I’ll probably never get over craving an Andy Sanchez vanity top, or Shawn Lovell’s metal-sculpture bed where the term “forest canopy” is almost literal… but there’s an endless supply of tree-inspired objets of home decor to snag our attention — and here’s a selection of recent finds:

Clockwise from upper left:

• Yellow Gocco Tree and Tissue Paper Note Cards by bubbledog on Etsy.
• Forest Leaf Collection twig-inspired silverware by Michael Aram [via stuff-i-like]
• Jelly Beans’ bright watercolour painting, The Turning evokes the spirit of autumn. [via Morrgan's Creatures]
• Gum tree jewellery stand by Polli can double as a tabletop screen.
• Woodwright’s oval tree pendant is handcrafted in birch wood.
• Red tree notecards by tamar say “I love you” inside.
• The Alberto clotheshorse — Casamania by Frezza — is actually inspired by coral plants, but it reminds me of the stark shape of a dead tree against the distant skyline, very elegant and sculptural.

Tree stumps have long been a staple of casual — even impromptu — outdoor furniture.

Now they’re moving indoors.

It’s another aspect of the continuing strong trend for elements of nature in interior design and home decor.

In fact, tree stumps seem to be turning up everywhere, whether in their natural form or in a more polished version, even as a hand-crafted representation — and put to use as occasional tables and stools and pedestals and bases for glass-topped table… the possibilities are literally unlimited.

On the up-market end, Hudson Furniture shows a line of tree stumps ranging from a gorgeous natural teak stump to an intriguing collection of petrified wood stumps with colourful striations created by the passage of time.

Or mxyplyzyk offers hand-carved stumps from the trunks of discarded Chinese fir trees, each one a unique piece of functional art in its own right.

And DFC goes a different route, with a tree-stump-inspired ceramic version, hand-glazed in bold modern lime-green or sculptural white.

Having lost a huge old maple tree in the past year, I’m looking at these stump stools and tables with a special interest.

Instead of trying to compost that giant tree stump, perhaps I should be thinking in terms of a new coffee table — natural spalled maple with a lovely smooth hand-rubbed finish?

[H/T to Moco Loco and Kingdom of Style]

Enchanted by eggs? There’s something so satisfying about that solid form, it’s no wonder the egg is showing up everywhere in home decor and accessories.

Clockwise from left:

• Egg-shaped ceramic Nyokki Grass Pets are handmade in Japan. Filled with growing medium and rye grass seeds, they’ll grow a lovely head of green hair in less than two weeks. They come in various animal characters, from this pretty yellow kitty-cat or the classic yellow chick, to a pink pig or bright blue bear, and more.
• Faberge, of course, practically invented the egg as a decorative objet. This hand-painted porcelain Coronet Flower Limoges Egg opens up to reveal a 24k gold-plated flower basket as a surprise gift hidden inside.
• Edesse Design’s fried egg table puts any room sunny-side-up with its whimsical top in painted MDF, perched on slim chrome legs.
• Squirrel-proof birdhouses are hard to find, but the glossy ceramic Egg Bird House is said to be just that. Handmade exclusively by J Schatz in New York, the earthenware-and-aluminum eggs are durable enough to hang outside year-round, beautiful enough — in 8 shiny colours — to make an unusual decoration in a modern room.
• Tiny pinprick holes in the handcrafted ceramic Star Egg Nightlight let out just enough light to scatter a starry-night illusion on a bedroom ceiling. Lovely! The base is brushed stainless steel, and it comes with a clear electrical cord so as not to detract from the elegant simplicity of the egg form.

Janet and I had so much fun decorating her boy’s baseball theme bedroom — and young Josh is having so much in his own personal “Fields of Dreams” space — we’ve been looking around for more ideas to make the room even better…

Today’s useful find was a retro clothes locker at Stack and Stacks. With a removable rod and a shelf that you can adjust to suit the kid, it’s “made from industrial strength powder coated square tube, bar stock and sheet steel with a silver finish and decorative powder coated door color.”

It comes in several colours — either the red or blue will please our young Red Sox fan, and give him some much-needed storage in his bedroom.

What Josh really really really wants, of course, is a photograph wall mural of Fenway Park at night — but at $400 (it’s official Major League fan gear at MLB.com) he’s going to have to save his allowance and chore money until he’s about ready to graduate from college, before that’s going to happen!

But lying in bed at night, pretending to be right there in the floodlit stadium, hearing the roar of the crowd… it would be kinda cool, wouldn’t it?

Technorati Tags: baseball, themes, decorating

You know how a successful room decor can be based around one perfect object or piece of furniture? When I saw this little fire truck desk, it struck me as the only significant investment you’d need to make to create the popular firefighter theme for a little boy’s bedroom.

The fire truck activity desk is quite a practical piece, for all its character and whimsy — it incorporates book shelves and storage bench, with a nice flat surface for playing games and coloring with crayons. The rest can be done with paint, and a few imaginative accessories.

Match that fire-engine-red paint at any good home-improvement store, for example, and update the nursery bedside table to match. When your little guy moves up to a youth bed, you might paint it a shiny lacquer-black: it’ll fits in fine with the firehouse theme, for now, but won’t restrict your choices when it’s time to redecorate as his interests change.

Use a metal “fire bucket” for a wastebasket, and cover the curtain rail in a piece of that formed-foam pipe insultation (it’s a black tube with a slit down one side, made to slip over a water pipe) to simulate a fireman’s hose…

Fire stations don’t have those slide-down poles anymore, do they? But it’s still part of the traditional image, so we’ll want one!

You can easily create the effect of a pole with a floor-to-ceiling length of sono-tube, painted up in one of the convincing new metallic paints to look like shiny brass and attached to the ceiling or wall with L-brackets. But do set it in a corner of the room to discourage climbing attempts!

