Q: I'm decorating my new studio on a dime (before taxes!), which means I'm shopping tag sales and recycling centers like Goodwill. When being thrifty, however, it's not so easy to come up with elements that go well together. The main piece I've found is a sleep sofa in a kind of beige. Where do I go from here?
A: Beige is a blessing, a basic around which you can build your own color story. It is also a blessing that you're shopping at a smorgasbord of sources, because once you've settled on your accent colors, you can easily hone in on what works and what doesn't.
The trick is to keep focused and edit, edit, edit, as professional designers say, so your room makes a coherent design statement. And at the same time, it has to address your inherent living needs for comfort, storage, entertaining and so forth.
Designer Keita Turner offers a collection of clever ideas in the room we show here, created for Housing Works, a New York nonprofit that runs support programs for people living with HIV/AIDS. Turner's room was one of more than 50 on display at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, which was divided into l0-by-12-foot spaces furnished with items on sale to benefit Housing Works' good works.
Since her ideas are free-for-nothing, let's go "shopping." Note first, the beige sofa that anchors both the space and her color scheme of neutrals is underscored by the beige-on-cream area rug and spiked with yellow and yellow-green in the artworks and throw pillows.
Other furnishings include a club chair, slipcovered in beige linen; a pair of dinette chairs in orange and chrome; and a conversation piece of a cocktail table, fashioned after a wooden coop topped with a board.
Don't miss the window treatments: woven wood shades ("Provenance" by Hunter Douglas, hunterdouglas.com). "They give (the room) texture and look as if they are straight from nature," Turner explains. She flanked the shades with beige linen panels
hung on rods with one-off finials fashioned from rolls of jute.
"I tried to stay as natural as possible with the design," Turner says to sum up her room. "I think of it as 'garden fresh.'" And for the budget: refreshing.
Q: Got more cachet than cash?
A: Ingenuity is inexpensive. With lean January looming, here are more budget-stroking decorating ideas you can, ahem, bank on:
—Recycle 2013 calendars: Paper a bath with a year's worth of free artwork (waterproof with a coat of clear polyurethane).
—Slipcover a tired club chair with a colorful Indian bedspread tucked deeply into the seat and secured down with rolled magazines. A few discreet safety pins will tame any excess fabric in back.
— Paint the inside of old bookcases a bright accent color. Add inexpensive clip-on lamps to make focal points of ordinary wall shelves.
—Build an "organic" cocktail table from a round of three-quarter-inch glass and any base you can think of: a tree stump, equal-height boulders, a sturdy basket, or even a stack or two of books.
—Stain or paint worn floors. A black-and-white checkerboard will smarten up any hallway. Ditto for a painted-on faux zebra rug. Big on charm; short on the long green.
Rose Bennett Gilbert is the co-author of "Manhattan Style" and six other books on interior design. To find out more about Rose Bennett Gilbert and read features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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