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Energize Your Life: Plants and Natural Items

Part two of a month-long blog series that looks at energizing your life through your home.

How’s it going revitalizing your home? Everything clean, organized and re-placed? Next step: add some natural energy!

Living plants in our homes emit oxygen and help to clean and detoxify the air. Did you know that indoor plants can reduce fatigue, coughs, sore throats and other cold-related illnesses by more than 30%? Some great ones to use are Snake Plants, English Ivy and Spider Plants.

Minerals, stone and wood elements can also bring different kinds of energy to your home. Some help with procrastination, giving a power boost, or bringing peace. Plus, they’re beautiful to look at! Here are few we keep in the store and their uses.

Carved Onyx Leaf Material: Onyx helps to ground and center. Good for: Family rooms

Quartz Lotus Candle Holders Material: Quartz crystal is energizing and emits power. Good for: Home offices and gyms

Spalted Maple, Red Cedar, Cherry and Walnut Turquoise Box Materials: Turquoise dispels negative energy and can be worn to protect against outside influences or pollutants in the atmosphere. Maple is a traveler’s wood. Those who are always on the move and changing will feel right at home with this type of energy. Red cedar brings luck in any pursuit that requires the acquisition of new knowledge. Cherry helps to conquer conflict. Walnut is good for focusing upon the task at hand. Good for: Home offices and “man caves”

Selenite Tealight Holders Material: Energy from a selenite crystal can provide calm and peace. Good for: “Mom caves” and bathrooms

Energize Your Life: Clean, Calculate and Create

Part one of a month-long blog series that looks at energizing your life through your home.

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I see the home as central to life and living. The state of your home has a direct impact on how you feel and consequently how you behave. When I’m looking for an energy boost, a trip to Starbucks for a cup of caffeine will not cut it in the long run. I need to refresh and revitalize my home as part of refreshing and revitalizing my life.

Clean
The first step in this process? I like to start with clean slate. I remove literally every item from my shelves. Once I’ve cleared everything, I clean—every nook, every cranny. This is not only good for bookshelves, but also helpful with kitchen cabinets that often go neglected.

Calculate
With everything down and clean I get a completely fresh perspective on the space. This helps me to best utilize what I have. I can also see if there is anything I might need to purchase or repurpose from another room in the house. I also try to evaluate what has been working in the room and what is not.

Start re-placing with your favorite items. At some point you are left with what doesn’t work. That is the donation pile! Or find new life for it in another room where it might work better.

Create
Now that I’ve cleaned and calculated how to use the space, I start to create and compose. I try to bring a balance to the room through color and décor. Here are some examples from the vignettes we created in the store.

Using art as a backdrop in shelving is a nice way to start a composition.

Notice the accessories are all different heights and textures—fossil, stone, metal and mercury class.

Using risers helps layer accessories. Don’t be afraid to have a little fun either!

If you feel you need to call in some help, for a couple hours and not much money a designer will be able to look at your barren shelves and surfaces and help you make something appealing and friendly for your lifestyle. Contact us at info@studiochameleon.com or 949-650-7979 if you’d like a free consultation!

Reminder: March Artist Reception plus Sip, Shop and Save

This month’s artist reception on March 31 from 4-7 pm will feature the work of Stacy D’Aguiar. Join us for beautiful art, great wine and 15% off the entire store!

Keeping Clutter At Bay

When I design rooms, I want them to be livable spaces. I try to think about how the space will be used. What items will get tossed on this surface? Who will be sitting here? Will they have food? Wine? A sippy cup? Knowing these behaviors allows me to figure out what kind of storage should be present, what types of surfaces would be good and where to place decorative items.

While rooms that are lived in will rarely stay in their “original” designed state, no one wants to be in a room that feels overwhelmingly messy. After all, friends drop by unexpectedly and sometimes in-laws like to check in. No one likes saying, “Sorry for the mess.” So, here are a few tips to keep clutter at bay.

Designing this kid’s room we made sure there was a place for all of her school and personal items.

1) A place for everything, everything in its place. It’s a saying for a reason. This means EVERYTHING. Where do keys or your purse go when you come home? What happens when you get the mail? Do shoes get removed before entering the house? This is what I mean about thinking through how you live. Make sure your home is arranged to make organization and neatness as easy as possible. For instance, when you get the mail you may not have time to deal with all of the pressing items immediately, but have a drawer where it goes or a filing system. Whatever works for you.

2) Stick to a schedule, have a routine (as much as possible). I love this sample cleaning schedule from Re-Nest. I’d encourage you to adapt to your own needs, print it out and stick it somewhere you’ll see it regularly (like the fridge).

3) Apply a little pressure. Having people over to your home on a regular basis can also be a great motivator to keep things in order. I’m not talking about doing a deep clean every time there’s a visitor, just making your place presentable. Also, having regular cleaning service stop by once or twice a month will motivate you to put things away so they can clean the nooks and crannies more easily.

