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Today I bring you a few moments of peace and harmony from the world of design. Sit back, close your eyes, and let your being reach out toward enlightenment.

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=sr_gallery_18&listing_id=15773674

Waves of semi translucent colors merge into one another, amber towers which rise up and then fall, spreading transcendentally in a spectacle of contrasting hues.

These high end drink coasters are the newest additions to the PebbleArt coaster catalog. Available in sets of six, each coaster is semi precious gemstone disc, encased in a hardwood raised lip rim. The coasters are paired with a gorgeous hardwood holder, whose shimmering surface is smoothed by protective lacquer.

Functional and attractive, these drink coasters are available at http://coasters.PebbleZ.com

I just liked the colors in these candle holders. Deep and rich, the maroon contrasts and reflects off of its stainless steal base.

I can’t decide if its gothic, or simply romantic. The artist called it rustic, but I don’t really see it working in a log cabin.

One thing is for sure, this candle holder is appropriate for your next dinner date with a vampire.

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=sr_gallery_12&listing_id=14731546

This clock looks like it could have been built from a sundial located in an ancient Roman village. The colors are meant to evoke the coming of autumn, but to me they seam to have been born in the days of the coliseum.

I really appreciate mosaic designs both for the amount of artistic work that goes into them, and because they represent the union of imagination and chaos, which is a very powerful force.

In this piece the design is mostly random, with autumn acting as a theme, but not a boundary, for the evocative images that arise from the surface of the clock.

This is another etsy find from artist “Big Rock Mosaics”

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=sr_gallery_7&listing_id=13637432

If a watch is a device that tells time, than what is this? Created by Absolutely Alex, one of the crafters on Etsy, it’s a wrist……accessory, that actually looks pretty cool. But it doesn’t seem to do anything useful.

So, if you want to look like you are walking around in a sci fi movie, here you go.

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=sr_gallery_13&listing_id=14827275

A drink coasters basic purpose is to protect your surfaces from water damage. They do this by standing in between the bottom of a glass, and the top of your table.

The problem is, the bottom of your glass is not the only wet surface. Sometimes you have a spoon, dripping with liquid after a stir, maybe you have a straw that you just wanted to remove from the glass, either way, your coaster isn’t doing its job.

Unless you have these coasters. Equipped with a little extra space, they give you the ability and the opportunity, to maintain the dry perfection of your favorite table top.

Made of rubber, and available in sets of 4 in either a green or a gray color.

http://www.domesticity.co.uk/Products/spill

Decorating is a way of exerting your influence over an environment. By influencing the environment, you are shaping the ambiance that will exist whenever things occur in that space. In this way, you are effecting interactions, relationships, and events, all through your decorative choices.

When decorating up your child’s room, the influence is even greater, because you are actually affecting the way that they are going to develop. Their mind, the way that they think and see the world, will develop in response to the world they see around them, a world which you will have partial control over.

Therefore, when planning this space, you should envision the various qualities you would like your child to possess, and then imagine ways to inspire them using the environment itself.

Organization is an easy one. Simply maintaining a tidy, and clean space will go a long way to instilling those sensibilities within the child’s psyche. Making the space easy, or even fun to clean and organize, will help to engage them in the actual organizational process. This can be done by making organization a game, using brightly colored bins, and fun containers that look like toys themselves. Organization should also be simple, so that they don’t even have to think about putting things away.

There are also a number of ways to use the environment to inspire their creativity. The walls of this space should be replete with pictures, posters, and shelves full of toys and projects. As far as the room itself, it should be clothed in interesting colors, wall paper with imaginative scenes or engaging patterns, doors, windowsills, and even flooring are all places where color can be added.

Other attributes can be encouraged in less subtle ways. A poster with a big cartoon doctor using an oversized stethoscope is all in good fun, but the picture may bury itself inside of your child’s subconscious, resulting in a doctor in the family a few years down the line. Similarly representation of astronauts, scientists, and great leaders are all ways to instill values into the very nature of the environment.

I am certain that you can all come up with about a million more ideas for instilling positive values into a child’s room. If you use any successfully, please let me know using the comment section below.

The bedroom is a place for love. There the blissful couple retires, resplendent in their love for one another, melting languidly into each others forms until the union is complete.

And yet, let us not forget the setting of this episode. Around them the air itself cups their bodies, separating them with oblivion while joining them, uniting them in shared presence.

It is this air, this ambiance, whose very emotion will so stir the inner workings of the mind, casting you into whatever scene and setting you feel is most real. Love may be blind but it runs on intuition. Therefore, the atmosphere for love should reflect the beauty, and the power, of the feeling itself.

So consider the bedroom. Contemplate it lovingly, as if indulging the space with romance is a way of exploring the creative bounds of love for your other half. Build the perfect setting for your next passionate love story.

