LiseVintgLightg's Profile

Long comment, but speaks to both camps:

Decorating my home is a very enjoyable and personal thing. While I completely understand why it works for so many, I would never dream of simply handing what I consider to be a labor-of-love over to someone else. Through the years however, we have moved several times and our continually evolving and very personal decor has made each move with us-- inherited family treasures, thrifted finds, pedigreed antiques, travel memories... I am also one of those design magazine junkies mentioned. However, as this was years before I started my lighting business I knew that I would not have access to the majority of the fabric showrooms I was most interested in as I sought to freshen and blend, that I needed someone with experience/connections to not only help me make changes to existing furniture but also make a few furniture purchases in order to expand into a larger dwelling, and blend it well with our new surroundings. In addition, I simply would never have enough time to track down and research, locally or online, what I was able to access.

I knew that I needed help and began to ask everyone I had ever known to have used a decorator until I found a wonderful interior decorator who was very open to my being as involved as I desired to be. Robyn listened to my ideas and how I wanted to bring everything together in our new home, she was very sensitive to our budget, was as excited about a good flea market as a to-the-trade showroom. Robyn did the research on my piles of collected fabric swatches magazine clippings & brought her research back to me. Based on her research of my clippings (price/availability/fabric content/measurements) I narrowed the field on what we would explore further. Together we hit the local fabric and furniture showrooms in the Dallas Design District, places I did not have access to on my own.

You CAN have the best of both! As hands-on and territorial as I am about the decor in which my family resides, hiring an interior decorator turned out to be an extremely helpful, educational, enjoyable, and time-saving decision.

Loving these choices for office storage as much as gift boxing! Thanks for the links!

LOVE vintage for kids rooms! I am a bit biased obviously, but I also share the concern for avoiding lead paint.

I have learned over time as I make choices for my children's lighting shop (Mary Had A Little Lamp) that you can generally make safe, vintage decor choices as you flea and thrift if you stick to glazed ceramic, oiled or stained wood, glass, plastic or fiberglass, most of which are kept out of kids reach anyway. There are a wealth of choices out of these materials, especially from mid-century American design items! Further, people often think of Mid-Century Modern design such as machine age, Panton/Eames or Atomic design, but in actuality there are many more options to be easily found for just about any kids' decor from this ultra-creative, multi-decade time in American design history! It is less difficult than you might think to make thoughtful vintage choices that not only satisfy a parent's design ideal and keep kids safe, but actually function as green choices, since by choosing vintage a parent is choosing to reuse/recycle! Besides lead paint, my only other words of caution--all vintage lighting for children should be thoroughly cleaned (inside and out!), as well as rewired and brought up to safety code!