Collaboration is stuff dreams are made of so; I count myself very lucky that I count Timothy Corrigan among my design acquaintances and have been able to work with him on several projects. He is an extraordinary designer and so is his new integrated collection for Schumacher and Patterson, Flynn and Martin. 

As someone who is passionate about window treatments, I love the fact that Tim likes to start designing a room with the window.

“Most American designers start furnishing a room with a rug and then play matchy-matchy,” he continues. “When I furnish a room, I start with draperies, because that’s going to be the strongest vertical in the space. Then I’ll bring in the furniture and the art, and maybe at that point I’ll put in the carpets.”  says Corrigan.

That also means fabrics are an important piece to the final design puzzle. So it is only natural, that Corrigan’s inaugural collection not only splits inspiration from his home in Los Angeles and chateau in France, but that the center piece of the integrated collection of furniture, rugs and trim  is fabric. Uniting both locales is a lusciously lyrical palette that mixes lavender and green, rose and camel, blue and white—and doses of blush-pink.

Drawing on a diverse set of influences, cultures, and eras, Cap Ferrat combines disparate motifs–arabesques, trelliswork, pineapples–into one distinct pattern.  My favorite pattern, I love its distinct French personality with a bit of a an Art Deco undertone and its soft palette and variations in tone. Printed on a linen-cotton blend, the design comes in three colorways with muted gradations that resemble a watercolor.

Pickfair Paisley marries the strong traditional shapes of the East into a lush floral, giving it wide appeal in a variety of spaces on a linen ground.

Tim’s aesthetic comes through in  Chateau Silk Damask–a shimmering fabric that mixes the ornate damask motif  with  colorways that are  easy to live with. The  weave creates a puckered effect traditionally found in European hammered silks–perfect for dramatic, gently puddling curtains on floor-to-ceiling windows.

The obligatory animal print that seems to be needed in collections these days is made fresh and modern with Madeleine Velvet. Named for leopard-pattern aficionado Madeleine Castaing, Corrigan wanted to produce a coordinate with character. The small-scale fabric is an motif woven in a pragmatic material that will work nearly anywhere. The animal pattern has a soft hand with a pile that beautifully catches the light, providing for artful variation in colorways that are extremely versatile.

Check out Tim’s more of Tim’s collection including wallpaper, trim, furniture and rugs here. 

Need some more  inspiration? Tim’s’ book, An Invitation to Chateau Grand Luce is just the ticket!

The post Tim Corrigan’s New Collection for Schumacher appeared first on Design Confidential.

Bringing back a post from the past in honor of Sunday’s Oscars. Another year has gone by and a couple of new movie rooms have made my short list this year. What movie rooms or interiors are on your shortlist?

My Oscar Contender Rooms-

It’s Oscar weekend and I will have a bottle of bubbly chilling  while I check out the red carpet arrivals and cheer on my favorite Oscar contenders.  To heck with Best Actor /Actress or Picture. Here are my picks  for Oscar winning movie rooms  for people who like design….

I loved, loved, loved everything about Marie Antoinette. My god, it is Versailles already!

I had the immense pleasure of visiting the factory and seeing  where all the passementerie was made for the movie and  including this scene.

Or Brideshead Revisited…( Give me a period piece anytime.)

I still gasp a little when I see the winter palace in Dr. Zhivago….

The Great Gatsby… ( Can’t wait to see the sets on DiCaprio’s 2013 version. )

Update: Not bad Baz!

For some mod inspiration- Love the Doris Day +Rock Hudson movies like Pillow Talk …

Remember the  oh- so- chic  automated bachelor pad?

Leo Di Caprio looked dashing in this Aviator living room

Didn’t you just love Diane Keaton’s house in the Hamptons in Something’s Gotta Give…

Every time I watch this movie, I love it more.

Just watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s . Who would’t be enamored with this sexy room.

I am carrying around this clipping of the living room in It’s Complicated as inspiration for a  my family room redo.

Update: Family room redo with sitting area inspired by this shot- Done!

But my all time favorite movie design muse is Rosalind Russell’s Auntie Mame. How many times did they makeover the staircase? This film could be a CEU class in decorative arts!

What movies have tripped your trigger that you would recommend for design pros or design aficionados?

The post My Oscar Contender Rooms appeared first on Design Confidential.

It’s time to update what’s happening in the digital world of web platforms, design directories and design apps. Here are the design apps and digital tools that I am loving right now and can make a design pro more efficient, creative and productive. I know you are going to want to play around with these.

For a look at more design apps check out this recent post.

