Interior Design

Redesign Me Special 2009 - The Art of Redesign

Like many people, I’m really good at telling everyone else what to do: how to ditch a bad boyfriend, how to lose five pounds, and of course, how to light their living room and arrange their furniture. But when it comes to managing my own life, I’m just as much of a disaster as the next guy.

At least I know this about myself and I don’t try to pretend otherwise. I’m never sure about where my furniture should go or how to make the best use of space.

So when my neighbor, Carolyn Gregg, invited me in for coffee and I saw her apartment, and it looked so perfectly organized, I was thrilled when she offered to re-design my place. No purchasing necessary — no buying new curtains or getting a cute bookshelf. In fact, she assured me that she wouldn’t even make me get rid of anything; she would find a spot for everything I had. It would just be a new spot.

The funny thing is, Carolyn Gregg isn’t even an interior designer, or a re-designer. She is a floral designer, so she is making good use of her impeccable design sense. But as soon as she stepped into my front hall, I knew that she knew this redesign stuff inside and out.

We started with a tour of the living room, study, and bedroom, so she could get the big picture. I showed her my extra lampshades, pointed out the cute little bench in the bedroom.

Then, we started in the bedroom. Before I could say “feng shui” she was pushing the dresser over so that its feet were all on the rug; before, it had been off the rug by about two inches. She took down the small framed photo that had been to the side of the dresser and put it aside. Then we moved the blanket chest from the corner to right under the big window.

And then it got challenging. Before, I’d had two matching end tables on either side of the bed, but they didn’t quite fit and they meant that there wasn’t much space between the door to the room and the end table on the door side of the bed.

“Let’s get rid of one of those tables,” Carolyn said. I pointed out that according to the rules of Feng Shui, there should be a table with lamp on both sides of the bed, especially if one wants to attract or keep someone sharing that bed.

“Let’s just see,” she said. We moved the table out and put it in the living room, and she put the lamp on top of the radiator instead (I keep the radiator off at all times, so no danger there).

And then it got even more challenging. “Let’s move the bed, just six inches toward the window,” Carolyn said. This took some doing, but eventually, we moved it, so that now it was centered with the window at the foot of the bed. Then the remaining table could be moved as well, affording more space by the door.

The results: dresser fully on the rug, bed centered to window, one table removed to make more space, blanket chest moved to anchor the window, little luggage bench moved to bedside.

Next stop, living room.

Here, the sofa was against the windows, with the coffee table in front of it, with the two chairs facing the sofa. The room was split into two sections; by the bookcase, I had a curved red bench, with two spare kitchen chairs on either side.

Before I could say, “Hans Wegner,” Carolyn was rolling up the rug and pushing the sofa around. Every now and then she’d stop, and say, “Wait. Let’s think about this minute,” and her eyes would go unfocused, as if she was looking at something I couldn’t see. “Okay,” she’d say, “let’s move this table over here.”

Before

After

It was a little like having a tornado take over, but a very controlled tornado. I’m not sure how we did it, but when I looked up, the furniture was all in different places, and suddenly the room seemed to have expanded.

The best part of this was that Carolyn moved the chest I inherited from my mother onto the opposite wall, centered under the heavy mirror. Now, the oil portrait of my father, painted by his father, really stands out, where before it got kind of lost on one of the longer walls. This portrait shares the chest with a figure that belonged to my mother, and with two figures in clay made by my sister, a ceramicist. This feels to me now like it’s my family altar, and makes me feel happy and loved every time I walk in the room.

One change affected by this rearrangement was that now, there is easier flow from the kitchen/dining area across the living room and into the bedroom/study area. The flow, however, is interrupted from the front hall into the living room, as now the sofa cuts the living room. But I think this is better, because I only come into the house once, but I go from study to kitchen a few hundred times during the day.

By moving the chest to the other wall, I no longer have the outlets and cable cord for the television. Not that I ever really had cable, but the cord somehow makes it that I can get the few stations I get — without it, I get nothing. But this actually has been a big improvement in my life. I now keep the t.v. and DVD player stashed in a corner, and it only takes about three minutes to set them up and then take them down again. That’s just enough so that it’s a little inconvenient so that I don’t just automatically turn the t.v. on when I could be making better use of my time. And yet it’s easy enough so that I can throw it together if I really want to watch an episode of “House Hunters.”

Finally, we tackled the study. One of my desks was in front of the large window, which at the time I’d thought was nice, making it as if I was sitting at the window. But Carolyn said that without the desk there, I’d be closer to the window, able to really look out over the pretty garden, and that gave us space where we could put the low glass case that had previously been in the living room. The whole room suddenly opened up, and I couldn’t wait to get to work.

Before

After

The overall effect of Carolyn’s work on my place is that it looks pulled together as never before. It looks kind of professionally done, even though I still have my junky old stuff. Somehow, Carolyn’s Midas touch limned everything with gold, or at least with a really great high-gloss polish.