I love to find crazy, wacky design pieces that make me laugh. The Dutch seem to produce lots of this stuff, leading me to realize that I must spend some time there someday. Here’s what I mean:

Crochet chair

These are crochet chairs by Marcel Wanders, as currently displayed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Delightful, aren’t they? I wonder if you can actually sit in them…  Marcel chose favorite pieces of his own creation for the Philadelphia show. Here’s another:

This piece is called “Moosehead”. Wow! How would you like to wake up to that every morning? And, finally, here are the “New Antique Chairs”.

These are very cool. Dutch designers have been doing amazing things with furniture for hundreds of years, and contemporary designers from the Netherlands often look back for inspiration. Check out our previous blogs “Brad Pitt Goes Shopping” and “Brad Pitt Goes Shopping Again” to see other examples of museum-quality furniture. Can’t wait to see what these folks come up with next!

Work is underway to calm down an extraordinarily artistic home where the previous owner, the artist herself, had let her talents roam throughout.

There are so many beautiful details in this home: it has a wonderful country feel even though it sits smack-dab in the middle of Suburbia. The yard backs onto a woodsy green belt full of hiking trails, and there’s a wonderful screened-in back porch complete with squeaky screen door. Inside is detailing throughout:  stained-glass panelled doors, beamed ceilings in one room, beadboard ceiling in another, mosaic floors hand-installed, wrought iron screening along the staircase, hand-weathered and painted baseboards. These are the details we love and want to keep. But each room is faux-painted in its own style and color palette. Great, except that the patterns and colors in one room have little to do with what’s happening in the next.

We’re about to change all that.

Our goal is simple: unify and bring flow to a great floor plan by allowing the best of these custom features to shine while toning down the rest. We want to bring the tranquility that you naturally associate with a country home and do away with all the busy.

Here’s what we’re starting with:

Dining Room Before

In the Dining Room, we certainly want to keep this fabulous mosaic floor and unique crystal chandelier. But we’ll tone down the candy-green wall by softening it to a sage green. And we’ll swap the floral window treatment with green velvet curtain panels we found elsewhere in the home. Not sure about using the distressed white wood rod yet…

Study Before

Here’s the study, opposite the dining room. We’ll be replacing the carpet with Brazilian Cherry hardwood similar to what we have elsewhere in the house and continuing the sage green from the dining room. And we’ll marry the two floors with a wonderful Saltillo-style tile that wears much better than the real thing. Whoosh!  I feel calmer already.

Kitchen Before

Here’s the kitchen. We like the oak cabinets, but we’re bringing our sage green here as well, along with the Saltillo-style tile with a complimentary back-splash including random hand-painted accent tiles. And we’ll replace the Formica countertop with a fantastic granite that has the most incredible blue “teardrops” scattered throughout. Can’t wait to show you the after pics!

Wow, the design seminar we did last week about area rugs was fabulous! Good turnout, good food, and lots of interest in area rugs of all styles. But I think the most fun we had was during the “good rug bad rug” contest.

After we discussed area rugs and how, where, when, and why to use them, we showed slides illustrating a few good and not-so-good examples. A disclaimer: none of these are our work! These are catalog photos that are meant to sell sofas rather than area rugs. But they were fun just the same.

So what do you think? Good rug, or bad rug?

Want to do something really fun and special for Christmas? How about a collection of glass ornaments, each handmade by the artist? Here are some possibilities:

How great it would be to buy one or two every year for a stocking stuffer, building a wonderful collection over time. We did that with Calphalon cookware , but that’s not nearly as sentimental…plus the Dutch oven really stretched out the stocking.

And what collection would be complete without the Red-nosed One himself? Here he is:

All from $22 – $325 at The Artful Home, www.artfulhome.com .