Formal Entry-Living-Dining area, After

In November, Canadian ReDesigners Association members from several Edmonton-area decorating businesses (including me) pooled their talents and resources to redesign and decorate a home for the Homes For Christmas Tour. This fundraiser benefitted the  St. Albert Senior Citizens Club, a not-for-profit that has been providing support services and programming for seniors in the community since 1975. (This was the Tour’s second year, six decorated homes were featured, and the tour ran Thurs Dec 4th til Sat Dec 6th, 2008.) Our team of volunteers worked fabulously together, and we are all so very proud of the transformation we made on a shoestring budget, without the multiple-major-retailler support that typifies other tours of this kind. So, I thought I’d share some of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos here.

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Urban Eco Chic, by Oliver Heath. This will be joining the books below on my reference / inspiration shelf shortly.

(this article was first published in January 2008 in vol.1, no, 1 of the ecoDomestica reDesign newsletter)

Here are a selection of the publications that inspire and inform my work. Enjoy!

Books:

- Alan Berman. “The Healthy Home Handbook: Eco-Friendly Design” (2001) …This practical, British guide to making eco-friendly choices for the construction and decoration of homes is wildly inspirational, with photos of sustainable interiors in a variety of styles from around the world.

- Kari Foster, Annette Stelmack, and Debbie Hindman. “Sustainable Residential Interiors” (2007) …The definitive reference book for North American interior designers on environmentally and socially responsible design principles and practices. Quote: “The finishes in a home can exemplify environmental responsibility, as well as reflect the inherent beauty of design.” (more…)

Redesign services are called different things, depending on which decorator is doing it and who trained them: redesign, staging, tweaking, one-day decor, no-cost decorating, use-what-you-have decorating, re-decorating. There’s a show on HGTV (both US and Canada) called “FreeStyle” that’s all redesign before-and-afters; this service has also been featured on “Decorating Cents” and “Oprah”, and in numerous newspaper and magazine articles (most recently, Real Simple’s May 2008 issue).

Essentially, redesigners use the principles of interior design to help their clients redecorate in a single day without buying anything new. Redesign clients may be blending families, merging households, welcoming a new baby, downsizing to smaller quarters, moving to a new home, preparing for a big party, or just feel like they’re having trouble pulling a room or rooms together. Staging a home for the real estate market is a subset of redesign, as well. (more…)