Design Details for Dummies

The holidays are over, the decorations packed away. The joyous overflow that was Christmas has turned into a sad collection of bare spots on mantels and tabletops.

Are you desperately seeking accessories? Is everything in your pre-holiday stock too small and uninteresting? Was your last craft project better left forgotten?

Relax.

We offer you Design Details for Dummies, collected suggestions from three Orange County designers on easy ways to embellish a room and give it that homey, lived-in quality with a sophisticated edge. No glue guns are required. But an open mind might come in handy.

Perhaps all the foyer needs is a stack of cannonballs. And aren’t there more interesting things than flowers to put in those clear glass vases? Our designers explain how to use new accessories along with items you already have to add interest and creativity to your home.

Don’t let that word “creativity” throw you; even the artistically challenged can make these ideas work.

Designers Dana Eggerts of Creative Design Consultants Inc. in Costa Mesa, Carmen Olsson of Irvine and Pam Stovall of Fountain Valley share some design secrets, bright ideas and help with common pitfalls in accessorizing.

Here’s a few general rules they all agreed on:

* Three may be a crowd in a checkout line, but it’s a good number for a group of accessories. Three items of different heights work better than two. The don’t have to be three of the same thing, Stovall added.

* Angles are good. When you arrange items on a square table for example, don’t square everything off; put one piece at an angle. It’s more interesting.

* Bigger is better. “Nothing smaller than a football, is our rule,” said Eggerts, who specializes in model homes. A large plant on a coffee table looks better than a small one. Big walls need big pictures or groupings of smaller pictures with wide mats.

Accessories are usually the last additions to a room, and the fact that they can be added and subtracted makes them important design elements for creating a mood or infusing harmony and color, said Stovall.

Like all design work, accessorizing is based on color, balance and scale, she said. Before you begin, look at the scale of the room and take its architectural elements, ceiling and windows into account to help bring about a balance with accessories.

Scale and mass, the designers agreed, are the key. When they toss those words around, they are really talking about relative height and size.

Scale is the proportion of an object or space to all other objects, to people and to the space it belongs in. Mass refers to the visual weight of an object. The perfect combination of scale and mass is not easy to define. You have it when things look so right that the issue doesn’t even cross your mind. “It’s elusive,” Olsson admitted.

To get a good idea of successful scale and mass, Eggerts suggested touring model homes.

Her firm accessorizes a lot of model home bookcases, and people always ask how they get the bookcases to look so interesting, she said.

The answer is that nothing is the same size or height, there is space between items and there’s more than just books in those bookcases. There are plants and candlesticks and vases and boxes. And lately, birdhouses.

Almost anything can be an accessory. Books, old picture frames, those florist vases that have multiplied under the sink, all can be pressed into service.

“People have attics,” said Olsson, who ventured into hers last month to get down Christmas decorations and emerged with an idea for what to do with a boxful of picture frames. Here’s that, and some of her other suggestions:

* Take the artwork your children bring home from school and instead of sticking it on the refrigerator, put it in a frame. Use frames of different sizes and shapes and let the artist decide what the most important part of the picture is if it has to be trimmed. Then mass the frames together on a table.

* Collect those clear glass vases that floral arrangements come in and fill them with gum balls. They should be different sizes and shapes and placed all around the rooms people live and play in.

Gum balls are colorful, and they have a great shape, Olsson said. Using them will restore the festive look we miss when Christmas is over, she added.

Jars with lids could be used as well, but the size of the contents is important. Her daughter suggested using Skittles, a colorful candy, but Olsson dismissed them as too small.

* If your houseplants haven’t fared well over the winter, fill the ceramic pots with white sand and put seashells in them. You can use them for doorstops, and it will make your thoughts turn to spring vacations at the beach, she said.

Olsson, who has designed for several of the American Society of Interior Designers’ annual Design House projects, used that idea at a design house where the French doors kept flying open.

In one project, she admired another designer’s use of stacked cannonballs in the foyer. “I had seen cannonballs, but I couldn’t think of a way to use them. I thought they were quite clever in the foyer,” she said.

