Accent chairs are a great way to create a colour scheme or decorating aesthetic in your room. Should accent chairs match? Don&#;t make this common mistake when choosing an accent chair.
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This post is written by my Senior Colour Designer, Tricia Firmaniuk while I sit by the pool in Positano!
Cobalt blue accent chairs bring this room by Miles Redd to life
My pet peeve about accent chairs is always the fabric they are covered in when you buy a set in a big box store. Always some weird swirly, modern fabric that cannot be coordinated with ANYTHING.
Left a bossy generic pattern, Right a timeless, versatile print from Ballard Designs
My advice is DON&#;T DO IT.
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Read on to find out what Tricia has to say:
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The word &#;Accent&#; according to Oxforddictionaires.com, is &#;A feature which gives a distinctive visual emphasis to something&#;.
And in my mind, an &#;accent chair&#; is a piece that draws attention in a room, an emphatic expression of the colour scheme or aesthetic of the space. Makes sense right?
Pink accent chair in Natane Boudreau&#;s NYC Apartment
Was I ever shocked and dismayed when I had to go to a half dozen home decorating stores recently in search of a fun, colourful accent chair for a vignette I wanted to create.
Let me just tell you that I was met with a bland wash of shades of taupe, gray and linen chairs on offer everywhere.
Now of course, if I was shopping online, and I had some time to order something custom, I would have had options, but I wanted to buy it, toss it in my truck and create my vignette. I was on a mission. I know there is much to be said for patience and planning, but you know, sometimes it just doesn&#;t work out that way &#;
The image I held in my mind was of a pretty print of some kind, maybe in blue or green, pink or coral, something with some colour and interest that I could base my image on like this fun chair below.
Ok, this is probably too fabulous to find off the shelf but one can dream. Giant Peony by GP & J Baker
But by the third or fourth store I was becoming despondent. The best I could find was a grayed teal.
Here&#;s the vignette I came up with which was much more demure in colour than I had hoped (below).
My favorite sculpture by artist Susan Owen Kagan, modern brass pharmacy lamp here. Chair from Homesense
It took my mind reluctantly back to Economics 101, you know, basic supply and demand? And I got all contemplative and thought, people must just not be buying colour and prints, otherwise, surely, the stores would be offering them?
Just a theory guys, tell me it&#;s not true?
Yalani Stripe Angelina Chair Anthropologie
So here&#;s the thing, let&#;s say you decided to go with a safe, neutral sofa, (I admit I have a big space in my heart for a classic light canvas colour sofa, and warm cognac leather ones too), and now you need a pair of chairs to go with it (because we all know better than buying the matching loveseat right?)
What do you do? It looks like a good lot of people (according to my hackneyed interpretation of a highly oversimplified theory of economics) must be deciding, &#;I know, I&#;ll get pair of gray/linen/taupe accent chairs&#;, and I assume it&#;s because committing to blue/green/pink ones seems terrifying right? But this is false logic (according to my patchy recollection of Logic 101), because gray/linen/taupe is a colour too!
And you&#;ve just committed to it. And what&#;s worse, you now have diminished opportunities to introduce a more interesting and happy colour into your room! Ack, that wasn&#;t the idea!
If you&#;re still with me, here&#;s the thing my colour designer heart wants to share to save us all from too much gray and taupe: before you buy your main pieces for your room, it&#;s a good idea to dream up some idea of the colours you would like to use, not after you buy the bulkiest pieces that will take up the most visual space.
And this is because when I see a gray &#;accent&#; chair, I see a missed opportunity for delicious colour or pattern.
These blue chairs make this room by Jeffery Bilhuber
Can a neutral sofa and neutral chairs work? Of course they can, but it&#;s harder to pull off and it&#;s much more fun to make a statement, ahem, create an accent with some colour or pattern I think &#;
If your heart is sinking reading this, because you&#;ve just bought all neutral furniture, don&#;t despair! You can still get some large scale colourful art or a nice area rug in colour, all is not lost. However, it&#;s not likely that you will get enough colour to make your room feel pulled together out of a few pillows and vases.
Source
Maria has said this many times on the blog, and that is to introduce an accent colour successfully, you will need to add it in large, medium and small gradations.
The drapes give a large dose of green in this otherwise neutral room Source
You will get efficient and thoughtful service from JE Group.
What qualifies as large? Your sofa, drapes, an area rug, a piece of art that is almost as tall as you, or yes, a pair of fabulous accent chairs!
Medium? A piece of art the size of my dog Mabel, a decent sized collection of vases (like 5 or 7), an ottoman, an accent table, a set of toss pillows.
My sweet Mabel
And items you can call on to represent your accent colour in small doses are smaller artworks, single vases or vessels, a lamp etc.