As to the particulars, we are all well aware of them. The enticing flicker of candle light, the soft sensations of silk and satin, the muted glow from ambient illumination, are all archetypes of romance itself.

The only real challenge is the very challenge of life, to find balance. Passion and love are never wrong, but without moderation, and control they fall apart, like waves crashing on a shore. It is only through the application of focus that you can intensify these feelings, and turn them into a steady and sustained source of joy.

Therefore a balanced approach is the best course. If you overwhelm your environment with stimulus, with emotion, it will become an irritant. But an uninspired world will lead to an uninspired life. It is only through the application of the small touch, the exciting surprise, the new, the interesting, but the subtle, that one can properly inject passion.

The gentle stone filtered glow from an illuminated onyx lamp, falls gently upon your lovers skin, bathing it in color and light

Country style decorating is warm and inviting. It’s friendly, engaging, and interesting but not overwhelming. It represents common values of family, friendship, loyalty, comfort, and acceptance. For all of these reasons and more, adding country style decorative touches to your bathroom can dramatically improve the ambiance of this space.

Boring Cold Bathrooms

Boring and cold are two words that would describe a lot of bathrooms. The tile is unyielding and chilly, the fixtures are precise and inhuman, and the whole space is built to function, not to live.

Country style décor can add a familiar touch to such a space. It will warm the frozen fixtures, and bring comfort to the function of the bathroom. Simple touches, familiar accessories, and engaging colors will all serve to give character to an otherwise sterile location.

Country Style Accessories

The most obvious country style decorating piece is the classic claw or club foot free standing bathtub. An icon of common life throughout the twentieth century for so many people, it is the epitome of this particular decorative movement. Traditionally these bathtubs are floated in the center of a bathroom, but if space is tight you can still push it up against a corner.

The next obvious accessory is a pedestal sink. Since the 1800’s most sinks have been with from vitreous china, a hard, scratch resistant, stain resistant material, which is in its own right an icon of classic bathroom style.

Reclaimed antiques and classic style accessories are the next step to furnishing your country style room. Items made from wrought iron, reclaimed hardwood, whicker, thatch, and natural stone all serve to reconnect the room with the natural world outside. These items can include shelves, waste baskets, towel racks, and toilet seat covers. A grand Victorian mirror can go a long way to adding a major decorative focal point to the space.

One easy way to add country style touches throughout is to replace hardware including doorknobs, cabinet pulls, and handles with antique and distressed country style pieces.

If you have the space, bringing antique furnishings such as a dresser with drawers, or a vanity, can do a lot to give the space the feeling of being a “real room”, rather than just an appendage on the house.

Country Style Bathroom Design

When developing a country style design, people often leave parts of the original architecture of the home showing, exposed through drywall or whatever other surface has been placed over them. This can mean exposed brick, stone, or hardwood foundations, which serve to give the space a more relaxed, natural feel, much like a country farmhouse.

Natural materials are also very important in any country style design. Hardwood, brick, stone, slate, and thatch should all be emphasized wherever they are found in the existing structure of the room. In some cases you may actually want to remove more modern treatments to get at these underlying, original features.

Natural materials can be exposed, installed, or simply purchased in the form of decorative accessories, such as with this natural stone wall clock

One good place to look for inspiration is in Tuscan style designs, where chaos and nature can combine to form an almost sylvan style. Another style to examine is log home farmhouse, which takes the ideals of the country home to the next level, using raw materials, unshaped and in their original natural forms.

Country Bathroom Philosophy

One of the main ideas behind a country style bathroom is that you want people to feel welcome and invited. You aren’t putting on airs, trying to intimidate anyone, you are one of the common people, and all you care about is that everyone around you is comfortable and happy.

A country style bathroom should be soft, warm, and inviting. It isn’t serene, but is instead exciting, in the way that going to a party with a bunch of old friends is exciting. It is just comfortable, and that is the vision you should hold on the back of your mind as you embark on this journey.

It isn’t easy to decorate a bathroom. The space lends itself to waste, with messes sprouting up on a daily basis, just through regular use.

What is worse most of the room in the bathroom, what little room there usually is, is filled with immovable structures that have been there ever since you moved in. Generally these structures, the sink, the bathtub, the toilet, etc. can’t be changed or replaced without a major expense and some messy construction.

But you can’t just ignore these fixtures; any element which you add to this room has to blend in harmoniously with the rest of the space. Blending your own taste in with the existing personality of the room is they key to decorative success without a construction mess.

Organization Considerations

With few exceptions, the bathroom is the smallest and most crowded space in the home. An overstuffed closet may be a little bit tighter, but a closet doesn’t really need to have an attractive decorative scheme.

