Michael Gregor Ratz Interior Design Consulting

05/28/2016

Happy blue & white weekend!!

Vintage Chinoisserie tea towel.

05/06/2016

Alert!! On trend this year :


Pale pink, or 'Rose Quartz', paired with warm tone metallics, specifically copper and yellow golds have been popping up all over the home front of the interior design world for several months now.

Pair your pale pink hues with cool tone greys & white for balance. Accentuate with metallic copper to achieve this trending, modern color scheme in your desired space!

05/03/2016

When you combine art with sentimental objects in a room, you create the essence of a warm and wonderful home!

Here a Palm Beach Regency style credenza in pink is offset by a cooler color pallette created by introducing strong white accents and prominent blues present in the framed photograph. Blue and white porcelain ginger jars and vases continue this color scheme and add a stately 'Chinoisserie' detail into this room's design.

05/01/2016

Here are two rooms in similar yet visually contrasting, almost opposite textural color schemes showing the importance of art in a space and how one might choose to display it.

03/20/2016

This is the 1961 Buick Flamingo. Comm'on it's perfect as my dream car with its highly unsafe pivoting front seat that makes it so Fabulous!!!!!

03/19/2016

It's been years since trendsetters declared the comeback of the bar cart as a living room fixture. But as Washington D.C. interior designer Skip Sroka says, "Bar carts never left. They have always, always been around. Anyone who has been hospitable has one somewhere." Stand-alone, movable bars are helpful for guests because they allow them to make their own beverages, but they also help hosts delegate drinks while they manage the other details of hospitality.

Think about width and where you will put it, whether you want to see the liquor bottles or whether you want them behind closed doors. And what about wheels? If you want to move the cart from the dining room to the living room occasionally, you might want the ability to roll. It seems that every home-furnishings retailer sells bar carts now, so there's one to match every style.

Consider how the bar cart material will stand up to guests' cocktail making. Mirrored surfaces wipe up beautifully, spills on wood will add patina over time. (Note: Alcohol will etch marble surfaces.) There's a lot of personality going on with a bar, the basic design should complement your collections, whether its alcohol or non alcoholic beverages or beautiful glasses. Railings prevent bottles from tipping. If you think you might move the bar cart around, even seasonally, look for wheels. It's a rather Jetsons-like convenience to roll your bar cart to whatever room you're in, and that way nobody has to go far.

As soon as Ikea debuted the trim little Raskog utility cart, bloggers and DIY-ers started testing its versatility, resulting in Raskog nightstands, craft stations, vanity carts, toy storage, bookshelves, potting benches and, of course, bar carts ($30,ikea.com).

Look beyond home furnishing retailers for creative options. One company, Luxor, for example, manufactures specialty carts for work environments, but many of its utility carts could stand in as bar carts. The industrial feel comes with industrial function, too: The SSC-3 has casters with locking brakes, a one-inch lip around the top and middle shelves, and 300-pound carrying capacity ($148,webstaurantstore.com).

Small bar carts are ideal for tight spaces, but they can't hold an entire bar's worth of bottles and glasses. If you're hosting a get together, use them instead to set out ingredients for a special cocktail designed just for the occasion, and teach your guests a new recipe. Whatever you put out someone will use. Someone may prefer Scotch, but if you're serving lemonade with iced tea and vodka and mint, then that's what they're going to drink.

Accessories

If your bar cart doesn't have drawers, think carefully about the items you put on it. Consider what you want to look at and what will save space. Just a little glamour on a cart is tasteful.
What to stock for libation making? Besides glasses, I recommend a small cutting board, bar towels, cocktail napkins, tray, strainer, shaker, bottle opener, jigger, knife and ice bucket.

In addition, I always include a little vase for flowers or small branches, a few small, well curated books and if there's room on one of the shelves, and interesting & beautiful object.

03/17/2016

CHINOISERIE is a French word that means “in the Chinese taste”.
It describes a European style of decorative ornament that was wildly popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and still looks great today. Scenes of the Orient abound on textiles, wallpapers, pottery, porcelain, and lacquered and painted furniture. Owning a piece of Chinoiserie (or, “japanned” furniture, as some pieces were called) was the height of fashion. The interesting thing about Chinoiserie is the tremendous range and variety of Oriental scenes and fantastical decorative details – Chinese people in elaborate robes with coolie hats, long pigtails and mustaches; intricately detailed pagodas with layer upon layer of fretwork, tassels, and bells; or monkeys, lions, and elephants in costume. Our endless fascination with exotic locales gives the designs relevance even today.

Why Chinoiserie at all? Europeans’ fascination with the Far East began in Marco Polo’s day, in the thirteenth century. At a time when few people traveled the world, exotic goods such as silk fabrics, carpets and porcelain reached Europe via a trading route known as the Silk Road, which carried goods by cart and camel across the entire continent of Asia. This ancient road was a bridge connecting the major cultures of the world. China and Japan were sophisticated and complex cultures at that time, with a long history of art. (In fact, in the 8th century, when Europe was in the Dark Ages, Chinese artists were inventing Impressionism!) For wealthy Europeans, owning artifacts from the Far East was a status symbol. With these artifacts came stories from the traders of the amazing temples and pagodas they had seen and the strange costumes and appearance of the Oriental people. Cultures from Persia all the way to China were called “Oriental” by the Europeans. They made little effort to distinguish one people from another, and the fanciful designs of Chinoiserie often blend Chinese, Japanese and Persian or Indian elements. Today we know that the “Orient” at the time was really the current-day Middle East, and “Asian” is the only correct term for the peoples of the Asian continent. But because of this long-ago misnomer, it is not uncommon to hear some people still refer to Chinoiserie as “Oriental” art.

03/15/2016

A sneek peek at some of the cursory images I'm collecting to choose examples from for the next design blurb I write for this page. I'm brushing up on details of some definitive aspects, that, when combined, render a decorating style I grew up with at home as a child called Palm Beach Regency, a.k.a Palm Beach Chic or Southern Regency.

03/15/2016

A Las Vegas based company known as °BCS, or Black Crow Studios takes the art of wallpaper and literally puts the "art" into it! Founded in 2013, this quintessentially postmodern design team first creates original abstract watercolors on paper before further abstracting them by enlarging and exaggerating the transparent bleeds, drips & runs in digitally printed wallpaper panels which are made to order and customized for the intended space each order is commissioned for.

In addition, °BCS has recently begun selling pre-formatted watercolor murals you can buy by the roll, as well as frameable smaller scaled prints of their original abstract designs.

03/15/2016

Vintage linen dish towel c.1940's. "Home is where the heart is!"

03/15/2016