All posts by Beth and Carolina

The Magic of Wallpaper

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Wallpaper is more popular than ever before. Nothing can add more pop and visual interest to a room than an amazing wall covering. The Pulp team loves to use special patterns and custom designs to add punch to their interiors projects. Here are some of our favorite ways to use wallpaper to make a big statement!

Color Highlight

In a black-and-white monochrome bathroom, adding a vibrant pattern from Abnormals Anonymous in turquoise transforms this bathroom. Part of a basement renovation, the wallpaper brightens the room and makes it a compelling focal point.

A Bit of Whimsy

Wallpaper can also tell a story for you. In the pattern above, we customized the design with a bold black background and touches of glam gold in the kernels. But what story is it telling? This special wall covering is going up in a home theater, and what goes better with movies than popcorn?!

Wrap It Up

Wallpaper can create a chic-but-cozy space if it wraps the room from floor to ceiling! We took a gorgeously glam pattern and covered all 4 walls AND the ceiling to create a super-special space for our clients.

The Element of Surprise

The wallcovering above from Elitis is one of our all-time favorites! It’s unique and textural and it transforms this tiny space into a surprisingly stunning gallery.

Focal Point

In our modern glass house project, a boring sliding wall becomes a compelling focal point with this lovely crane pattern from Phillip Jeffries. It is so gorgeous that it looks like an oversized piece of art!

Looking Up

As your looking for fantastic wallpaper patterns, remember to look up! In a neutral themed modern lakehouse, adding pattern keeps the visual interest high. We placed this wallpaper on the ceiling to be the perfect counterpoint to the art and the lovely rug.

Use these ideas to create wow-worthy spaces with wallpaper! And if you need help creating unexpected moments in your rooms, just give us a call.

Making the Most of a Micro-Renovation

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The Pulp team’s work ranges from new construction to down-to-the-studs renovations. But we also love to do micro-renovations! What’s that, you ask? Those are smart home refreshes and furnishings packages that offer a nip-and-tuck approach to updating a home. In a micro-renovation, we work with fantastic contractors and trades to make small improvements that pay off big time!

For example, the clients who own the home pictured above had purchased this beautiful house in a sought-after Dallas neighborhood. It had great bones and well-appointed hard finishes, but it didn’t reflect their personal style. Rather than a major renovation, the house just needed a simple lift with paint, lighting, and furnishings. This micro-renovation gave our clients a home that is now a complete reflection of personality and style!

In another Dallas home for a family of 5, our team planned minor renovation projects and furnishings packages that would transform this home on a very tight deadline. Small improvements that don’t involve structural changes can still completely transform a space. Just look at what a bit of tile did for the room above!

For that same project, check out the “before” of the home office. We painted the room a bright white, added new furniture and textiles, and curated an art package that our clients loved. And look at how incredible the reworked room is below!

Wallpaper also makes a huge difference in transforming a room. Below, we used a painterly design to showcase the creativity of our clients. Pulp also brought in unique furnishings to tell the edgy and modern style story that fit the clients. The result is a fashion forward and playful modern residence that the homeowners are proud to call home.

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Most importantly, the Pulp micro-renovations not only help personalize your home, but they also add a lot of value.

In the Seattle home above, Pulp created a warm furnishings package to complement the contemporary architecture and finishes. The result highlights the best of the architecture and design, but also adds much-needed softness and balance.

Designing your dream home doesn’t always mean you need to tear things down and start all over. Contact us today to see if our micro-renovation package is right for you!

Tour this Modern Glass House Featured in Gray Magazine!

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We’re so excited that this modern glass house project on Lake Washington is featured in the Masterworks Issue of Gray Magazine! We are so proud of this new construction project that our team worked on for the last few years with DeForest Architects and Toth Construction. These clients really let us create something unique for them and have unrestrained design fun. That’s what it should be!
With floor-to-ceiling windows that can be opened to let the rooms flow into the outdoor setting, the architecture makes the most of the mountain and lake views. These clients love to entertain, are a family of artists, and enjoy travel. So we created unique design details that were geared towards creating, entertaining, and showcasing the soul of these unique clients. Luckily, they also were not afraid of color, pattern, or taking a risk, which is why they were drawn to Pulp Design Studios in their exhaustive hunt for a designer. Let’s take a tour of this gorgeous home!

