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Let Your Light Shine: Lighting and why it’s important to the overall look and feel of a room.

Lighting is unbelievably important in creating the right look and feel in any space. It creates the mood in each room definitely deserves some special thought and attention. If you are moving into a new space, make sure that lighting is considered in your planning. If you’re in an existing space and you’d like to re-do your lighting, hiring an electrician is your best bet. They can help explain your options and make sure that you stay within your budget.  Here are some pointers from Chameleon Design in making sure you’ve got your bases covered when it comes to lighting in your home:

Install Dimmers
One mistake that we find people often make is not putting dimmers on all of their lights. Any switch can be converted for $100 or less, and the amazing results you’ll get when you can control the mood in the room will be well worth the cost!

Use Different Light Sources
We always recommend that every room have three different light sources: Accent Lighting for highlighting small spaces, Task Lighting for specific purposes such as reading and Ambient Lighting for general illumination purposes. For accent lighting, overhead lighting in the form of recessed cans or tracks are best. You can use these to brightly light specific areas or a piece of artwork. Table lamps or occasional reading lamp covers task lighting, and ambient lighting can be achieved with decorative sconces, chandeliers or other lamps. You’ll find that if your living areas are complete with these different light sources, it can transform the look and feel of the entire room.

Make the Switch to LED
All this additional lighting may have you worrying about your electricity bill. But a switch to LED can solve this problem in a snap. LED products are relatively new to many sectors of the lighting marketplace and are currently enjoying a big surge in popularity.  Though it has a higher upfront cost, LED lighting has many benefits that will save you money in the long run.  Benefits are: high energy efficiency, durability, versatility and a longer life span compared to incandescent and fluorescent lighting.  LED lights have a 50,000 hour life span and do not burn out.  After time, they will start to diminish about 30% of the light until they eventually fade out.  The wattage required to power an LED bulb is a mere fraction of that required for standard incandescent light bulbs. This means big energy savings for the homeowner, while also reducing environmental impact!

If you have any questions, or to request additional information, LED Power Inc. (www.ledpower.com) in Irvine is our go-to source for all of our LED lighting needs!

Chameleon Design Studio/Showroom Update

We’re still working on the new Chameleon Design offices and wanted to update you with some behind the scenes news! As mentioned in our last post about the new offices, we tackle design dilemmas that can also apply to the home. When moving into a new space, two of the biggest factors are making sure you successfully integrate the old with the new, while maintaining beauty and functionality.

Take Existing Things Into Account
When you’re looking for a new space, do an inventory of the bigger items you already own, and make sure they will work within it. With our space, we knew we wanted to use our existing commercial office furniture, as well as some furniture from the store that we wanted to keep and integrate. We found a building with polished concrete floors that we knew would look great with our metallic green Systems Office Furniture. This was a big factor is choosing the space, because the cost of replacing the furniture would have been huge. Once you know you can fit your bigger ticket existing items into the new space, you can begin to fill in the holes with new items.

Function and Beauty
Another important design element is to make your new space look great AND be functional. The same goes for any home or office, as you obviously want it to look great, but if you can’t really live or work in it, you’re doing something wrong. In designing the Chameleon Design offices, everything is driven from two things: they must be functional in terms of helping our clients in the most cost-effective and time efficient manner, and they must look beautiful and demonstrate our design abilities, while integrating items we already own to save on costs.

The multi-use space will have offices where people are working, as well as a showroom area with store inventory set up in vignettes so that clients can see possible design directions. There will also be an interior design library that will need to be functional and easy to use, but look fabulous and organized at the same time!  Also, as we discussed in our last showroom update, there are office areas in the space with walls that do not go all the way to the ceiling.  We decided to address the sound transmission issue but putting in upper glazing.  As you can see below, we raised the walls in the office areas, to give added privacy, but left them lower in adjacent areas that may serve as more general areas such as the showroom.

We hope these design tips will help you when moving into your next home (or office) and please don’t hesitate to contact us at Chameleon Design for some additional guidance.

Creative Roadblocks: What to Do With Trouble Areas in the Home

Every home has those rooms or areas that get left out of the design and décor mix- often because people don’t know what to do with them. Follow our blog in the coming weeks for series of “Creative Roadblocks” that we’ll help you out with. First up- the laundry room!

The Laundry Room:
The laundry room is often a room that homeowners don’t think about. Yet there are simple things that you can do to make it much more functional and maybe even show-worthy! One very helpful addition is to hang a dry bar for those items that have a tendency to shrink and delicates that need to be air-dried. A drying rack only holds a few shirts at most and can look sloppy, but a closet rod mounted on the underside of a laundry-room shelf makes a good spot for a row of shirts on hangers. The rod can also be helpful when you’re ironing to hang pressed shirts as you work.  You can see an example of this, and other features, in the photos below from various Brookfield Homes laundry rooms.  They are one of our favorite clients to work for and one of the most creative developers of new homes out there.

Speaking of ironing, the laundry room is a logical place for the ironing board to be stored, but many don’t have closets. Consider having a pullout ironing board built into the wall and you just might find yourself looking forward to the chore.