She managed her own clever use of balls on a smaller scale--marbles--in a design house game room. In a corner where most people would have stuck a plant, she placed two statues of kneeling children. It didn’t look quite complete until she added an open bag with marbles spilling out in front of them.

The element of surprise can be achieved in different ways, like taking collections out of the curio cabinet, the designers said.

Porcelain eggs can be placed in a special bowl for a dining room centerpiece or in uneven numbers on a bookshelf, said Stovall, who likes to find surprising areas to show off small collections. Instead of hanging plates on a display rack, she suggested using picture stands in wood and wrought iron to hold individual pieces.

Here are some of her other ideas:

* Place fat, odd-shaped pillows in varying colors and sizes on small accent chairs, daybeds or sofas.

* Oversized books, the kind that never fit in the bookcase, can be stacked up to double as a table and placed beside a chair. Eight 2-inch-thick books are about the height of an ottoman, she said.

* Lean large, framed pictures against a wall instead of hanging. This works best in a room with a wood floor. To make it look as if you planned it--and are not just waiting for someone to come around with a hammer and nail--place a chair beside the picture and a shelf made from molding strips above it.

* Jars with lemons, nuts or beads add color and texture in a kitchen or family room. A bowl of lemons, or green or red apples makes a statement in a white kitchen and such stores as Pier 1 Imports and Crate & Barrel carry inexpensive but interesting pieces to put them in, she said.

* Use vases with tall, curly willow or cattails for a natural look in a corner of a room. Curly willow, which comes in 4- to 10-foot lengths, used to be a trade secret but is available now at many craft stores, said Stovall, who is a floral designer as well. She also likes to use natural plants such as grasses and moss in terra-cotta pots.

Eggerts, too, likes to use terra-cotta pots indoors. She suggested adding dried flowers to them, planting herbs or bulbs in them or turning them upside down and putting candles on the top. They can be tied with raffia or ribbons. And buttons, which she said are big now, can be glued to them. You could even use terra-cotta pots as bookends, she added.

Here are some of her other ideas:

* Place a mix of candlesticks on a coffee table that shares space with a large plant. The plant acts as a backdrop, and the candlesticks add different heights, widths, colors and textures. The candles themselves are neutral in color. How many to use? You have to play with it, she said, but she has 15 candlesticks on her 42-inch-wide table.

* Use bird cages for finches arranged with leaves and dried flowers or birdhouses in different sizes and heights. The bird cages work well in new homes with high wall niches; birdhouses add a rustic look to bookcases or tables. Birdhouses can be found at the Nature Co. stores and Roger’s Gardens in Corona del Mar, she said.

* Interesting boxes, such as keepsake or jewelry boxes, can be emptied and moved to a cocktail table to add interest and variety.

* Items normally stored away, such as china pieces or a decanter, can be displayed on a stand in the hutch or on an elegant tray on the side piece in the dining room. Colorful tassels can be added to decanters.

* Decorative easels and stands can be used for framed pictures and small artwork placed on a table. It’s a good way to give impact to small artwork that would be lost if it were just placed on the wall, she said.

Books can be used as accessories. Eggerts suggested taking the covers off and stacking them on a coffee table.

There’s a distinction between what should go on the living room coffee table and what should go on the family room table, she said. In the living room, people just want enough space to put a coffee cup down. But in the family room, the books should be ones you are actually reading, and there should be something you can put your feet up on, she said.

To start accessorizing a mantel, Eggerts suggested placing a small piece of art on a little easel, filling a vase with flowers and putting that next to it. Constantly changing the flowers will give you a different look.

The heights of items on the mantel should vary, she said. One side should have something a little higher than the other side, and the total look doesn’t have to be symmetrical.

So what’s the key to putting it all together?

“A lot of it is just observation and trial and error,” said Stovall.

And much, Olsson added, can be done at the mercy of department stores, because anything you buy can be returned if it doesn’t work.

“Just don’t be afraid to try something,” Stovall said.