Or, if that’s too ambitious, you can always just tape off a vertical stripe of the wall and paint a trompe-l’oeil pole. If you tape off a narrower stripe along one edge, and fill that in with a slightly darker tone, it’ll help to give a rounded effect.

Don’t forget Spot, the fire dog! A big soft stuffed dalmation to wait at the foot of the bed…

My pal Janet and I put our heads together over the weekend to come up with some affordable ideas for a baseball theme room for Josh, who’s turning 12 and wanted a bedroom to celebrate his favourite sport.

It’s hard to get more baseball crazy than a glove-and-ball chair and ottoman set.

The baseball-glove bean bag chair is made from a durable nylon fabric, while the ottoman is made from vinyl to simulate the look and feel of an over-sized baseball. Both are stuffed with those polystyrene beads that are so much more comfortable than those original beanbag chairs that Janet and I grew up with!

It’s not a large bedroom (and Janet’s budget isn’t very large either) so we decided to keep the perfectly serviceable textured taupe carpet, drapes, and bedding — with the addition of a $20 bedside mat that had the logo of Josh’s favourite team on it (found in the home decor section of our local DIY store), and a few inexpensive throw pillows in the team colours (picked up on sale at Wal-Mart).

Inspired by a wall shelf with a decorative baseball bracket, we put together something similar using Josh’s existing bookshelf, a glue gun, and a few spare baseballs.

Finally, Janet cut an X-shape in two baseballs and fitted one over each end of the plain old department-store curtain rod, for a great finishing detail!

A particularly geeky pal of mine just emailed that he’s finished building a giant Starship Enterprise out of LEGO®, and that got me thinking… those plastic building blocks aren’t just for adults with a limited social life… What a cool theme for a little kid’s bedroom!

I’d start with 18-inch carpet tiles in bold primary colors, a kid-sized club chair with good solid lines, and perhaps a bright red duvet set on the bed. Patchwork pillow shams and bedskirt, in rectangles rather than squares?

If the bed itself was nothing very special, I’d paint it up with blue, red, yellow, white and green on the headboard, foot board, any exposed side rails or posts.

Actually, a captain’s bed with drawers underneath would be really cool here, with each of the drawers painted in a different LEGO-type color. High-gloss or melamine paint for durability and shine…

The truly ambitious decorator might even cut huge circles of foamcore board, like real estate signs are made of, and mount it in pairs on block-painted sections of wall to simulate giant LEGO blocks.

Absolutely, I’d want to build a custom lamp for the bedside, using the real-life building blocks!

I noticed that the online LEGO store also has block-shaped magnets which would be fun to use on a wall-mounted magnetic whiteboard… and an official LEGO® storage box to hold the toys!

Technorati tags: LEGO Home Decor.

It seems that the weirder the world gets, these days, the more we find ourselves looking back to the past. And here is no single decade that exemplifies North American optimism as fully as the 1950s. No wonder it’s a popular theme in home decorating.

Get the look of the Fifties with strong clean lines, cheerful bright colors, and a few selected few accents that evoke that retro era, but have a more contemporary twist — maybe a mini-Wurlitzer, (StacksandStacks.com) a tabletop CD player juke box that’s also an AM/FM radio.

Spin a set of record label coasters (UncommonGoods.com) and your vintage formica tabletop is safe from those wicked cherry-cola spills. Bowls and snack trays in classic vinyl, too.

A little bit of Elvis hip action, anyone?

Ah, the 1950s…

Ah, Happy Days…

We look back on it now as a time of post-war prosperity, a time when Hollywood glamour was just a Marilyn-style angora sweater away. A booming industrial economy promised a chrome-laden automobile in every suburban driveway, a high-speed highway for the open road, and an episode of “Leave It To Beaver” on the television after a nutritious family dinner of space-age convenience foods prepared in a whiz-bang kitchen full of shiny new labor-saving appliances.

For furniture inspiration, I turn to those great old roadside diners for something like a set of 1950s Diner Style chrome swivel bar stools (check OneStopDecor at Amazon), yes — but also to the fabulous cars of the era: all chrome and shining curves, with big bench seats on the interior, upholstered in solid-solor fabric or leather/vinyl that was stitched in simple verticals.

This was the heyday of the automobile, and it was also the very beginning of the true Atomic Age, remember, so everything was about power and progress and shooting for the moon. And, to be frank, the big boom of North America’s full-blown consumer culture. Vintage (or reproduction) advertising evokes the era like nothing else — Fifties decor “goes better with Coke!” and Coca-Cola collectibles continue to be incredibly popular.

Okay, so there’s something to get you started. And for more 1950s theme decor inspiration, take a cruise around BenniesFifties: it’s a little bit tacky, but then, so was that whole decade!

Asian-inspired home decor is very hot right now, and you can’t go wrong starting out with simple lines, natural colors, and maybe a Shoji screen in the corner. But it’s the right artwork or accessory that can really set the mood for an Oriental theme.

Here are five of my favourite recent finds, in no particular order:

1. Kelly Shults kellyshults.etsy.com does the most tiny perfect mixed-media collages on heavy watercolor paper…
2. Also found at Etsy (infromawalk.etsy.com), sage-green and rusty-cream rice bowls, gorgeous simple shape, set of four…



3. Luscious pink brocade with a bamboo theme, imported from China, begs to become a throw pillow! Available at www.distinctivefabric.com/ along with similar fabric with a butterfly or dragon motif…



4. At www.chopa.com, beautiful music… from Zen meditation gongs to Feng Shui wind chimes to tiny Tibetan tingsha…



5. Lacquer ware — an antique japanned tray, a trinket box… I covet the Fret table (red or black) at www.suzanneallen.com/.