The dining room is a pretty multi-functional room in our home. This is where we eat, work or craft up some DIY projects. It’s basically where a lot of the action and magic happens. It is also a space where great conversations & discussions are held and, of course, memories are made. I think it’s essential to maximize the way you live and use your domicile. It’s healthy and makes you feel happy and more at home, as it offers to house and manifests all layers of your personality.
Let’s be honest, it’s really not that easy to source motifs for a gallery wall. Clients frequently ask me how to mix different medias and I often find myself sharing the same approach: The more diverse the collection the more dynamic and enriched the gallery wall becomes. The trick is to arrange and re-arrange the art pieces until it visually complements and makes sense. With that said: Lay them out and make sure neighboring pieces have at least one thing in common: Whether it is the color or pattern that these have in common, it really doesn’t matter.
As a student, I remember always being “hungry” for new inspirations and new design projects and always scouring design mags on any given occasion. I would commit to expensive design magazine subscriptions in order to stay current. Furthermore, in an attempt to bring organization to it, I tried creating a catalogue on my computer, so I would scan the images and store them and categorize them in order to be able to find them. I would also browse the internet like no other to find new images and I’d save them in specific categories. After a while, I would transfer them onto external hard drives to make room for new images. I admit, it was not the most ideal system and it definitely ate up a lot of my storage space on both my laptop and external drives and slowed them down extremely. It wasn’t the most practical approach either, since I wouldn’t have the backlink of the source. I also tried the whole bookmarking thing and I soon started disliking it, since it didn’t have the visual support I needed to make it easy to find what I was looking for. And then Pinterest came along and changed my life completely.
As an 80’s kid (yikes, I feel old!), I remember walking up our staircase to our condo in Lisbon and having a closer look on the walls and stairs which were framed with solid marble. I remember my eyes followed each swirl and vein and I was intrigued with the coloration and how it’s worn patina felt hard but yet extremely smooth. The smoothness had a certain softness to the touch, which I loved. In fact, I loved it so much that I barely used the railing.