The first thing you have to do is ensure that your space is organized in such a way that it functions smoothly. You don’t want to have to claw around your cabinets at 6 AM when you’re groggily getting ready for work.

You should try and maximize whatever organizational structures already exist within the space. If you have a medicine cabinet, compartmentalize and divide up its contents. Depending on the size of the cabinet and the amount of room you need, you may want to reserve this space for just medical supplies, and leave other bathroom accoutrements elsewhere.

A second cabinet can be a great place to store brushes, hair pins, various sprays, pastes, and ointments that are used when outside of the bathroom.

Inside of the shower / bathing area, you should have some sort of structure for storing soaps and shampoos. A soap dish can be difficult to clean, and a bit small, so you may want to invest in some hanging shelves. These are often available in a variety of plastic and Plexiglas materials and can fit into most shower setups.

Decorating the Walls

Since space, especially work space is at a minimum you have to make sure that you use all surfaces when considering your bathroom decorating scheme. This includes the floor, the walls, the windows, and even to some extent the ceiling.

The walls are going to be your main canvas. They are pretty much wide open, and provide you with all of the space that you need to personalize the room.

You can choose to hang print, portraits, or posts in this space; however you do have to take into account the wet nature of a bathroom. There will be splashes, there will be splats of soap and lotion, there will be grime and there will be messes. This is the nature of the space.

Therefore, it is important that you choose media which are water proof, and stain resistant. You also probably don’t want to be putting anything expensive or irreplaceable into this space.

Clear plastic covers, or even glass encasing can go a long way to protect certain items, but you are always taking a risk in the bathroom, so use care.

All About Floors

The floor of the bathroom is less of a centerpiece to the space; however it does add its own important element to the overall ambience of the space, through texture.

The way that the floor of a bathroom feels when you have shoes on can give the space either a sense of straight line rigidity, in the form of cold hard ceramic tile, or squishy warmth and comfort, in the case of soft area rugs and fluffy bathroom pieces.

In a bathroom however, you will often be barefoot, and so the feel of the floor is much more important here than in other spaces. Just think, its 6AM, you stumble bleary eyed into the bathroom, your bare feat treading the solid carpet of your hallways, until you reach the bathroom and take a step in, and are shocked by the freezing cold sensation of hard lifeless tile.

It could be a pretty unpleasant sensation. Or it could be invigorating. That’s a personal choice, but its one which you have the power to make.

Lighting A Bathroom

While it is important that your bathroom be well lit, so that you can see what you are doing and everything that is going on, usually this will have already been taken care of by the time you move in. Most bathrooms have at least an overhead fixture, and some actually have a light built right into the mirror piece.
There are a few accessories that some people get, face lamps, and extra mirror lights, which are very effective in adding to the illumination of the room, but overall you shouldn’t need much more than what is already provided.

The one place where you may want to consider controlling the light however is through a window.

While most windows in bathrooms are either semi-opaque, or are covered over by curtains, you still get a little bit of sunlight through that space. This can be enhanced through the use of transparent glass artwork or window pieces. These can be made from either clear colored plastic, or more elaborately, from stained glass.

They have the effect of not only adding colorful light throughout the space, but they can also be a powerful eye drawing accent within a room.

Bathroom Accessories

It goes almost without saying that your accessories should match one another. They should also match the existing structures. If your bathroom is made up of Victorian furnishings, don’t try to mix it in with stainless steal accessories.

However most bathroom styles will give you some room to mix and match. Hardwood cabinets can be matched with other woods, or alternatively with straw and thatch. Aluminum is a better match for stainless steal, although some of the darker stained hardwoods are also a good compliment.

Often when purchasing bathroom decorative items, people overlook more transient pieces, such as towels and washcloths. These temporary items, which cycle in and out with use, are an amazing opportunity to customize the look and feel of your bathroom on a regular basis. Different colors of towel, and linens, can have a dramatic effect when hung on a door, or even folded on a shelf.

By choosing a focal item in the bathroom with a particular pattern, you can steal the colors of your accessories and linens from that pattern, using it as a cheat sheet to create a multicolored matching decorative scheme. In this way no matter which towels you pull out of the laundry first, you know they will always match up with everything else in the room.

Conclusion

Bathroom decorating can be challenging. You have a room that invites messes, and incites visions of mold, which is small, and expensive to remodel. It has a million uses, and no room for any of them, and usually it’s being shared by multiple people.

However, a little creativity and planning can go a long way to helping you dress up the space. You have to make maximum use of what space you have, walls, floors, possibly even the ceiling, while at the same time maximizing the organization of the room to ensure that it remains functional. If you can manage to balance these competing necessities, then you have a good chance of developing the bathroom of your dreams.