queerbychoice | Interior Decorating: A Request for Pictures

I suppose it's stereotypically female of me, but lately I've been spending huge amounts of time on home decorating websites - hoping, perhaps unrealistically, to find some sort of decorating trick so great that it would trick me into wanting to spend a lot of time in my living room even despite the fact that nearly everything I'd generally want to do is located, and needs to remain located, in my bedroom. Mostly I've ended up concluding that the only thing that might do the trick semi-successfully would be a really, really comfortable recliner in the living room - but really comfortable recliners seem to cost several thousand dollars, and I only want one bad enough to spend about $200 on it, so that's just not likely to happen at all.

However, along the way, I came across various suggestions, and one of them was to "search for images of rooms decorated in ways that you like." So I started searching, and this rapidly led me to the discovery that there are actually virtually no pictures to be found anywhere of rooms that I can really imagine wanting to live in. In fact, after extremely exhaustive searching (with both Google Image search and the HGTV.com "designer's portfolio"), I've found only one image anywhere on the Internet that shows a room that I wouldn't terribly mind living in - and even that one, I wouldn't exactly call the room of my dreams or anything. It's merely a room that I can imagine might potentially feel like "mine," and that I wouldn't hate.

It's this one. It would be better if the stripey patterns were proper rainbows instead of partial ones, but I think it'd do the way it is. The colors are acceptable, and that style of curtain in the background - well, only a week or so before I discovered this picture, I finished hanging

rekraft's rainbow fish above my living room window in a shape just like that curtain, draped in a row of half-circle shapes between eight evenly spaced nails above my window. So it's rather obvious that I must be fond of curtains that drape that way.

But I can't find a single other picture of a room that I'd want to live in! How can my taste in interior decorating possibly be so unique that no one else on the entire Internet has ever decorated a room in a way that I'd enjoy living in? I feel like there mut be good rooms out there that I'm just failing to find pictures of.

Which brings me to the purpose of this post. I want to know what kinds of rooms you like. Search for some pictures and give me links to them, will you? I bet if enough of you post links to pictures of rooms you'd love to live in, someone will find one somewhere that I'd love to live in, too. And besides, I might learn something about you from seeing your tastes.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You can browse catalog sites online, or order the catalogs and browse at home. You'll see plenty of rooms showing their products. I mentioned Spiegel in the post about fashion, and I'll mention it again here. Check it out. Lots of ideas. Lots of pictures. And if you see something you like, you can probably buy it too.

I viewed the dining room picture you linked to, and you may find some things like that via Spiegel. Another site that is chock full of ideas, but of a completely different style is IKEA.

I do a lot of decorating, helping people, over on the Better Homes and Gardens Decorating message boards. I found this site by searching for "Decorating" at Blogger.com, because I'm bored. LOL! It slows down sometimes on the BHG boards, and I just NEED to decorate.

So, let's consider the BASIC questions. I could show you a thousand rooms. But I don't really have a "feel" for you yet. You want to decorate for the way you live 95% of the time. Not how you want to live, not how you see other people living, not for those rare occasions where there are 15 family members gabbing over a meal. But for everyday living.

You want to decorate for YOU. Your lifestyle. How much time do you want to spend maintaining your decor? Some folks love to fuss and putter all the time. Then there are people like me, who'd rather have a cement floor with a central drain that I could hose down the living room instead of dusting and vacuuming. I don't want to live my life maintaining my home. Some others would feel totally empty if they didn't have something to dust. Really. My mom is like that.

Practical considerations, as in picking out the things that will work for you the way you need them to. Budget. Comfort. You may wish to choose items that are multipurpose, or can accommodate different decor.

Okay, just ONE BHG link, LOL!
http://www.bhg.com/bhg/story.jhtml?storyid=/templatedata/bhg/story/data/12354.xml&psrc=dg052

That's Carpet Magic. Same walls, same window treatments, same main furnishings. It changes appearance with accessories, such as an area rug, throw pillows, art. Note the coffee tables. Two are benches. One is a trunk.