Entry/Exterior

Pulp Design Studios Modern Glass House

Living Room

Dining Room/Kitchen

Study

Principal Bedroom Suite

Artist Studio

To take the full tour of this gorgeous modern home, just click here!
Lakehouse Retreat seating and wood shelving in living room

Gray Is Still Having Its Day

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Gray has had a long run as a popular color for interiors. Some may have thought that it was on its way out, but it’s still going strong! Need proof? The color forecasting icon Pantone selected two colors for its 2021 Colors of the Year – a soft Ultimate Gray and a bright yellow called Illuminating. We’ve used this color duo before and it makes a great pairing. You can see it above in one of our projects. That soft gray is Repose from Sherwin-Williams and it’s a great all-around gray.

We were also excited to be interviewed for Martha Stewart’s website to talk about our favorite gray paint colors. We love Cyberspace from Sherwin-Williams (you can see it above)! As we told Martha, it’s a dramatic tone that makes a strong impact in a room, but the fact that it’s gray takes the edge off. We love the drama.

Gray is also gorgeous on furnishings. In the room we created above, it’s a soft accompaniment to the white walls, and it was all inspired by the lakeside views outside. The CR Laine captain’s chairs are covered in San Polo by Castel, and they work so well with that lovely gray rug from Driscoll Robbins.

Another project that features that soft Repose Gray is the midcentury modern renovation we designed above. With a slightly darker gray on the sectional and a great pop of teal, this room is a great reflection of the home’s history, but with a modern update.

We love the neutral undertones of Repose, too. It’s great in any room, but especially where you want to create a sense of calm and quiet, like in the sitting area of a principal bedroom (above).

What do you think about gray’s longevity? Is it still a color you’d want in your home? Let us know!

4 Tips for Trying Bold Color in Your Home

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There’s one thing we hear over and over – most people are still fearful about using bright colors in their homes. They either think it will be “too much,” or that they’ll get tired of it quickly. But those bold colors are important as we spend more time at home. In fact, now is the perfect time to experiment. It’s your home and it should make you happy. So the Pulp team has 4 foolproof tips for getting bolder in your home’s palette!

Go Small

A little can go a long way when you’re trying out color in your home. Find a small space where you can experiment, like in the pantry at the top of this post, or the cabinetry we designed in the kitchen above. Those little hits of color should complement the rest of the room, and we guarantee they’ll make you smile. If you’re super-nervous, use spaces that don’t get a lot of traffic or that are inside a closet or small space.

Be Art Smart

Art is a great way to bring dramatic colors into your rooms. Choose pieces that you love, even if the color is bolder than you might normally try. You also might want to select an oversized piece to cover a large wall and make a big statement. Then you can bring in accessories that complement the colors in the art. This is a great way to slowly build up a strong color story in a room!

Accent the Positive

Try accent pieces in super-bright colors as a foray into a bold new world! We loved using these hot pink swivel chairs to brighten an otherwise neutral space. And notice that we also used the same color in pillows and even in book covers. The great thing about using pops of color like this is you can easily switch them out if they don’t work for you. And with a neutral main palette, you can play with the accent colors until you find the perfect one.

Drench It

We love a monochrome room! That’s a space that is absolutely drenched in one dramatic color, like the black bathroom above. This is a room that your friends and family will talk about – and they’ll marvel at how brave you are. To take this approach, again choose a color that you really like, but don’t go pale and quiet. Think about cobalt blue, bright emerald, sizzling saffron, or deep merlot. Don’t use too many other colors in the room to help you achieve the perfect look.

