Decor tends to be a lady’s concern. There’s plenty of frippery and frills out there in furniture shops — florals abound and pastels float in and out of style in a never-ending cycle. Furthermore, a lot of gentlemen are not at all concerned with the outward appearance of their domiciles. All they want is a roof that doesn’t leak and working appliances.

To illustrate my point, let me take you back a few days to Saturday afternoon. The Beard and I were standing in front of a huge display of light fixtures. I was nattering on and on about the relative pros and cons and each, and kept asking him which he preferred. His answer? “You care a lot more about this stuff than I do,” he said. “So why don’t you just pick out the one you think will look best.”

That’s not to say that all dudes don’t care about decor, but I’m willing to bet that a great deal of them have no opinion one way or the other. Maybe they’d care more if they saw a few more masculine interiors like these?

This living room, put together by one Stefan Tyra and featured in The Sydney Morning Herald, was actually crafted with a mix of lavishness and frugality. Two-dollar mirrors hang over accent cushions upholstered in $2000 a meter fabric! How’s that for mixing and matching?

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One of the places those of us who are seriously eco-minded fail is in the home. We drive environmentally friendly automobiles, recycle like crazy, buy fair trade coffee and sustainably grown veggies, and organic cotton t-shirts. Go us, right? Then we buy any old rug, furniture made of any old wood, and any old paint. It’s not surprising — after all, the really nice ecologically sensible stuff is reeeaaaaally expensive, right?

You’re only partly right. A lot of it is outlandishly expensive. On the other end of the spectrum, Freecycled furniture is about as low-impact as you can get. And somewhere in the middle you find stores like VivaTerra that have stuff for your home that pairs elegance with eco-friendliness at prices that won’t bankrupt the average buyer.

I absolutely luuuurve this chair. Oddly enough, however, I had my very own slice of trunk table when I was an apartment dweller. The cross section was a lot bigger and the whole thing was a lot lower, so we gave it away on Craigslist to someone who had the space for it.

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Every now and again, my mailbox is inundated with home decor magazines. Where all of them have converged in recent months is in their liberal use of blue. It’s not just one particular sort of blue, either. There are Greenwich blues and icy blues and cornflower blues and cobalt blues. Light greenish blues seem to be dominating at this time, but there certainly seems to be plenty of room for other competing blues.

Did I mention that other than black, blue is my favorite color? There are millions upon billions of ways one can integrate a color into a home decor scheme. Sometimes it’s hard to decide what to do because there are so many options, but seeing what others have done can be all the inspiration one needs. Below you’ll find some blue interiors that will get your creative juices flowing.

The thought of painting a floor never really occurred to me until just now. As it turns out, The Beard and I have an unfinished floor in the upper story of our home and I’m sorely tempted to start laying down color!

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There’s nothing like a nice squishy tosser, as I’ve mentioned previously. In my little abode, throw pillows get sat on, chucked around, used as trivets, gnawed by curious kitties, and taken on long car trips. Huh…maybe that’s why none of mine are stuffed with down and covered in raw shantung silk like the colorful examples above. If your throw pillows lead a far less vigorous life than my own, perhaps it’s time to upgrade to something more refined.

image by scriptingnews

Doesn’t that look gorgeous? It’s the little touches–like funky pillows or an heirloom quilt–that make a space feel homey to me, which is why sitting on any of my couches and chairs usually involves moving a bunch of throws and things. What are the tiny details that make you feel at home?

Wedding gowns and shoes get saddled with amusing, silly, and patently odd names. Why was Cary named Cary? And who’s Madalyn?

As it turns out, plenty of furniture comes complete with interesting and evocative monikers. Meet Cairo, the bench that apparently hails from the land of the pharaohs.

For many, the new year means new furniture, new appliances, and a new decor scheme. I know that I definitely get way more into the whole new year thing when I’ve made some outward changes in my existence, a la moving everything I own around and donating anything that hasn’t seen the light of day in, oh, six months. The keyword is organization, a.k.a. shelf shopping! I’m contemplating the one you see above, but only in a ::wouldn’t it be nice if I had $700:: sort of way.

I hope you have a most prosperous and beautiful new year!

Before the official launch of the blog, I wrote about shopping your home when you need a decor pick-me-up. What do you do, though, when you’ve found all of the perfect new furniture for a certain room in your house or apartment, but you have no clue how to arrange them? When I find myself facing this conundrum, I put scissors to paper.

I could explain myself in my own words, but Seeds of Knowledge wrote it out so succinctly:

1. Measure your room. Draw it to scale on graph paper which you can find at your local discount store. Use a 1/4 in. equal 1 ft. scale. If you can’t figure out how to draw out scale, ask your know-it-all teenage son!

2. Mark anything on your room drawing that will affect the arrangement of the room. Outlets, telephone, cable, light switches, windows, doors that open in, the space between windows, and the height of the window sills are all things that should be measured and noted.

3. This is the fun part! Make scale paper cutouts of your furniture (just like cutting out paper dolls!) Use the cutouts to arrange and rearrange the furniture in your room until you are satisfied with the result.

That’s it — without breaking a sweat, you can be sure your old rooms with their new furniture will look wonderful in their new configuration. Even if you find drawing tedious, it beats asking your friends, significant other, or “know-it-all teenage son” to help you move your couch over and over and over again.

Yesterday we got to peek inside Betsy Johnson’s NYC pad. Today it’s time to have a gander inside Saddam Hussein’s mega yacht, the Qaddisat Saddam. This $34 million boat, which now goes by the less disturbing moniker Ocean Breeze, can now be yours! Let’s have a look…

Saddam Hussein’s mega yacht comes equipped with bulletproof glass, a full medical clinic, prayer rooms, weapons storage, gold fixtures, marble, fountains, and more. It also comes equipped with decor straight out of the hotel decorators’ handbook.

Again, this is pretty much the set-up I would have envisioned for Saddam Hussein’s mega yacht if someone had asked me to guess at Saddam’s taste in interiors.

via Radar Online

I’ll admit that a wood stove would look absolutely ridiculous in my house. There’s a reason there’s no fireplace — the living room is properly cottage sized. But at the same time, I do occasionally dream of installing a sweet little wood burning stove somewhere in my abode. The winters north of Boston are shaping up to be just a touch colder than I expected!

Why heat with a wood stove? EPA certified stoves are a lot more efficient than the old school potbellied models that probably come to mind when someone says, “wood burning stove.” The also look a fair bit sleeker, though they are nowhere near as charming. Were I to redo my decor in a less modern style, I could probably incorporate a stove into my living room… and I could probably do it myself, according to this document from Hearth.com.

Am I ready to do something like punch a hole in my house for the purposes of adding more heat? Er, no. If my cozy cottage was a bit more cottage-esque, I’d consider it. For now I’m going to have to stick with my electric space heater for the foreseeable future.

::shiver::

Cubes have gotten a bad rap, what with so many people working in those ucky tight workspaces commonly known as cubes. This utterly adorable jacquard cube makes it easy to forget that you’re chained to a whole different sort of cube for eight hours each day. You can put your feet up on it after a long stint at the office and then use it as makeshift seating when one too many post-dinner visitors come knocking at your door.

In fact, just keep your feet up. Speak in hushed tones, and whoever is asking to be let in will give up and go away so you can enjoy a little sit down and a big glass of wine in peace.