 Waterlogue- Release the Artist in You

Capitalize on the popularity of artisan looks and create watercolors of your projects without ever having to pick up a paint brush.  I love what it can do to my before/after pictures and portfolio. There are a variety of ways to customize a Waterlogue image – use a variety of presets or a few key settings- to quickly and easily capture the spirit of your subject. The result is an app that can turn any snapshot into a luminous, lively watercolor sketch. And it’s highly accessible: the presets are based on painting styles.  Thanks to Maison21 for turning me onto this app!

SwatchMate Cube- The World’s Smartest Color Detector

Throw out your swatch books! Place the Cube onto a surface and it will capture its color, displaying it wirelessly on your paired smartphone. It’s that easy. The Cube makes it easy to instantly match the color of a surface to your favorite paint brands and color libraries.

You don’t measure floor plans using your hands, nor should you judge color by eye. SwatchMate is an essential tool in your design war chest that helps you get on with being awesome.  $80 on Kickstarter. 

Adornly- Your Personal Home Decorating Consultant  

Ikea started it; now Adornly is expanding it. Using augmented reality, this unbeleive app uses a magaizine to make different pieces of furniture appear on your iPad.

After downloading Adornably and creating a free account, you can lay any magazine on the floor of a room and Adornably will use it to scale a virtual image of that room in your iPad. Then wait a few moments for the screen to scan over it, and see that magazine tagged with a green circle on the screen.  Next, you can take photos–to be used to add furniture to at a later time–or pull some from the Adornably catalog to allow it to virtually exist in the room. So if you think that is cool… you can move the furniture around in the room with your finger!  FREE

Spacemaker VR- A Design Tool to Wow Your Clients

Spacemaker VR works with your existing design software (3d Studio Max, Sketchup, Revit, Rhino, Autocad are all compatible) to export your 3d design files into immersive experiences that you can walk in! Spacemaker makes it easy to quickly jump back-and-forth from designing a 3d space to walking inside it.

Plus, It is super portable- designed to be used on site, at your client’s house, at your office.  Use Spacemaker VR as an everyday design tool to give jaw-dropping presentations. Now you can feel what it’s like to walk through your designs throughout the design process.•Use Spacemaker to test and refine your designs

•Meet you client at the job site, home, or office, and walk through the design at any stage in your design process

•Answer an RFP with a walk-through experience instead of a physical model or renderings

•Use your existing 3d model files to create new and exciting virtual reality experiences

All this for $249 on Kickstarter.

Magic Plan 3.5

I have been demoing Magic Plan for a couple of years now and it’s a great way to create floor plans using your iPad or smartphone. I have found it to be pretty accurate and to be honest, there is something compelling about standing in a client’s living room and creating a floor plan using a camera. Users were asking to go a step further and wanted to use MagicPlan as a business tool to capture not only the shape and dimensions of the room, but also incorporate additional information about the floor plan for professional usage.  So MagicPlan 3.5 helps capture additional elements at the site using “smart objects”:

•             Each object added to the floor plan (an electrical object, a piece of furniture or a structural element) can be assigned a comment, a picture and specific attributes. These specific attributes can be customized, and may include the price, the sku number, or even a specific Q&A.

•             An annotation can be placed on the floor plan and can include a photo and a comment. Either general or specific annotations can be used; such as “to do’s”, shapes (circle and rectangle), and more.

•             A revised PDF layout (including each of the objects) will create ready to use business documents. FREE

Storehouse

Storehouse is a way to tell visually driven stories- i.e. your projects and proposals. You can import images from your photo library, Dropbox, Flickr, or Instagram, then easily drag and pinch them into a gorgeous layout, peppered with as much written narrative as you’d like.

“One of the things we’re trying to achieve with Storehouse is the feeling you get from physical paper.”

This tactile approach makes Storehouse’s interface as approachable as it is avant-garde. Storehouse has an editing system that imports your images as neatly organized thumbnails, which you can stretch, crop, and zoom to your heart’s content. But you can’t screw things up, because Storehouse has engineered some logic into the backend, meaning that your photos and text, however intensely you manipulate them, will always find some grounding visual sense rather than resembling an overzealous five-year-old’s scrapbook.

Why, you ask would I care- as design entrepreneurs we wear many hats and this is a great way to build presentations, brochures, tutorials and much more.

Color 911 

Color 911® helps you create your own colors, select colors from themes or photos, combine colors to create your own palettes, organize colors into folders, share or email to designers, friends or family, and so much more! Created by a recognized color consultant, there are more than 50 downloadable color themes. Each theme has 42 different colors; every theme includes colors that work together for whatever your color needs are:

•             FINDING YOUR COLORS is easy – Use designer color themes, create your own color on the color wheel, select colors from an Internet or from a snapshot .