So now you’re organized and tidy, but if your laundry room feels a bit dreary, add a brighter paint to the walls such as yellow, green or turquoise. You could also consider a textured vinyl wallpaper to give you a nice, tonal texture in the room. If you do go with color on the walls, keep trim, counters and the backspash looking clean with a color like white.  Laundry rooms are busy enough with clothes everywhere, so keep your design simple. I like Caesarstone counter tops instead of granite because it creates a more uniform look. Also make sure you have adequate lighting.

Brookfield Homes builds great functional features and clean design into their laundry rooms.  Check out the rest of the homes in their Colony Park Anaheim development: www.livecolonypark.com.  And, as always, if you need help with your laundry room you know that we’re here for you at Chameleon Design!

Fall Is Here! What Does It Mean For Your Home?

School has started back up, it’s beginning to get dark a bit later and temperatures have begun to drop by the slightest bit. Fall is on everyone’s mind! I’m sharing some helpful hints on how to get your home nice and cozy for the season ahead.

Fall Cleaning?
Though spring-cleaning typically gets all the attention, fall should not be ignored! It may not be on the top of any Southern California residents’ to-do lists, but it’s a great way to prepare a home for the cooler winter months where much more time is spent indoors. Before the temperatures start to drop, tackle all the loose ends that build up over the year. We talked about organizing the closets a couple weeks ago, but don’t forget about the kitchen pantry, turning rugs to avoid ware, removing summer slipcovers on furniture, changing bed linens and so on. While vacationing with my family this summer in the Caribbean, I was catching up on my favorite magazines and came across some incredible cleaning checklists from homemaking maven Martha Stewart. I thought these were excellent tips to share with you, and you can check them out here: www.marthastewart.com/photogallery/fall-homekeeping-tips

Changing Seasons, Changing Wall Color:
The leaves are changing color, the weather is changing, so why not transform a room in the home with a wall color change? Painting is the quickest and most inexpensive way to give any room a new look and feel. You can even do it yourself! Over at Chameleon Design, we find ourselves getting sucked into that late-night infomercial just like the rest of you. One of our latest faves is the “Paint Zoom” paint gun www.paintzoom.com. This can turn anyone into a pro, and make transforming a room with a color change a low-cost breeze that anyone can do.

Also, consider painting one accent wall as opposed to a warmed background color on all four walls.  An accent wall is traditionally a brightly-colored wall added to a room where the other three walls are white.  They draw your eye to a particular part of the room and give you a chance to play around with color in your house in a new way.  When deciding what wall to use, look for the natural focal point in the room.  If you have a fireplace, you can make the room more dramatic by painting the wall around it a different color.  The wall behind a bed’s headboard or an important piece of furniture are also great options.  When there is no natural focal point in a room, you can create one. Look around- where do you want the eye to go first?  Here are a few examples to illustrate this design technique:

Get Organized for Fall…. starting with the closet.

While many people see Labor Day weekend as the last chance to squeeze in a mini-vacation before the fall, some are up to their ears transitioning their closets from summer to fall and getting organized and prepared for back to school. So for those who have opted to stay home, we thought we would offer some tips to organizing your closet in style.

Take an inventory:
In order to assess what’s in your closet, start by taking every single thing out. You’ll be surprised by what’s been hiding in the far corners and on hard to reach shelves. Once you can get a clear picture of everything you’ve got, be choosy about what you put back in. If there are items you haven’t worn in two plus years, it’s time to get rid of them. Donate to a charity and make room for new pieces. We love Working Wardrobes: www.workingwardrobes.org. If you have a ton of outgrown kids clothes, make some extra cash by taking them to a children’s consignment store such as PrettyDotz in Corona del Mar. Once you get things cleared out, stay organized year-round by spending 10-15 minutes each morning making sure things get put back where they belong.

Create a Hideaway:
Consider storing off-season clothing such as bathing suits and sundresses elsewhere. These items don’t deserve prime closet real estate and can easily be tucked away until the summer weather rolls around again next year. An attic, garage or extra closet in another room is a great place to store boxes. Also consider creating mud room area in your garage with wall hooks and a bench. By leaving items such as coats and shoes just outside the door, you’re saving much-needed closet space.

Invest in New Hangers:
You know those wire and plastic hangers from department stores or dry cleaners that somehow always manage to find a home in even the nicest of closets? Well get rid of them! Any dry cleaners will take them back and recycle them for you. Splurge on nice, wooden hangers that will keep the form of your clothes and you won’t regret it. Investing in all matching hangers, which will also allow your clothes to all hang at the same height, is one of the quickest ways to make your closet look and feel more organized. And don’t forget about the kids hangers! As your kids grow, and so do their clothing sizes, make sure to get rid of old hangers that are too small. Involve the kids in any closet organization projects, so they can learn how to do it for themselves as they get older.

Make the Most of the space you have:
Don’t let any space in your closet go to waste. The simple act of adding hooks to the backs of doors gives scarves, purses, belts or long necklaces a tidy place to hang out. If it will work with your closet configuration, install two-tiered hanging rods, allowing you to hang blouses and shirts over your pants. That way, you’ll get twice the amount of clothes in a smaller amount of space. Purchase plastic bins to store knits such as cashmere, that lose their shape if they are hung, and stack on shelves above your clothes racks.

If you don’t have shelving and your closet will allow for it, consider having something built. Chameleon Design can work with you to design a beautiful custom built-in for even the tiniest of spaces in your home. It will leave you feeling not only luxurious, but fresh and organized for the new season!