This story category covers home decor, home maintenance, garden design and garden maintenance.
THE CREATIVE SOLUTION | Cut flowers straight from the garden or the corner store are a fine if conventional way to bring spring indoors. But bedding plants, which are becoming more plentiful everywhere as the gardening season takes hold, make equally attractive, arguably more novel and definitely cost-effective arrangements.
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DO IT RIGHT | The wedding cake bed—you know, the ultrafeminine one (pictured here) with a frothy meringue of duvet, pleated bed skirt and rows of European shams racked up against the headboard—may not be passé, but it is not what’s currently hot in bedding. What’s in fashion in bedding right now is a tailored, masculine effect, characterized by lean, clean lines and multiple layers of fitted sheets and flat covers drawn in tight to the bed frame. Read more
GROW YOUR OWN | Blueberries thrive in our little corner of the planet—they love our climate and generally acidic soil—so if you want to grow something both good to eat and attractive to look at (what can I say, I’m married to a garden designer), you might want to leave room for a blueberry bush or three in your garden or grow this yummy fruit in tubs on your balcony. Read more
While not everyone has huge pieces of art gracing the walls of their home, most people do have plenty of little pieces, whether they are favourite photos or original, miniature works of art. But just how do you display these smaller things? You can hang them on the wall in thoughtful groupings to create a tableau, or you can find a way to set them on a table. For years I had been looking for an elegant way to display framed art or photos on a table top. I have never liked plate stands and using an easel seems derivative; finally, I designed an easy-make support of my own. Read more
WHAT THE PROS KNOW | Garden ornaments can be expensive for sure, but they don’t need to be. Witness the clever way the late, great British Interior and garden designer Sir David Hicks employed ordinary available-in-every-garden-centre containers to create a particularly eye-catching pot garden on his own estate, The Grove, in Oxfordshire, England. Read more
BUY RIGHT | Blame it on the spa industry, or decorating magazines if you want to, but the idea that thick spa-white bath towels and washcloths are the best and only way to wash and dry yourself is hogwash. White towels go with any style décor and feel indulgent in a good way, but white washcloths? No way, never! Easily stained light-coloured washcloths look dowdy quickly. Their low life expectancy means having to replace them frequently, which is both expensive and wasteful. Better to adopt the approach of more and more luxury and “cheap chic” hotels by having dark-coloured washcloths on hand, particularly for washing off stubborn makeup. Read more
WASTE NOT | When my four-year-old European dishwasher crashed a while back, I called in a repairman who made an eye-opening comment about my dishwashing detergent. “You use that stuff?” he asked, pointing at the Electrasol Dishwasher Detergent with Powerball Tabs I’d bought in a convenient 100-tab tub at Costco.
“Yes, and I love it. It’s so easy,” I chirped, citing a no-mess no-fuss defense and explaining how my dishes looked at least as sparkly clean as they had with other detergents I’d employed. Read more
CREATIVE SOLUTIONS | In early February, when thoughts turn to hearts and flowers, it’s easy to think that a dozen red roses are the key to a woman’s heart. Not necessarily. In the floral department, sometimes something both ordinary but imaginative will do the trick. It’s not the flowers, it’s the original containers that make these arrangements pop. Read more
STEALS & DEALS | —27-01-12—Nood, the New Zealand/Australia-based furniture and housewares retailer known for good modern design at reasonable prices, is shutting down operations in Canada. Their killer closeout sale is currently underway with everything in their two Metro Vancouver stores at 50 to 75 percent off the regular price. Though Nood won’t close its doors permanently until early March, we can’t imagine there’ll be much left to purchase by then (maybe its fabulous in-store hanging light fixtures?). Stuff is flying out of there really fast.
Here’s what we like best of what’s left. Read more
CLEAN SMARTER | Have you ever noticed there are two kinds of house dirty? The first is surface dirty. This is what most of us deal with on a weekly basis, doing the dusting, vacuuming and general tidying that keep our homes looking presentable.
The second is deep down dirty. This kind of dirty creeps up on you while you’re religiously attending to the surfaces. Deep down dirty is the leather sofa that never gets conditioned, or the back of the insides of bottom kitchen cupboards that become magnets for grunge, or the dust and gunk that gathers on baseboards behind bedroom dressers that seldom if ever get moved.
Deep down dirty can make even a tidy house feel unclean. Read more
