Candice Olson Favorite Design Challenges

By Candice Olson

Popular TV star Candice Olson shares her favorite design challenges

Candice Olson Favorite Design Challenges focuses on the tricky situations that Candice expertly handles for her clients—the same challenges that many homeowners face. From working around architectural limitations like sloped ceilings or a lack of wall space, merging styles to ensure that a room's decor pleases all of a home's occupants, to accommodating the changes that come about when a family grows or shrinks, this book highlights those ingenious solutions that make Candice's designs both beautiful and functional.

Featuring 25-30 of Candice's stunning room makeovers—described in her approachable and authoritative voice—Candice Olson Favorite Design Challenges provides gorgeous sketches and design boards that show you how each design took shape, while more than 200 full-color before-and-after photos offer a wealth of visual inspiration.

• Includes Candice's tips and insight into what makes each space work
• Candice shares how she overcame the predominant challenge in each case
• Provides invaluable guidance on planning your own room redos

Redecorating—or even just dreaming about decorating—can transform one's outlook on life, and Candice Olson Favorite Design Challenges is just what you need to dream, plan, and execute up a redo in your own home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9780544178700

Candice Olson

CANDICE OLSON is one of North America’s leading designers. Her television series, Divine Design with Candice Olson, has been seen by millions. Her popular show Candice Tells All airs on HGTV in the United States and on W Network in Canada.

Book preview

1

Architectural Challenges

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A Knockout Living-Dining Room

Challenge

The first room you see when you come into Kim and Rey’s home is the long, narrow, living-dining area, which the previous owner painted bright yellow and turquoise. Rey, a former professional boxer, likes to use the unfurnished space to teach their two boys to box, but Kim, a painter and children’s television director, says it’s time to move the boxing lessons to the basement. They’d both like the space to be a warm, welcoming center for family life as well as a suitable place to welcome clients of Rey’s boxing equipment business. But the space is more like a bowling alley than a boxing ring, and they don’t know where to start.

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BEFORE: The brightly painted living-dining room in Kim and Rey’s small suburban bungalow was mostly a kid zone that Kim and Rey couldn’t figure out how to furnish or decorate.

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AFTER: I gave the bum’s rush to those yellow and turquoise walls with knockout neutral beige and some creamy white trim. A new fireplace on one side and new floor-to-ceiling bookcases on the other break up the long, narrow space, giving the eye places to rest.

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Solution

• To counteract the tunnel effect, the first thing this space needs is a focal point. A gas-insert fireplace flanked by bookcases not only defines a cozy living area but also pulls your eye over to one side instead of letting it race down this long chute of a room.

• Because budget was a consideration, I used ready-to-assemble bookcases instead of custom. But to give them a custom look, I installed beadboard behind the shelves and unified the whole wall of cabinetry and the fireplace with a slab of dark-stained wood that also serves as a mantel. To add some interest and depth, I painted the beadboard a soft, watery blue.

• For some architectural interest, I also installed framed beadboard panels on the wall above the mantel and bookcases. The beadboard adds subtle texture that calls even more attention to this wall, downplaying the room’s narrow dimensions.

• On the opposite wall, a floor-to-ceiling bookcase balances the fireplace and provides storage and display space. Like the bookcases flanking the fireplace, it’s a ready-to-assemble unit, and I customized it with crown molding on top and beadboard paneling inside.

• To visually widen the end wall, I treated the five bay windows as a single unit. One long set of woven wood blinds, installed outside the bay, pulls down for privacy and light control. Dummy drapery panels frame the bay with tall columns of color that create the illusion of a higher ceiling.

• I anchored the dining area with an armless bench pushed up against the wall and a new, 6-foot-long pedestal table (see it here). A pedestal table makes it easy to scoot onto the bench, and it’s also easier to squeeze in a few more people around the table when you have a crowd.

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Nothing says focal point quite like a fireplace! I framed the gas insert with a surround of fireproof cement board painted flat black to blend with the insert’s frame, then installed a beautiful mosaic of randomly sized round glass tiles. Beadboard panels set into picture-frame molding add dimension to the walls above.

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Crown molding customizes a store-bought bookcase. A floating display shelf and a unique wall-hung organizational system add function and style to the adjacent wall.

Style Elements

• Kim and Rey had bought a striped ottoman in an attempt to start decorating the space, so I used it for my jumping-off point. I pulled the putty-beige color for the walls from the stripe and chose a crisp white for the trim and the ready-to-assemble bookcases.

• With all the light neutrals helping expand and enlarge the sense of space, I decided on a dark, pre-finished wood-plank floor to ground the room.

• For furniture, I chose armless and open-arm seating to help keep the look and feeling open. A tailored, tufted love seat fits right in front of the bay window, and a lounge chair with sleek, modern lines rounds out the living room seating. Petite but comfy dining chairs can be moved over to the living room if there’s a crowd.

• For fabrics, I chose a beautiful floral that looks like a watercolor painting for the lounge chair and a solid, neutral tweed for the love seat. I found a stripe very similar to the ottoman fabric to use on the dining room chairs. A beautiful large-scale modern geometric for the draperies plays on—what else?—the boxing ring. The draperies are nonfunctioning dummy panels, but they bring in a splash of color at the end of the room and pick up on the blues in the lounge chair floral.

• The ring theme shows up in the fireplace surround too. The mosaic of randomly sized round glass tiles is a showstopper that brings together all the colors in the palette. I used a creamy white, nonsanded grout on the tile to avoid scratching the gorgeous glass