Try going this bold in the smallest room in your house – the powder room! This is the perfect room to experiment in because you won’t see it all the time. Drama works very well in these little spaces, so really go bold. Remember, paint doesn’t cost a lot, so if you don’t like it, it’s easy to change.

We LOVE to work with bold color and we know how to select the perfect ones for each of our clients. Need help with color and personality in your home? Give us a call!

It’s Giving Tuesday!

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Giving back and paying it forward are core values for Pulp Design Studios. On Giving Tuesday, the Pulp team is highlighting the charities that are close to our hearts and that we support throughout the year. Each of our team members has selected their own non-profit to showcase. So please consider donating to the non-profits we’ve listed below, or to causes that you believe in. This season, more than ever, they need our support.

Carolina’s Charity: Dwell with Dignity

Dwell with Dignity designs and installs complete home interiors for families who desperately need an environment that will support health and wellness. They empower families to lead their best lives and to thrive in a safe, functional, and beautiful environment. Click here to learn more or to donate.

Beth’s Charity: The Conscious Kid

The Conscious Kid is an education, research, and policy organization dedicated to equity and promoting healthy racial identity development in youth. The group supports organizations, families, and educators in taking action to disrupt racism in young children. Click here to learn more or to donate.

Tracy’s Charity: Baby2Baby

Baby2Baby is a mega diaper bank and nonprofit organization providing essential items to children in need across the country. In the last 9 years, Baby2Baby has distributed over 100 million items to children in homeless shelters, domestic violence programs, foster care, hospitals, and underserved schools. Click here to learn more or to donate.

Tara’s Charity: The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a national network of crisis centers that provides free and confidential support to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is committed to improving crisis services and advancing suicide prevention. Click here to learn more or to donate.

Jana’s Charity: The Humane Society

The Humane Society fights the big fights to end suffering for all animals.They take on puppy mills, factory farms, the fur trade, trophy hunting, animal cosmetics testing, and other cruel industries. And they rescue and care for thousands of animals every year through the Animal Rescue Team. Click here to learn more or to donate.

 

Ellie’s Charity: Team Read

Team Read in Seattle propels young students to become inspired, joyful readers. Team Read’s dual-impact model helps young students to become confident, joyful readers equipped for academic success, and teens to develop work and life skills that support their transition to college and future employment. Click here to learn more or to donate.

Leina’s Charity: The Bridge

The Bridge is a homeless recovery center for individuals without a home in Dallas County. Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, The Bridge offers basic needs services including hot showers, nutritious meals, and haircuts, as well as intensive services such as physical and mental health evaluations and care management services. Click here to learn more or to donate.

Aidan’s Charity: Planned Parenthood

With over 100 years of service, Planned Parenthood is a trusted health care provider, an informed educator, a passionate advocate, and a global partner helping similar organizations around the world. Planned Parenthood delivers vital reproductive health care, sex education, and information to millions of people worldwide. Click here to learn more or to donate.

How We Solved Our Biggest Design Dilemmas

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We recently revealed to Architectural Digest what our biggest design dilemma has been in the last few years. We told the editor that it was an awkward space under our client’s stairs, and that we transformed it into a magical hidden door to a fabulous wine room – you can see the door closed above, and open below. In our business, you run into dilemmas a lot, and we had a few projects to choose from that gave us issues to work around. But the Pulp team loves a challenge – it lets us put our creativity into high gear. Take a look at these projects that offered dilemmas, and how we solved them!

Getting the Perfect Finish

In the photo below, all you see now are gorgeous beams and lots of beautiful wood tones. But getting that fabulous lodge look was a challenging multistep process that took hundreds of hours of applying finishes and comparing results. We literally had 15 reapplications of stains. Our clients had two very different design styles. He wanted a more rustic look and she was more into a modern transitional design. So getting these finishes right was key to combining what they wanted into a cohesive style. They love the finished look!

