INTERIOR INSPIRATIONS:
Accessories Add the Finishing Touch
by Maggie Brandon

Think of accessories as jewelry for your rooms. Just as a strand of pearls sets off a cashmere sweater the things you love and display are part of your home's signature. Whether you choose art, heirlooms, or sentimental favorites, it's your chance to express yourself without necessarily making a major investment.

Knowing what kinds of furnishings, accessories, and colors grab your eye is only part of the picture when accessorizing your home. By understanding your decorating attitude, you can pull your home together with beautiful arrangements of favorite things that consistently convey your decorating personality. Do you want formal or casual?

Formal:
A sense of order characterizes formal groupings. If that sounds like you, flank a gilded mirror with a pair of topiaries or hang paintings in perfect symmetry. Although a formal attitude can be expressed with contemporary accessories as well as classical ones, chances are you gravitate toward venerable objects with classic forms and flowering shapes. Accessories often include a mix of collected objects, antiques, or even contemporary art; personal photos and mementos convey a sense of heritage, too.

Casual:
Accessorizing casually - with a fistful of fishing lures hung from a pegged rack, seashells scattered over a shelf, or vacation snapshots grouped in driftwood frames, for instance - conveys a put-your-feet-up decorating attitude. Balance and proportion remain important, but arrangements are more relaxed and usually not symmetrical. A sense of nostalgia or whimsy is more important than the pedigree of an object, and colors can be crayon bright or earthy as a desert landscape.

Contemporary:
Calm, cool, and composed summarize this sophisticated decorating attitude. Accessories - what few there are - tend to be chosen more for what they say about form and function than for what they convey about nostalgia and warmth. Collections are carefully edited and displayed in a way that gives each piece museum-like prominence. Color steps in mostly as an accent - but often in a bold way.

Eclectic:
Far from anything goes, an eclectic approach to accessorizing involves planning and forethought. Keeping balance and proportion in mind, the idea is simple: Pick what you love. The secret is to find distinctly disparate objects that play off one another in an interesting and unexpected way with contrasting textures, shapes, and design origins.

Balance

The walls are painted. The furniture is arranged. The window treatments are hung. But until you start filling in the blanks with objects that express your personality, a room will never say enough about you. It may take years to properly accessorize a room. In fact, if you really love decorating and view it as a lifelong hobby, you don't intend for your home to ever be truly finished. You'll add items gradually, remove others, and let your accessories continually reflect your own changing interests. But even if your home is a work in progress, use your own sense of balance - the degree to which you lean toward formal or informal groupings - to help achieve and maintain harmony and consistency.

Find your focal point

A mantel is the most obvious place to begin adding personal touches, although a built-in bookcase or empty wall might serve as a starting point. In a formal room, a large painting or mirror centered over the fireplace can be flanked by identical objects such as porcelain vases. Casual settings call for asymmetrical groupings - perhaps a tall basket of willow branches or a painting placed off-center and then balanced by a trio of weighty beeswax candles.

Vary the pace

A good story builds excitement then lets the reader relax for a moment, just as satisfying decorating schemes include quiet, uncluttered zones between high-drama areas.

Know when to stop:

Love what you display - but don't display everything you love. Whether your attitude is formal or casual, cluttered or minimal, remember that by paring and rotating your treasures you can give them greater impact.

Tell a story

Decorating books and magazines are invaluable resources when you're collecting furnishings and design ideas. When it comes to choosing the accessories that will deliver your personal statement, however, you're on your own. Only you can write your story.

Grouped together, certain objects can create a narrative of your life. The story may be literal - perhaps told by photographs that show you and your parents over the years. Certain items or colors can cheer you, calm you, jog wonderful memories, and become conversation pieces as you recount their origins to friends.

Room to room

Walk through your rooms, gathering things that speak to you - the seashells you collected on last summer's trip to the beach, the painting you bought at a gallery in Amsterdam, the apothecary jar full of marbles that your child collected. Shop in your attic and your albums for family photos; have some copies enlarged for impact.

Birds of a feather

Even in decorating, the old maxim still applies - there's strength in numbers. When considering how best to display your collections, remember that grouping related things together will carry far greater impact than if you sprinkle lots of small items throughout a room, allowing them to get lost in space.

Multiple choices:

Some types of accessories - smaller works or those with more detail - often look best when grouped together for impact. Beautifully detailed botanical prints, for example, can turn a dull wall into a virtual garden. Small bird prints create drama - and humor - when allowed to flock together high on a wall. For fun, work flat and three-dimensional works into the same grouping. Small cat figurines on a shelf will be more interesting when you tuck a framed cat print or photo behind them.

Turn up the heat:

• Warm the walls. Blank walls benefit from even the simplest wall hangings. If you don't have the budget for expensive framing, hang a single large poster instead. Look for interesting old frames at flea markets and yard sales and mount them on the wall as is - without pictures - until you find just the right art to fill them. Suspend a favorite quilt or tapestry remnant from a wall-hung rod for instant warmth and color.
• Add architectural interest. In a white-box space, mount a window mullion above a mirror and sofa. Old columns and pediments instantly add a sense of history, plus texture and dimension, to rooms that lack character. Look at unused nooks and crannies - that black hole at the top of the stairs, for example - as spots for a tabletop gallery of family photos.
• Design quick warm-ups. Cluster candles in an empty fireplace, a dreary corner, or on a tabletop. There's no need to invest money in fancy candlesticks; just rummage through cupboards for an array of pretty glasses, terra-cotta pots, or china saucers.

Picture arranging

First attempts at picture hanging often result in walls that look like Swiss cheese. To avoid costly mistakes and frustration, carefully plan your wall arrangements before you hammer the first nail.

• Get the picture. The easiest way to get a feel for balance and spacing is to lay out on the floor all the pictures you plan to use. Or, cut paper templates of each picture, tape the templates to the wall, and move them around until you're happy with the results.
• Create special effects. Generally, walls that are wider than they are high call for horizontal groupings; narrow spaces welcome vertical arrangements. Arrange shapes within an imaginary framework with a strong horizontal anchor. Keep spaces between frames equal. To create intimacy, hang pictures low to visually link them with furniture.
• Frame for personality. Frames and mats should complement, not compete with, your pictures. Modern art often looks best in minimal frames such as metal; traditional paintings call for carved wood frames and multi-layered mats. Let the frames image, not your room palette, guide mat color. Mats in dark hues are dramatic; white mats emphasize the art itself. As a rule, mats should be twice as wide as the frame for resting the eye, but tiny pictures with oversize mats are eye-catching.