•             EDIT your colors on your palettes to adjust hue, saturation or brightness. You can reorder your color selection, change color themes, lock in a color, duplicate a palette, with name modification and select colors from a photo.

•             BUILD your personal palette library and create folders using the palette preview tool, which makes organization easy

.

The post Design Apps + Tools You’re Going to Want to Have appeared first on Design Confidential.

You couldn’t miss Markus Benesch’s work at Heimtextil. It popped up everywhere from the HP printing stand to Raasch wallcoverings booth and more.

“What’s important to me is that my work is innovative,” he says. “My two criteria are, it has to be new, and I don’t want to be a bore. I want my audience to feel enriched when they see my products or a space I’ve designed.”

Most of Benesch’s work shows up in contract applications, probably because they are so eye- catchingly surreal. But with consumers being so comfortable with color; his designs are equally at home in residential interiors as in contract environments

Growing up in Germany, Benesch was drawn to Milan from an early age. He says he started  going to German furniture fairs at 13 and felt that he wasn’t seeing enough change from year to year.  “One year it’s grey; the next year it’s a lighter grey, the year after that it’s a darker grey—then it’s a grey with a beige. Seriously?”  So he went to the Milan fair at 15, and found what he was looking for.

This paper is inspired by zippers.

He began designing for Abet Laminati, showing his collections of furniture, objects, stools, carpet, wallpaper and pajamas for Memphis Gallery.  When he started working with wallpaper he chose digital printing to save money. Today, through his studio, Curious Boy, he explores the fusion between digital and natural by digital printing on veneers or stucco. A designer first, Benesh says he always starts designing with pen and paper, not with a computer. “

“The computer is not the idea. The idea is the idea, and the computer is just a tool, like a hammer. Sometimes we use it, sometimes we don’t, but it’s not the first thing.”

The post Someone You Should Know: Markus Benesch appeared first on Design Confidential.

When Target gets their “design on” , we always take notice. Thought they have been pinning on Pinterest for a while , they have taken it up a notch by tapping three of Pinterest top pinners to collaborate with 3 new party planning collections.

The first, by design blogger Joy Cho, of the Oh Joy! blog and having 13.6 million followers on Pinterest. Other top pinners Jan Halvarson of Poppytalk (8.3 million followers) and Kate Arends of Wit & Delight (2.6 million followers) are set to unveil their own party planning collections in June and September. Party planning is a popular area for Pinterest; more than 700,000 party planning pins are shared every day on the platform.

Monday’s partnership is a design win for Target,  who wouldn’t want to have the new design influencers not only designing for you, but sharing them online with their millions of followers. It’s a design marketing strategy made in heaven.

“We selected Pinners who we felt would have broad appeal to our guests, have significant followings, a diverse geographic location and their own unique style,” a Target spokesperson told Mashable.

The collection includes the  usual suspects like cups, plates, and napkins, but shines with details like the scallops on the tablecloth. What party host doesn’t want coordinated trash bags?   Here’s a sneak peek:

The post The New Design Influencers appeared first on Design Confidential.

Hello, everyone! I’m so excited to be here at Design Confidential with a guest post from Arcadian Home blog. It’s a great place to find lots of interior design inspiration including beautiful home décor ideas from appealing foyer lights to fabulous wall art and much more.

Today, we’re going to take a look at eight rooms that are at once stylish and functional, showing how well design can work when furnishings are chosen based upon ways a space will be used from day to day. Please enjoy!

~ Mari

The foyer or entryway of a home is a versatile space, one that might simply function as a beautifully decorated passage way, but can also be furnished to meet the needs of a busy family. Here, the foyer is turned into a tiny sitting room.

In this chic white living room, furnishings have been chosen to create a conversation area in front of the fireplace for family gatherings or entertaining friends.

Much thought was given to the way this master suite would function. In the end, two seating areas were included in the design. The soft color palette creates a retreat-like atmosphere, while the contemporary pendant light is simply beautiful.

Obviously, the kitchen is one room in the house where planning for functionality is of the utmost importance. Here, one unexpected additions, a convenient beverage cooler, is one of the homeowner’s favorite elements.

This slightly masculine home office is at once beautiful and functional with its spacious layout and meticulously planned storage. I love the soft houndstooth patterned rug.

