16 — Friday, October 30, 1992 ~ North Shore News HOME & GARDEN Decorating on a shoestring budget calls for innovation FIVE YEARS ago, many of Peter Wheeler’s clients were embarrassed to admit that they had a budget for decora- ting their homes. Now, the interior designer says, same clients would be embarrassed if they didn’t have a budget.’’ More and more interior design- ers all over the country agree that their clients are looking for design solutions that are economical as well as stylish. In response, designers are ‘look. -ing in new directions for inspira- tion. Making do in these reces- sionary times, they say, takes imagination and wit as well as know-how. Charline Sullivan, owner of a design firm, arrived at some of her best money-saving techniques after some clients had spent most of their budget redecorating the master bedroom and library and sti! hadn’t touched on the living room or dining room. Window treatments for the oversized living-room windows were the first priority. Sullivan’s design scheme proved inexpensive and charming. She hired a decorative painter to paint ivy tendrils around. the outside of the window frame and on a hardware store closet pole, which she used as a curtain rod for two panels of inexpensive chintz from a fabric outlet. Sullivan’s clients wanted to buy a $4,000 oriental rug for the din- ing room, but she persuaded them to paint the floor to look like parquet and leave it bare. Total cost: $300. She also cut the cost of decora- ting the walls by proposing an alternative way to hang the moire fabric the clients had selected. Ordinarily it would have cost $1,000 to hang, but Sullivan had it laminated (for $60) so it could be hung like regular wallpaper (for $300). The curtains were plain white fabric swags hung-on a closet pole that had been gilded. Sullivan’s clients had long ad- mired a reproduction Hepplewhite chair priced at $1,500. They found a pair of similar chairs, painted a hideous combination of cream, turquoise, blue and orange, in the sale area of a furniture store for $200. Sullivan spent an additional - * $100 to have them repainted black and embellished with gold leaf and flowers. She estimates the total cost of decorating the dining room at $2,500. . Meanwhile, Wheeler has come up with a number of economical window treatments for clients. Sometimes he uses dark green dime-store shades, mounted so they pull up from the bottom. “In a room with clean white walls, the green shades give a bit of contrast and a very elaborate effect,” he says. ‘They look like a yery finished window.” Wheeler also likes to dress groups of windows with inexpen- Sive paper shades, which he in- Stalls on the wall outside the win- dow frame sothat they hang from ceiling to floor. When the shades are used this way, he says, ‘‘the effect is ... architectural ~ like a row of columns.’’ For economical shelving, Wheeler buys basic plastic crates from a store and mounts the bot- tom to the wall so that the open- ing is in front. Five or six mounted horizontaily along a din- ing room wall provide storage space for plates or decorative ob- jects. Two hung vertically can work as a telephone table with storage for telephone books. Wheeler thinks the least expen- sive way to decorate is to look at everyday objects and the things ‘these 5, By Janice Byrd Contributing Writer that the client already has and try to put them in a new perspective. For a recent decorating project, he transformed a wooden desk drawer into a decorative shelf for children’s paintings and other items, then hung it over a smali dining table. On another wall, he grouped a number of inexpensive engravings in one large gold frame, for a striking effect. Rather than elabo- rate flower arrangements or pricey decorative objects, Wheeler sug- gests using commonplace or natu- ral items, such as a large bowl of beach rocks or a foliage arrange- ment. “The juxtaposition between new and old, cheap and expensive, can give a project enormous energy and whimsy and still nave all the essential elements of good design — comfort, function, organization and logic,’’ he says. Chris Benson, another interior designer who is no Stranger to big-ticket jobs, says he hasn't found it difficult to meet the cur- rent demand for fess costly deco- rative alternatives. One of the keys, he says, is knowing | where to look. When Benson designed ‘the inte- rior of a two-bedroom apartment he hired a decorative painter who transformed a secondhand French dining room table with a scuffed finish into a handsome one-of- a-kind piece for a total cost of less than $1,000. For night-tables Benson used inexpensive laminated three- drawer units that he topped with marbie. These night-tables can also be used for end tables. Another of Benson’s jobs re- quired finding an inexpensive sofa. His solution was to use one of the twin mahogany Regency beds from the pair he had pur- chased for $500 at an antique shop. By adding large cushions for the back he constructed a splendid sofa at about half the price of a retail piece. Benson says this idea would work well in either a children’s room or a room that sometimes doubles as a guest room. Distributed by the Los Angeles - Times Syndicate. 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