'House Proud' Celebrates Fearless Louisiana Style
http://www.decor-ideas.org 09/19/2013 19:10 Decor Ideas
Louisiana has always had a unique flavor. When I go there, I feel like I've traveled to another country, one that's a lot more fun than mine. The music, food, art, accents, resilience, partying attitude ... Louisiana's style stands out, and its architecture and interiors are no exception.
Interior decorator, blogger and Houzz contributor Valorie Hart has amassed an exuberant collection of photos of extraordinary homes from the Bayou State in her new book, House Proud: Unique Home Design, Louisiana (Glitterati, 2013). She lets us peek into homes that any New Orleans tourist or resident would love to get inside.
She also offers smart tips for celebrating and executing your own unique style at home. Here are a few.
See past the hodgepodge and decay and be fearless. Hart's antique shotgun house in the Irish Channel neighborhood in New Orleans once served as a home for wayward girls, and the neighborhood scared her Realtor. But Hart visualized throwing fabulous dinner parties with her collected china and combining eclectic pieces to achieve what she dubs the "Frenchy pretty New Orleans vernacular."
Use flat paint on less-than-perfect walls, and paint walls, ceiling and trim all the same color. In a house that shows its age, flat paint helps hide flaws that glossy paint would highlight.
Use fabric to cover walls to hide flaws and unused doors. Hart uses her own home as a design laboratory, mixing and matching old and new, and high- and low-end materials. She admits to "using smoke and mirrors," she says, to achieve a luxe look, such as with the fabric-covered wall in this bedroom.
Couples should celebrate their differences and compromise. Hart's Irish Channel neighbors Tom Landry and Shawn Richard were well equipped to take on a home in a 100-plus-year-old bread factory building — Landry is an architect, and Richard is a real estate attorney. However, one is a modernist and a collector while the other is a traditionalist and a minimalist.
The couple combined their distinct styles to create interiors that show off both personalities. They've invested in timeless pieces from B&B Italia and Knoll, and they mix in things from thrift shops, flea markets, Ikea and their travels. The hunt is what makes each item special, as the search or trip itself is special and memorable.
Use pairs of chairs to create visual symmetry. This symmetrical furniture arrangement allows the portrait by David Harouni to shine as the focal point of this seating area.
This is the Greek revival home of musicians Sean Yseult (White Zombie) and Chris Lee (Super Group) in the New Orleans Garden District.
Collect what you like and make it pretty. An art school alum, Yseult dubs her approach to the 1860 home "early Addams Family." Her love of retro horror TV shows and magic comes together in this deep purple dining room.
Use one piece of oversize art as an accent wall. This vintage horror movie poster stands up to the scale of the dining room, brings in riotous color and sets the tone for all of the entertaining the couple does.
Make a rental elegant with white walls and white silk drapes. In their rented late-1800s home in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans, Ashley Longshore and Michael Smith dressed the walls with dramatic window coverings, which add luxe texture but don't distract from the couple's art collection.
Display your own artwork and the artwork of friends. Of course, art hanging on the walls also helps make this place the couple's own. These two works are by Longshore.
Envision your existing furniture adapted to your home's style. Lisa Donofrio has been carting this daybed from home to home ever since she bought it and stripped it back during her medical school residency at Tulane University.
When she and her husband, Brian Valzania, scooped up their 1830s Creole cottage in New Orleans' French Quarter years later, she untied the Shabby Chic–style white cotton slipcovers the daybed had worn in their Connecticut home and gave it a purple velvet makeover.
Now it brings luxurious yet eclectic style to the home's sunroom, standing up to the scale of the fireplace and the large mirror hanging over it.
Get creative with yard space. In the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans, homeowner Lindsay Ross opened up the plan of a double-shotgun house to make it all her own. Later she and an adjacent neighbor joined their yards to create what they've dubbed The Tropical Compound. The newly doubled garden is a great place for a party and provides spectacular leaves to enjoy inside and out, leading to Hart's take-away tip:
Shop your garden for palm fronds and leaves and display them inside the house. Just one massive palm frond gives this bathroom a tropical-paradise feeling.
Embrace and display your quirky collections. Homeowner Miranda Lake uses her artist's eye to display her collections in her 1910 Victorian shotgun house in New Orleans' Mid-City neighborhood. It's a group of unique things that she describes as "almost like a beautiful bouquet of flowers from another dimension."
Combine items that would usually never go together. Lake says the horns atop the vintage typewriter here are "a reference to the need for journalistic integrity."
House Proud, by Valorie Hart - $34 » There are so many more amazing things to see inside House Proud, like a double-decker bus-turned-playhouse, a well-placed disco ball, a claw-foot bathtub planter filled with toy horses, and a faux malachite dining room ceiling.
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