4) No excuses. This has become my mantra with exercising lately, but it holds true for lots of areas of life. Don’t put things off because, in the end, even 15 minutes of tidying is much easier to deal with than an all-day mountain-of-stuff-clearing marathon. You likely do not have a free day, but very likely have a free 15 minutes. And if you’re having issues with procrastination, the aragonite stars we sell in the store are great to get you motivated!

Aragonite stars help with procrastination and are available in our store.

5) It’s okay to look like people live in your home. Some people feel pressure that their home must be “perfect.” This is not necessary and ultimately doesn’t create the warm, homey environment guests love to be in. For instance, if you have your family take their shoes off before they enter the house, great! But instead of a messy pile in the home, think about a cute basket in the garage where they can throw them. Or even better, try to create a mud room in the garage that keeps the dirt in an “outside” space, along with hooks for backpacks that keep them from becoming a mountain of stuff on the kitchen counter or dining room table.

These are just a few ways I keep my home mess free. Is there anything you do to keep clutter at bay?

Westcliff Court Open House Thursday!

March Artist Reception plus Sip, Shop and Save

This month’s artist reception will feature the work of Stacy D’Aguiar. Join us for beautiful art, great wine and 15% off the entire store!

What We Love About Home: Comfort and Livability

This post is the second in a three part series on “What We Love About Home.”

One of the things I love about the TV show “What Not to Wear” is that the hosts are always telling women that they don’t have to wear baggy sweatpants or sneakers in order to be comfortable. It is possible to be both stylish AND comfortable. I feel the same about the home. You don’t need an overstuffed recliner in order to relax in your abode. Plenty of items for the home are comfortable and also stylish.

Furniture
Leather is beautiful to look at and is pretty easy to clean. It wears well and can actually look better with age. Like a great leather boot, it also becomes more comfortable with age.

Rugs

Area rugs can be a way to warm up hard surface floors like wood and stone. They also give extra personality to the room. Because they aren’t permanent, they are easy to change when worn. You can also rotate them in different rooms when you feel the need to change things up. We just got in several area rugs in the store that are absolutely beautiful!

Layout
Consider how you and your family go about daily life. Is your home helping or hindering this? Arranging furniture to suit your daily needs makes an impact to the overall feel of your room and makes you feel good in the process. Think about the size and shape of the room, as well as the sizes of the pieces you are working with, in order to determine placement. For instance, long rooms can be broken up by creating two groupings of furniture.

Also, keep comfortable items as part of your décor. Snuggly blankets thrown over a couch that are also beautiful, like chenille, make your home feel lovely to be in.

Knick Knack Attack
It’s fun to display family photos, sentimental heirlooms and treasures from travels. However, we can quickly get bogged down by all of these. Not only can it look cluttered, but becoming a knick knack hoarder makes dusting a bear. I suggest keeping only the decorative essentials out and bring special items out when you want to share with certain friends or family

Check Out Eve in This Month’s OC Metro

Owner and founder of Studio Chameleon, Eve Lowey, has been named as a “Woman to Watch” in the March issue of OC Metro.

What We Love About Home: Durable and Effortless

This post begins a three part series on “What We Love About Home.” There’s so much we love, we couldn’t squeeze it all into one post!

Durability and the “ease-of-maintenance factor” are pretty big for moms. We don’t like being stressed, worrying if the stuff that we have is too easily damaged. But we still want to have “nice” things–i.e. pieces that are beautiful to look at and make you feel like you are still living in an adult home, not a kiddie castle. Even if you’re not a mom, we’re all pressed for time and want to live in a place that is fairly easy to maintain, but doesn’t involve throwing plastic over furniture. This is a home we’d all love to be in. Here are some things to look for to help you create a durable and effortless home.

Flooring
For stone floors, opt for a honed finish instead of polished to avoid scratches. Wood floors look really beautiful when they get a little distressed but you want to make sure you pick a wood floor that you can actually refinish. Use real wood planks, not veneers (engineered wood is fine). If you plan on being in your home for a while you want to be able to refinish something. It will be a bigger investment initially, but will be more cost effective in the long run.

Carpeting shows damage and dirt when it is smoother and more unified. Using a loop pile or a frieze (which is a twisted end cut pile), adds more texture and reduces the appearance of wear.

We installed this beautiful wood flooring in a recent home design knowing the residents planned to be there for several years.

Paint
Flat finishes are always much harder to clean. If you are looking for a matte look, go with an eggshell finish. If it’s marked up, you can wash it off with much less effort and damage to the paint.

Fabrics
For upholstery fabrics, go with something that has more texture. The smoother the fabric, the easier it is to see dirt and damage.

Surfaces

Cesarstone is available in a variety of colors.

Avoid glass top dining tables that will inevitably get scratched and show every fingerprint. Go for hard stone in a honed finish. Personally, I use CesarStone, which is a hard surface made of quartz and poured into a mold. This is virtually indestructible. If you do want to use a marble or granite, remember to have it professionally resealed every one to two years. Know that it will show its age over time, but let it go; learn to embrace this as a part of the home’s story – because that’s what easy elegance is really about.