From Dingy to Dynamite

The project below required a lot of vision on our part because what we started with was a dark and dreary basement. In fact, it was so bad that we had to show you the before photo below. It was a HUGE challenge to work through the renovation and create a family room and bathroom that was a stunning as the interiors upstairs (which Pulp finished a couple of years ago). We added fabulous wallpaper and art, built-in storage, and lots of great seating to create a stunning hangout that made our clients want to show off this space to everyone who came to their home (pre-COVID, of course).

Before
After

That Awkward Corner

Every interior designer who sees a corner fireplace, especially at an angle, will roll her eyes. It can be such a pain to design around these, and really they should just be removed. So when our clients said they wanted to keep their midcentury modern dream house but needed it to be reworked, we knew the fireplace below had to go. They also needed more room, so our solution was actually a win-win. We gutted the structure, creating an addition that opened up the floorplan. That let us expand this room and add a new (NOT angled) fireplace! See before and after photos below.

Before
After

Do you have a design dilemma? We would love to help you find the perfect solution! Just get in touch with us by clicking here!

The 4 Things Every Family Kitchen Needs

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Kitchen design has changed in the last year to reflect how we’re all using that room today. It used to be the place to cook a meal or find a snack, and it’s still key for that, of course. But the kitchen is also now a Zoom room, a place for homework and online classes, an arts and crafts station, and so much more. So in addition to the usual must-haves like durable counters, cabinets, and floors, there are other key ingredients for a hard-working family kitchen. Let’s take a look!

1. Take a Seat

If you don’t have a kitchen island or table in your kitchen, we bet you’re really missing it right now. Because counters are meant to withstand heat, stains, and more, kitchen islands and counters are perfect places for kids to do schoolwork. It’s also a nice setting for your online meetings because the light is usually really good in this room. And it’s great to be able to multitask in the kitchen – keeping your eye on the kids at the island while you’re making a meal or putting groceries away. The Pulp team used bright orange stools in the kitchen above to add a bit of fun, too. Top renovation requests right now include adding more room (and seating!) to kitchens.

Leviton

2. Get Technical

There are so many new tech tools that make your work in the kitchen more efficient. We’re all about USB plugs, like the one above from Leviton. This is an especially cool model because it also has a lightning plug for Mac fanatics (like us!). Other great kitchen tech to consider include app-driven appliances like a coffee machine that starts your brew while you’re still in bed. Or voice-controlled faucets that fill a pot to exact measurements. We talk with our clients about how they use their kitchens and then suggest time-saving and smart tech ideas to make their workload a little lighter – and more fun.

3. Offer Easy Access

In the kitchen above, we added a beverage station for the littles in the house. It gives them some independence to be able to grab their own drinks – and keeps them from opening your fridge 100 times a day. The Pulp team also likes to use fridge drawers, pull-out snack drawers, and microwave drawers to make things easy for kids from tiny to teens. That will also help you keep them out of the background of your Zoom calls as they ask for yet another snack!

4. Organize It All

The kitchen is definitely the hub of your home, so consider adding a “command central” to the room. In the kitchen above, the Pulp team created an organized family center that includes calendars, places for notes and important papers, drawers for bags and equipment, and more. It’s great for keeping up with meetings, deadlines, and school assignments.. You can even add a computer station to the hub, like we did below, which gives you another working-from-home space – and we all need more of those!

The Pulp team loves a good kitchen remodel – and we’re now booking into 2021. Get in touch here if you’re ready to create the perfect kitchen for your family!

5 Tips for Setting the Perfect Table

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There’s an art to setting a stunning table for a dinner party – it’s more than just plates and linens. With Thanksgiving only two weeks away, the Pulp team has assembled their top 5 tips for making this a holiday table to remember, showcasing photos from an amazing shoot we did for Traditional Home magazine. And be sure to read to the bottom to find a link to our favorite holiday playlist!

1. Make It Visually Appealing

The best table design has a lot of visual interest with different heights, patterns, colors, and textures. It makes the table look fuller and more sophisticated, too. We also added style with a custom table runner in our Pulp Design Studios for S.Harris fabric, using the Hidalgo pattern. You can get that fabric, too, by clicking here.

