Fun: Design Despair

A friend from home recently wrote to say she had done 'home improvements'--to a house I always think looks great! We've also gotten links to Picasa photo album updates from another friend, showing us the painstaking efforts to get just the right color combinations on their remodeling project. I laughed, knowing that if either of these two friends, with their artistic eyes, saw our daily environment, they would be aghast!

Although our apartment is cozy, convenient, host-provided, and has a wonderful landlady (nice, and a great and generous cook!) the colors aren't exactly complementary and the patterns are engaged in a serious and ongoing conflict. The textures in the living room alone range from a shiny quilted pink ruffled sateen spread on a kingsize 'bed' to napless hunter green and brown flowered carpet to bumpy mint green walls to floor-to-ceiling rose damask and white lace curtains to olive green/brown velveteen chairs/couch, to pink, brown, and white patchwork throws over the chairs/couch to a jungle corner of dusty plants hanging from 70's macrame to a red and tan oriental style throw rug. All is lit overhead by hanging lamps that throw strange and overlapping geometric shapes on the ceiling. There's no bringing it together.

We just confound the problem by bringing the powder blue and navy flowered duveted comforters and pillows in from the bedroom to cuddle up and keep warm while we watch International CNN play the same 'news' for the upteenth time, or the TCM movie of the evening (the Cartoon Network switches at 9PM from Hungarian dubbed cartoons to English language movie), or the many bad/good old series (Magnum, P.I., The Saint, Dallas, Northern Exposure) dubbed in Hungarian, to the haunting FilmMüzeum channel that's nothing but old European road, bridges, cities, harbors, gardens with sometimes enchanting classical music in the background, and sometimes techno-pop.

I thought it might be fun to try to document this environment in a patchwork collage--here goes!