This spacious traditional white bath with pops of red in its Chinoiserie elements is large enough to allow for inclusion of an armchair and garden stool.

With walls of windows on three sides, this lofty family room with a stunning view needed a lot of thoughtful planning before furnishings were chosen. In the end, pulling the carefully chosen seating pieces in from the window walls and onto a large area rug worked beautifully.

Lots of planning goes into furnishing baby’s first room. Here it was decided that in addition to the crib and storage pieces, a cozy window seat and comfy rocker and ottoman were important for Mom and Dad. Drum pendant lighting is a great choice for this nursery design. Images 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

What do you think of these interior inspirations? Leave us your thoughts below, and come by our blog for more home decor and lighting ideas!

The post Style Meets Function appeared first on Design Confidential.

Here is a sampling of what caught my eye and I am loving from Paris Deco Off 2014.

Osborne and Little is betting that trims are going to make a comeback; putting their money on their new Cornish Trim collection shown in this stunning display window reminiscent of Little Mermaid.( It won Best Window!) I am a “more is better” person so my fingers are crossed that passementerie is chic again.

Embroideries were EVERYWHERE . The next one was more beautiful than the first. Companies are exploring new grounds, mixing machine- made with hand done and bringing back techniques that was almost gone.

From Pierre Frey’s Aloha Collection

Traditional florals on silk by Elitis

Applique and embroidery from Pierre Frey

More embroidery from Pierre Frey- this time with pearls.

Intricate wool leading edge applique with metallic highlights on Fortuny.

Wool and velvet take it up a notch. Wool in all weights was presented and Velvet became more baroque – certainly in the complex finishes and weaves.

Holland and Sherry introduced a custom quilted wool collection. You pick the wool, yarn color and quilt style to customize your looks.

Cassaro fabrics from Houston is always a favorite. Here is a jacquard cut velvet that has been overprinted with a rose pattern. Stunning!

Romo Black Edition was searching for a permanent embossing techniques so they used long nap velvet, embossed I;t then cut the nap to create this permanent moire inspired pattern- and it’s soft as buttah!

The post First Look: Paris Deco Off appeared first on Design Confidential.

Just in time for KBIS and Design and Construction Week in Vegas next month. Here’s an infographic of what will be hot in kitchen design this year.
from PartSelect.com

The post 2014 Kitchen Trends appeared first on Design Confidential.

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Throughout the year, the members of the MAISON&OBJET Observatory identify and analyze micro-signals heralding changing influences. Each session, the board’s trend forecast is embodied in the design of three trends areas created by trends consultancy firms Croisements, Elizabeth Leriche and the Nelly Rodi agency. Design Confidential is privy to this year’s trends that will unveiled at the January  2014 edition of M&O. The Observatory has coined this session’s forecast  Elsewhere.

Elsewhere is an invitation to distant inner journeys. A desire to get away and a wish for openness to the world are animating design and the art of living.  A Cool travel itinerary is about looking for new lands, unseen vistas, far-off spots where adventure and wonder are at hand. Globetrotters and nomads, amblers and bushwhackers are heading out to discover the Other and sketching the shifting cartography of a mobile, fluid, cosmopolitan and more human world. Guaranteed disorientation.

Elsewhere in Nature

Landscape by Elizabeth Leriche

The soothing contemplation of landscapes feeds our gaze and our mind. A quest for getaways, for higher ground is opening the doors of creativity. We are transcribing the reverie of a poetic, sensitive nature. Between the force of material things and evanescent lightness, between immenseness and microcosms,  a physical and spiritual escape is teleporting our imaginations toward new horizons. Travel logs in lands of feeling.

Elsewhere under the Sun

Heliotrope by Francois Bernard

A solar art of living is wandering through enclaves that are festive or quiet, transgressive or meditative, in an often somber time. Hotly blazing suns are like the metal of a blade taken from the embers. Midnight suns, white nights, cold suns gleaming like mercury. The heavenly body that is the sun is irradiating creation. It is divine, artsy, sexy, sometimes kitschy and eccentric, luxurious and joyful. Irresistibly hot.

Elsewhere in Abysses and Space

Beyond by Vincente Gregoire for Nelly Rodi

Immediate boarding for the most final distant lands. At the edges of space or in oceanic depths, we are diving into the unknown. A contemporary cabinet of curiosities is bringing together sea-punks and mermaids in mid- water, robots and astronauts searching for new frontiers. The infinitely far is opening up new vistas for creation. A bizarre beauty, strange and mysterious, stellar and astonishing

The post Maison and Objet Trends S/S 2014 appeared first on Design Confidential.