Creating Luxury with Color

If you are in a service oriented business and wish to create a luxurious, posh and glamorous atmosphere for your customers and employees, decorate with shades purple, burgundy and red-purple.  This could apply to curtains, pillows, furniture, wall hangings and rugs.

Purple represents royalty and luxury.  In darker shades, it is considered a wealthy color.  It suggests spirituality and blends the heart and mind with the physical and spiritual.

Red-purple shades indicate great passion and strength of will.

Burgundy symbolizes wealth, success and prosperity.  It invigorates a room and brings it to life.  Burgundy is honorable and builds deep ties.

My Pantone color picks that inspire this luxurious look are:  Pantone 41-2-7c (dark purple), Pantone 37-3-7c and Pantone 38-1-7c (red-purple).

My color picks from Behr's Virtual Color Center that inspire this look are:  Wild Grapes S-G-660, Delicious Berry S-G-690 and Vin Rouge 110D-7.

If you are a small business and want to enhance your work place atmosphere with new colors, contact Divine dZigns at info@divinedzigns.com.  Divine dZigns offers interior design management and color consulting services for small business.

Incorporating the Color of the Year, Turquoise in your Home!

Pantone has declared Turquoise as the color of 2010.  According to Pantone, "turquoise transports us to an exciting, tropical paradise while offering a sense of protection and healing in stressful times".

I love turquoise and I started thinking, how can I bring this color into my home in an economical way without needing a major revamp or home makeover?

Then I remembered that I had collected the bottles from Pier 1 and West Elm home fragrance reed diffusers once the liquid fragrance was over.  I did not know what to do with these until now!

I decided to paint these bottles with glass paint in turquoise and blue!  It was simple, easy, economical and I recycled!

I bought Pebeo Vitrea 160 Turquoise and Pebeo Setacolor Opaque in Shimmer Electric Blue glass paint from Lee's Art Shop in Manhattan.  You can also purchase Pebeo Vitrea 160 Turquoise from Cheap Joe's Art Stuff for $3.89!  Other places to check out are:  Blick Art Materials, Michaels and your local art store.

You can use any soft bristle brush and just start painting.  You can add texture by layering more paint, using brush strokes or even try a sponge.  Experiment and see what happens.  Leave the painted bottles to dry for a few hours or overnight and you are done!  Now you have Turquoise, color of the year, in your home!

Happy painting!

Decorating with hues of Blue and Beige

My living room palette is inspired by different hues of blue and beige.  I call this palette "Intuition".

Beige, the color of the earth reflects growth and creates an atmosphere of warmth and coziness.  Shades of dark and brighter blues complement the beige tones and inspire intuition, sincerity, peace, joy and tranquility, faith in oneself and trust in others.

I fell in love with a beige sectional sofa from Bob Mitchell William Gold and felt that this offered enough versatility and style suited for condo living. I chose silk dupioni window panels in blue sage from West Elm to decorate my windows and made my own rice paper window shades instead of traditional blinds or shear panels. 

My media/TV console and corner book shelf  were purchased from Crate and Barrel.  My wall art which will hang on the wall just behind the sofa is from my own Divine Living and Home collection, called European Style.  These images, original color prints converted to black and white and digitally enhanced, capture the essence of what Roma, Italy is known for:  fashion, tradition and culture.

 

Holiday Tea Party with a Twist!

I am a tea lover and I especially love tea-time and the whole tradition behind it!  As the holidays approach and I search for economical ways to entertain, I thought "tea-time with a twist" might just be the perfect holiday fare.

High tea is a British tradition that dates back to the 1700s.  At that time there were two main meals, breakfast and dinner.  Dinner was served very late in the evening, so high tea satisfied the hunger pangs between meals.  Soon, this idea of afternoon tea caught on and the emphasis of this gathering focused on presentation and conversation.

With that history in mind, the "twist" would be to host this holiday tea party for a small group in the early evening.  Instead of serving tea, why not spice things up with hot tea cocktails!

I love to entertain, but I also want to keep it simple, appetizing and of course presentable!

My suggestions for cocktails, appetizers and dessert are as follows:

Cocktails:
Ginger Rum Tea or Fireside Punch
Both are made from ingredients that are easily available from your local grocery or liquor store.

Appetizers:
Tea Sandwiches with Goat Cheese and Cucumber
I found this very easy recipe in Padma Lakshmi's cook book, Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet, page 10.  Essentially buy Pepperidge Farm Very Thin white (or whole wheat) bread, a package of plain goat cheese, fresh pomegranate seeds, a cucumber, sliced into thin rounds, dry dill weed and olive oil.  Let the goat cheese soften, mix with about 1/4 teaspoon olive oil and 2-3 teaspoons of dill weed.  Grill the bread slices so that they are lightly toasted.  Spread the goat cheese mix on the bread, sprinkle with some pomegranate seeds and press into the cheese, top with cucumber rounds, cut into triangles and its done!  They taste good and look festive!

If you plan ahead, you can order great appetizers and hors d'oeuvres from one of my favorite stores, Williams Sonoma.

My picks are:  Palmier Collection, Empanadas, Bake-off Cheese Straws

Dessert:
Going with keeping it simple, why not make an all time favorite, Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies!  Click here for a great Recipe.

Look to your local 99 Cent Store or Family Dollar Store for inexpensive decorative serving ware that suits your style and you are done!

You can have a great holiday tea party for a small group of friends within a budget of $100-$150, not so bad!

Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

The Color Palette: Color Advice for Your Home!

My whole reason for launching the Divine Living and Home line really stemmed from my own journey in decorating my condo. I move in July 2008. A year and half later – I’m just about done! But I’m still adding the final touches. I guess it has taken me this long partially because I was trying to keep my decorating expenses within budget. But mostly it was because I simply could not find exactly what I was looking for and I could not decide on a color scheme/palette. Before I moved in, I spent many hours looking through the numerous paint swatch cards at Home Depot and on www.Behr.com ’s Virtual Color Center (a great resource!) and finally decided upon a somewhat neutral color palette for my interior walls. I selected Expedition Khaki for both my master bedroom and second bedroom, Baked Scone for my living, dining, front entrance and kitchen and Heirloom Orchid for both my bathrooms. At that point, I wasn’t exactly sure what my color scheme for my interior décor was going to be, but my style is normally to stick to a neutral palette and spruce it up with colorful accessories.

Let's start with my bedroom, since this is the room that is totally complete at this point! Getting the furniture was fairly easy. My bedroom furniture came from West Elm (www.westelm.com). But finding accessories, in particular, wall art was my challenge. I wanted abstract wall art and I suddenly remembered these photographs that I took in Paris while sitting in a moving car.  As expected, the photographs ended up being blurred and out of focus, but they looked interesting to me.  So instead of just deleting the photographs I digitally enhanced them further to make them look more artistic and abstract.  That is the moment the wall art for my bedroom came to being! I call it Paris Nights. I’ve received so many compliments on this art work that I was inspired to stay up until midnight one Saturday night  to go through my stockpile of digital photos that I've taken over the years and digitally enhance the ones I liked to create this "new" art.

This is how my Divine Living and Home line came to being. I figure other people may face the same challenges that I did when it came to decorating so why not start this new line and this blog to help others create a nice home or office atmosphere. So I’m here to help – if you need help selecting the right paint colors for your home or office, please email me at Info@divinedzigns.com!

I’ll be back later to discuss my living room and the color palette I selected for that.