Design Mags: Get Real

I enjoy home design magazines. I like to flip through them and check out the season’s colours, trends, and the creative things that people do to their homes—well, for the most part.

Like fashion magazines, full of beautiful models with—for most people—unattainable figures and clothes, home design mags are full of beautiful houses with mainly unattainable stuff: granite-this, heated marble-that, and sharp-edged chairs (would you really sit on that and eat popcorn?). A recent issue of Style at Home featured a twenty-something Vancouver design-store owner who happened to have a $7,000 tulip table in her eating nook and a $10,000 double-crowned Venetian mirror over her fireplace. Must be nice but where’s the imagination?

In our materialistic culture, these magazines do their job, I guess: make people yearn for what they don’t have. Don’t get me wrong, I respect quality and talent. But above all, I admire vision and creativity. These always triumph over a lack of funds. Just as someone can look fabulously stylish in vintage (read: second-hand) clothes, one can have a lovely home without spending lots of money.

My husband and I moved to Kelowna last summer from the Toronto area. We bought a house long distance—through a friend’s scouting and digital photos—and made the trek across the country to our latest project. What we found was a beautiful home in a lovely neighbourhood where we’ve been very happy for the past eight months.

We also found strawberry milkshake and Georgia peach paint, vinyl-like wallpaper, hideous drapes, ten-year-old brown carpeting, and toilet-paper holders beside the stove. It was nothing terrible, but let’s just say that the house required updating.

So we’ve spent the last eight months slowly working away at our home and we’ve transformed it. There’s not a speck of gaudy paint left and the toilet paper is back in the bathroom. What’s more is that we don’t own a square foot of granite or marble.

I wanted to write this column because I see that Kelowna and the surrounding area is in the middle of a transformation. The housing market is hot and interest in the home-improvement market even hotter. It’s apparent to me though that anyone—should they be so inclined—can pump thousands of dollars into copying a photograph from a magazine with high price-point designer furniture, accessories, and materials.  Although this is enjoyable for some, it doesn’t provide me with any sense of design satisfaction.
 
What will follow then, in my little corner of Castanet, are my ideas for how to update or "upstyle" your home without having to spend a lot of (or any) money.  I also have ideas about where to shop and what to look for in appliances, furniture, wall-hangings and paint to maximize money and style.

Sometimes quality costs money, and I respect that. But I also know that you can’t buy style and imagination. Those rival $7,000 tulip tables any day.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.