<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Lygeia Grace: This is an apartment Holly Golightly would swoon over \u2014 please don&amp;#039;t tell me a retired couple lives here. Ashley Whittaker: The owner is a delight \u2014 she&amp;#039;s a single girl in her 30s with a great sense of style. Even though the living room is only 300 square feet, she wanted somewhere she could entertain. And she really does it! She routinely has 20 people for cocktails. Where does she put everyone? Almost all the furniture in the living room is multi-functional. The desk doubles as a buffet and a dining table, the settee pulls up to the desk like a banquette, the bar cart can hold anything \u2014 liquor, brunch, desserts \u2014 and the little West Elm silver stool works as a perfect perch. I call it the hostess stool \u2014 you can easily pop up and run to the kitchen or move it from group to group. The apartment is feminine but never goes over the edge. What holds it back from the brink? From the very beginning, the client knew she wanted a lavender palette. But she also wanted to incorporate a large black-and-white photograph by her brother, Landon Nordeman, into the mix. That led us to use more touches of gray and black \u2014 on the slipper chair and settee, in the rug under the desk, and in the chevron rug in the entryway. It adds some neutrality and keeps the place from looking so girly-girly. Navy has the same effect \u2014 you see it in the wallpapers in the entryway and kitchen and in the gimp on the berg\u00E8re. What&amp;#039;s a gimp? It&amp;#039;s the trim under the nailheads on the armchair. The navy line on the lavender upholstery gives weight to the chair and makes it feel important. Some people would have painted the whole place white to open it up \u2014 you did just the opposite. Pattern can actually make a place look larger. I know there are those who would look at the scale and color of the paper we used in the entrance hall and worry it would be too dark and busy. But the darkness makes the walls recede, and the large pattern gives the room a grander scale. If you used some tiny, all-over pattern on the walls, it would be so low-impact the room would almost disappear. This way, you walk in and you are knocked out. You know you&amp;#039;ve arrived somewhere special. But mixing wallpapers can be scary. There is a fear factor. But I always tell clients that at the end of the day, wallpaper is what makes a place feel finished and decorated. You don&amp;#039;t want to repeat the same scale of pattern from one room to another. And you want contrasting colors. One trick I often use when I&amp;#039;m considering two papers for adjoining rooms is to hold one up just a few inches from my face and the other one farther back. Then I look through from one to the other. It really helps you visualize how the patterns and colors will relate to one another. It&amp;#039;s a small space, but, miraculously, you don&amp;#039;t feel like you&amp;#039;re in a dollhouse with scads of delicate furniture. If you have lots of small pieces of furniture in a small room, it can feel cluttered. Furniture should be scaled to the people who live there \u2014 not to the size of the room. You want it to be comfortable and inviting. There isn&amp;#039;t anything in this apartment that I wouldn&amp;#039;t use in a 10,000-square-foot house. Here, there is less furniture, but it&amp;#039;s not smaller. Still, I think you&amp;#039;d have to be a sort of minimalist to live here. What do you do with all your stuff? Having enough closet space in a small apartment or house is life-changing. We enlarged the closet in the bedroom by three feet, even though it made the room a little smaller. Living in a small space is like living on a boat. You need a specific place to store the things you use. And if you don&amp;#039;t use them, then out they go. In this project, we also added a linen closet and a broom closet, put in tall kitchen cupboards, and installed a bathroom sink with a cabinet instead of using a washstand. You need storage in order for the rooms to feel neat and tidy. Any other universal rules for small spaces? Yes. You can&amp;#039;t think about a room on its own. You need to be aware of the room just beyond it, because that&amp;#039;s where your eye travels. So the idea of contrast between rooms comes into play. When my client is working at her desk, she can look to the entry hall and see a whole new scheme, rather than just more paint. It makes the apartment feel bigger. To pull it off, you have to be pretty brave with color. When it comes to color, I say, &amp;#039;Go big or go home.&amp;#039; You have to trust yourself. But you don&amp;#039;t have to commit to it all at once \u2014 you can play with it as the rooms evolve. Start with one palette and then mix things in. The blue zebra paper in the kitchen was our jumping-off point, then we added the red light fixture, and later the yellow seat. The bedroom began with a pale-blue palette. Floral sheets brought a punch of red, pink, and blue. If you think you want color, you are going to love it. Believe me, you will wake up every day and be happy you did it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.housebeautiful.com/home-remodeling/interior-designers/tips/a1147/ashley-whittaker-interview-0713/>