Each morning I wake up, before I put on my makeup...

Recounting my travels in a somewhat backwards way, I wanted to recap another interesting design inspiration from Gdansk (as well as parts of Warsaw too.)

Both Warsaw and Gdansk were bombed during the war and had to be re-constructed. They paid a lot of attention to detail to recreate the Old Town look, and after 60 or so years they look pretty authentic. (I'm afraid of how Disneyland/Westworld it might have all looked right after they rebuilt everything in the '50s.)

Something I saw that could be applied to more modern buildings Stateside is an exterior trompe l'oeil treatment. Basically, if you don't have any interesting architectural details to the outside of your space, why not fake it?

I found these pretty good examples:

And of course, you could have some fun inside too ;-)

More next week!

Now five years later on you've got the world at your feet...

I'm back! It hasn't exactly been five years, but I know I've been off the blogging radar for a while now. I left Ye Olde Dayjobbe at the end of March after (mostly) wrapping up some projects and began setting up shop on my own with some help from Homepolish.

April was really busy, working with new clients and trying to run a business by myself. So a couple of weeks ago my partner and I took a vacation. Flying into London first (where we always seem to go) we then hopped over to Poland to see his ancestral homeland. Krakow, Warsaw, and Gdansk--all will probably be featured here over the next few blog posts.

While in Gdansk, we stayed at Holland House, which I likened to the Zetter Townhouse in London--bold design with a twist on traditional/period. The room we stayed in gave me some great ideas on how to decorate with high ceilings:

Besides the great black and white color scheme, check out that wallpaper border at the ceiling. I know you might be traumatized by wallpaper borders from the '90s (like I am) but this is such a better interpretation, especially if you can only afford one or two rolls or don't want to cover an entire wall with your favorite crazy pattern.
 

These were approximately 10ft ceilings in our room. About 7.5ft from the floor, they placed the lower molding, pasted about 2ft of paper/border, and then topped it with a larger crown molding.

I loved the effect! It's the perfect way to have some element of your favorite wallcovering (Flavor Paper or Osborne & Little, anyone?) without going too crazy.

Watch out--I'm going to try this at someone's house pretty soon. Want to be my guinea pig? Drop me a line! ;-)