favorite bay window example in Napa. You can tell the designer spent a lot of time studying the form and detail to properly integrate with the house. Beautifully executed!