But if you ask a bunch of small and even medium pieces to add colour to a room, you will end up with colour that looks bitty, and comes off tentative and uncommitted.
Colour is a commitment, once you walk through that door, there is no going back (at least for a few years), but it&#;s better to make a choice and open a door than to stand in the all gray lobby which really is nowhere yet.
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Thanks Tricia, I couldn&#;t have said it better myself!
There is much more of course to choosing an accent chair such as shape and scale, but first, it&#;s important to be thinking about colour.
If you would like help pulling together your room, check out our Get Me Started eDesign decorting package here.
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Do you have an upholstery project that requires new foam for a cushion or seat? Here&#;s a guide to help you choose the right foam for your project&#;
First, I want to share a bit about how I deal with foam in my upholstery studio, along with a few entertaining alternative uses for urethane foam:
I&#;m a saver, a recycler, a stickler for minimizing the waste and useless by-product that emerges from my life & work. I use the blank sides of junk mail as scrap paper, throw match books (and spent matches) in the cardboard recycling, and use burlap scraps from upholstery projects as garden mulch.
So I have this problem that&#;s been bothering me&#;
Ever since I first dipped my big toe into upholstery, there has been one over-riding waste item (aside from the stinky old stripped-off fabric and padding that is beyond re-use) that I haven&#;t been consistently able to re-purpose:
Foam is expensive&#;
I buy it in sheets (54&#;x 82&#;) and half sheets (27&#;x 82&#;) and custom cut it into whatever size and shape needed for each project &#; a sofa cushion, a dining chair seat, back padding &#; and, inevitably, there is an odd scrap left over that&#;s too small to use on anything. Piecing them together is risky because the glued seam could open up during use, and ruin the whole upholstery job.
I hate throwing stuff away&#;
I think about what went into making that piece of foam (chemicals, resources, human labor, shipping) and I&#;m motivated to do what I can, so I&#;ve come up with a few uses over the years:
&#; Dog & Cat Beds: I go ahead and glue pieces together for this if I need to, since the puppies & kitties don&#;t mind and the zippered beds allow replacement (also a good use for old foam).
&#; Shred it for Pillows: I&#;ve heard there&#;s a shredding machine that cuts foam in to tiny pieces, and heard of a local guy who had one in his basement, but have not seen it or met him, yet&#;
&#; Toadstools: we make these small, medium & large mushroom-shaped stools that use layered foam, so I glue pieces for the bottom layer, and use an intact piece for the top layer (I sometimes do this with small chair seats too).
&#; Art: sculpt it, paint it, embellish it!
&#; Talking Balloons: You know, the cartoon balloons&#; always good for a laugh in the studio!
Here are some fun creations using urethane foam:
Okay, so that&#;s my 2-cents for re-purposing, but there&#;s really more to this story than finding CREATIVE ways to keep SCRAPS out of the landfill&#; which brings us to:
If you&#;re doing your own project with ANY kind of foam &#; replacing a sofa cushion, re-covering (with new foam) your dining chairs, or building a new window seat cushion &#; you&#;re going to need to know that there are different foams for different purposes.
Sure, you can go down to the local Joann store and buy their low density foam (and this might be the easiest solution for many of us who just want a quick fix and don&#;t mind the comfort factor so much), but there are NICE foams out there that your tush will thank you for in the long run. High density means less air, higher quality, and longer life.
Here&#;s a handy chart that will help you choose the right foam for your own reupholstery or cushion project:
Here are two online foam sources for urethane foam that seem to be the most user-friendly:
The eFoam Store in Pennsylvania has a good explanation of how foams are specified using a 4-digit number: the first two digits representing density, and the second two digits representing ILD. For example, if a foam is identified with the number , the 18 means a cubic foot of this foam weighs 1.8 pounds (The heavier a piece of foam, the longer it will maintain its shape), and the 35 means it takes 35 pounds of pressure to compress a piece of this foam to 25% of its original height (The higher the number, the firmer the piece of foam).
The Foam Factory in Michigan.
Note: this post was written in , and is still applicable (in ) to those looking to replace old sofa cushions with POLYURETHANE foam.
Here at NaturalUpholstery.com we&#;ve shifted our focus to NATURAL LATEX foam, which has very different properties than urethane foam. Check out the post &#;How to Use Latex Foam in Upholstery&#; or How to Choose Latex Firmness for Upholstery, and see our comprehensive FAQs to learn more about latex foam. If your&#;e seeking materials without flame retardants to use in your upholstery project, we have some natural & organic foundation materials available in our shop.
Whether you&#;re working with &#;conventional&#; or &#;natural&#; upholstery materials, there are universal upholstery techniques and resources that can help you complete your own project. Check out my YouTube channel for upholstery tutorials, or Join our mailing receive upholstery tips, resources and links to video tutorials in your inbox.
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