2. Add a Unique Detail

Use something unique like these handpainted leather placemats to set your table apart. Mix in a vintage bowl that you picked up on your travels. Serve your sides in pottery you found in a gallery. Think about how you can add unexpected moments that tell a story.

3. Keep It Fresh

Flowers, fruits, herbs, plants all add life to the table. But even here, be daring with your table decor. We added porcupine quills to this arrangement, which took it from good to fabulous!

4. Make It Personal

No one should have to reach for the salt and pepper, so we like to offer either personal shakers at each place setting, or at least multiples at each end of the table. It’s the little things that mean a lot!

5. Be Bold

Who says you have to use the same old clear vase? We love using objects with a lot of visual interest for our florals, like this spiky footed goblet by L’Objet. You don’t have to use the same old turkey platters and fall-themed plates. Make your table memorable with bolder designs and ideas.

We know that this holiday season is going to be different with shutdown rules and smaller gatherings. To lift your spirits during this holiday season, click here for Pulp’s Merry + Bright playlist on Spotify!

 

5 Ways to Create the Must-Have Home Bar

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As we head into the holiday season, we know things are going to be different this year. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still celebrate and have fun. A home bar gives you a great way to raise a glass with family or to toast to a new year, even if your gatherings are smaller. Here are 5 ways to create that must-have home bar for the holidays and beyond. And be sure to scroll down to get a recipe for our favorite fall cocktail!

1. Use Extra Space

A built-in bar looks chic and professional. If you’re adding a bar to your existing home, look for spaces where you can easily add shelves, a counter, and refrigeration or an ice maker. For the bar above, we used extra space on the other side of a kitchen wall to create a lovely place for our clients to store and enjoy their favorite wines and cocktails. A fridge is easy to add with an outlet – but if you can also plumb the space, it’s great to have an ice maker or a bar sink, too.

2. Create a Wine Room

If you’re really into savoring and collecting wine, consider adding your own wine room. We designed the space above in what could have been a storage closet originally. We added shelving for bottles, as well as chic decor to make the room extra special. You can create your own wine room in an spare room, a closet, or a pantry. If you want to store your wine at the right temperature, you can even add a separate thermostat that will keep the room as cool as it needs to be.

3. Build the Perfect Bar

If you have the budget and the space, nothing beats a custom bar like the one we created above. You can add all the bells and whistles, like refrigeration, bar stools, a sink, and even a TV. This can be added to one side of a family room, it could be a great basement renovation project, or you can add it to your plans for a new build. We love to create these chic home bars for clients, so if you’re ready to renovate give us a call!

4. Add a Bar Cart

If you aren’t ready for a major project, a bar cart is always a fabulous way to go. For the bar cart above, we made sure there was plenty of room for our client’s favorite liqueurs and cocktail mixers, as well as glasses and bar tools. You can see a different view at the top of the page.

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5. Table the Bar

If you aren’t ready for a huge commitment, you can always create a great mini bar on any surface. All it takes is a lovely tray and your favorite bottles. Glasses and mixers can always be stored in a cabinet or a nearby shelf. But make the tabletop bar just as inviting as its bigger counterpart!

A Perfect Day

This cocktail is our go-to for fall. Relatively low in alcohol, it’s perfect for brunch or to wind down your day!

INGREDIENTS

1 oz. Averna Amaro Siciliano
1 oz. Italian sweet vermouth (We like Carpano Antica Formula for this)
1⁄2 oz. mint simple syrup
3⁄4 oz. fresh lemon juice
Mint leaves for garnish
Ice

EQUIPMENT

Coupe glass
Cocktail shaker
Juicer

INSTRUCTIONS

Add mint simple syrup, amaro, vermouth, and lemon juice in a cocktail shaker. Fill with ice. Shake until outside of shaker is frosty, about 30 seconds. Strain into a couple glass. Add a mint leaf or lemon rind to top of the cocktail.

Enjoy!