Using the benches means you CAN sit there or put it to use as extra seating if needed. Using a trunk means you have additional storage.

You can also browse the BHG discussion boards in the Decorating area. I do a lot of posting and plug in tons of links.

Check out their Arrange A Room too. You can enter the measurements of the rooms in your new place, and try out furniture arrangements. If you're thinking of adding new pieces, you can try them out online before buying them.

I never went anywhere without a tape measure when selecting furniture. And if you're browsing furniture online, you can get the measurements there. So you don't even have to leave your home to check furniture and if it will fit. No surprises, like finding out the big sofa is soooo big that you have to climb over it to get into the room.

A.

I don't know if this is your style, but it may give you some ideas
http://www.cottageflourishings.com/index.html
http://www.cottageflourishings.com/933166.html (and several pages after that)
Gerrie

Hi, if you want to see some great pictures of rooms, then I've got some here, check them out... Thanks :D

http://reallycoolideas.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_reallycoolideas_archive.html

Wow, it's only taken me about two months to respond to this. That being said, I have finally located photographs of my preferred interior decoration styles. I have three major styles that I love:

1) Islamic architecture. It's rather difficult to find photographs of proper houses of this style, rather than mosques or palaces, but here's a general idea, if it's a bit spare for my tastes. Here's the interior of a Moroccan restaurant in Morocco. I very much enjoy the copious use of arches, hanging brocades and sheers, delicate metalwork, rich, bright jewel tones and subdued arches. Additionally, I love Moroccan lanterns, coloured glass is always excellent in my book. And it goes without saying that I love Moroccan tea glasses and teapots.

2) Distantly related, I have before made known my obsession with the interior decoration present in the cities of the fallen Kingdom of Zeal from the Super Nintendo RPG Chrono Trigger. Examples are provided here and here. Yes, they're just palette swaps, but I love the whole aesthetic of the place. I have serious plans to actually construct a room identical to one of these, and construct the remainder of the house in an "inspired" style. To add to the awesome of this, when I describe it as a "fallen" kingdom I'm alluding to it falling out of the sky. This is a picture of the outside of these cities, against a lovely altocumulus backdrop. It probably doesn't hurt that one of these cities is a research institution.

I wouldn't mind having my house float in the sky, really, although I'd be concerned about air traffic and people shooting at it. Oh, and storms, but that could be theoretically alleviated by placing it above the troposphere, but that would be awfully chilly. Well, that and if I've learned anything from video games, it's that floating cities are going to fall within the course of the game. Sort of like if a game begins in the hero's peaceful hamlet, it's going to be burned within the first two hours of gameplay.

The other city (than the research institute) is the City of Dreams, but that doesn't appeal to me as much because I have dreams about turning into Matt's ex-roommate Kenji and getting accidentally shot in the back of the head numerous times by drunk people in the next room.

3) Horror from the 1970s. I don't know if you've ever visited this site, but I am vaguely embarrassed to admit that I genuinely enjoy all of these rooms. As in I'd love to live in one. One of my great joys is going to thrift stores and acquiring 70s furniture. I don't really know where my enjoyment of this aesthetic came from, given I wasn't around in the 70s, so it can't count as nostalgia.

A good example of the 1970s aesthetic that I dearly love is the 1974 World's Fair, which took place in Spokane. I have large representation of the logo (in green, blue and white! Hoorah!) hanging on my wall and I can always identify my car in a parking lot by the Expo '74 air freshener. Oh, and that big tent thing depicted near the Spokane River in the first photograph is still there.

And finally, I love rainbows myself. I should post pictures of my room as it is. It involves a number of clocks and paper fish on the walls.

Ooh, I like Islamic architecture too. I don't understand how you can even translate the videogame drawings to real architecture though; I have a terrible time trying to picture what that would even look like if it weren't a videogame.

Yes, you should post pictures of your room. It sounds like something I desperately want to see.

Interior Decorating: A Request for Pictures

Catalogs can be a great source!

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