Decorating Town-House Halls - Part 2

Decorating Your Townhouse hallways in an elegant style helps it live up to the promises evoked from the outside. This second part of our two part series provides you with specific decorating ideas and suggestions for making the most of your townhouse hallway.

Style Pointers

WALLS

Golden yellow is a favorite town-house color, especially for creating a perpetually sunny hallway. Instead of genuine wainscoting, gray-striped wallpaper absorbs the brunt of the day-to-day scuffs. White-painted woodwork is typical of the town-house style.

FLOOR

Traditional black and white checkerboard tiles are virtually indestructible and easy to clean. A large coir doormat spares the floor from the full onslaught of dirty feet entering the house.

STORAGE

'A place for everything and everything in its place' is a useful motto for keeping an open path through the hall. An umbrella stand keeps wayward walking sticks and umbrellas under control. A coat stand or boot rack organizes hats, coats, and footwear in an equally efficient and stylish manner.

ACCESSORIES

Certain practical accessories are a necessity in a well-equipped hall. A large mirror, for example, has the dual advantage of making a narrow hallway seem wider and providing a last chance for a quick check on your appearance before going out. Plaster plaques hanging on wide black ribbons or a gallery of framed prints look suitably elegant. Flower arrangements are attractive and welcoming.

FURNITURE

To maintain free access through the hall, furniture is kept to a minimum. A discreet semi-circular console table, useful for leaving keys and mail, is fixed unobtrusively to the wall. A small chair may be useful when answering the telephone or changing shoes.

Furnishings

Furnishings: In the average household, the hall often ends up as a repository for items waiting to be moved elsewhere - everything from mail to discarded boots. Make a clean sweep of the clutter and find other places to keep essential gear stowed out of sight. This leaves space for a few well-chosen pieces to convey the sophistication of the town-house look and transform the hall from a passageway into a room with its own character and purpose.

Most halls are narrow, so hall furniture should be relatively compact and pushed back against the wall to allow free movement. A console table, fixed to the wall with just a pair of supporting legs at the front edge, provides an elegant punctuation point.

A pair of hall chairs is an added refinement. If the hall is wide enough, a small chest of drawers makes an effective substitute for a console table, with the bonus of providing a place to keep gloves, hats, and other items ready at hand.

Fittings: Radiators are a feature of many hallways, but although the warmth may be welcome, they are not particularly attractive to look at. By encasing a radiator in a boxed housing with a front grill or fretwork panel, you can hide the eyesore and gain a useful display surface.

Details: A fine mirror is an indispensable accessory for the town-house hall - the larger the better. Victorian overmantel mirrors or plain gilt frames are ideal for siting over a console table. If you position the mirror opposite the entrance to the main living areas, you set up internal views and create a good sense of spaciousness. Other traditional town-house features include brass umbrella stands, antique or reproduction barometers, and grandfather clocks.

Hall walls are excellent places for a display. You can treat the hall as a miniature picture gallery with framed prints, paintings, and drawings, massed in rows or groups. For a supremely stylish look, create your own print-room effect using cut-out photocopies of engravings applied directly to the wall.

For a final flourish, make good use of flower arrangements. Nothing looks more hospitable as you walk through the front door than a vase of fresh flowers.

Details

Keep space and practicality as well as town-house elegance in mind when selecting accessories for the hall. Period-style mirrors, small chairs, and compact console tables are all useful and enhance the setting at the same time. As tidiness is paramount for safe access to and from the house, hunt for neat storage ideas like an umbrella stand and a coat rack.

Thanks To : Sword Steel

Colored Marble Tile Flooring For Your Bathroom

All throughout civilization, there has been no doubt of marble's eminence. One of the most popular places in the modern home for marble floor tiles is the bathroom.

Marble has retained its ranking as the supreme building material for vanities. A natural marble vanity or sink stands out as the one and only choice for many discriminating and aesthetically-inclined homeowners.

While marble has the characteristic of being etched and stained by water and chemicals, the use of modern sealants has significantly reduced this major risk.The stone that inspires poetry and has been used to create architectural wonders across the world is in fact a metamorphic rock, which was formed by the alteration of limestone or dolomite.

Marble is used for both interior & exterior flooring applications. Marble is available in many colors like milky white, red, black, mottled and banded, gray, pink and green. Some manufactures offer marble tiles in the form of green marble tiles, green marble slabs & green marble blocks

New Technologies Have Reintroduced Marble Tiles As Bathroom Vanities

A more recent advance in tile fabrication technology has enabled marble floor tiles to be within the reach of many homeowners. A sink could be a bowl of polished marble which sits atop a vanity. A tall faucet empties water into the vessel. It is a simple, yet supremely artistic way to decorate a bathroom that will make all your houseguests green with jealousy.

Marble tiles on the floor of a bathroom are almost a commonly seen necessity, if a homeowner's target is to create a luxurious bath. These tiles are available polished or honed. Honed tiles generally provide more traction. Polished tiles do provide a more elegant look, however they can be very slippery when wet, so bath mats need to be placed at strategic points in the bath or shower room.

Marble Could Also Be Used As A Shower Wall

Many professional interior decorators know the key to a luxuriously created bathroom is to utilize marble around the walls and the tub. Most Jacuzzi bath tubs and Roman tubs look far more elegant wrapped in stone. Marble is also a popular fixture in shower walls and in steam showers; again however, traction is a factor that need to be seriously taken into consideration.

Marble mosaic tiles are often used on shower floors, and the grout lines provide the necessary footing to prevent slipping.Hand-carved marble trim pieces are also good for use in framing bath mirrors, and a wide variety of marble accents will round off your ultimate dream bath.

Tumbled Marble Also Makes For A Rustic, Old-World Bathroom Feel

The current rise in the popularity of "tumbled marble" has seen an increased use in many homes. These rustic tiles look more like travertine, wherein they have a rough finish, and often have little pits full of crystal, as well as an an uneven edge which is usually rounded at the corners.

These varieties are available in many sizes and are good for backsplashes, showers, and flooring. The hand-carved look of these tiles helps provide an excellent method for counteracting the formal air which marble typically lends to a room.

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Throw Rugs For Children - Looking For a Birthday Present?

It does not speak of your sense of hygiene, but there can be no running away from the fact that potentially, the most contaminated part of the house is the floor. Inmates walk all over it, liquids and foods which spill on to the floor, attract germs. You simply cannot swab the floor time and again, but the worries about a contaminated floor can tend to accentuate when you have a kid at home, as children are more prone to infections and allergies than adults. That's why it is an amazing idea for giving children's throw rugs for birthday presents.

The best things about choosing children's throw rugs for birthday presents are that they are not staid in characteristic. Children's throw rugs for birthday presents come in countless shapes, sizes, colours and patterns, but the external features apart there are so many other things, which a kid can do if you gift him or her with a children's throw rug for a birthday present.

As discussed earlier, not only do the children's throw rugs for birthday presents keep the child off the floor, but if a rug is chosen as per the tastes of the child, you can be rest assured that he would be kicked by it too. Say for example if the child is fond of animals or birds, you could pick up a throw rugs with such patterns. With the makers of such children's throw rugs flooding the market with their products that should not be too difficult to manage.

Children's throw rugs for birthday presents can serve as extremely efficient and subtle learning tools too. A colourful throw rug peppered with alphabets or numbers can really help the child pick up these basic tenets of education sooner than you think. The point is driven home faster this way because the child has fun learning them. Children's throw rugs for birthday presents also serve as great teaching aids when it comes to identifying patterns and colours too, making it a very handy and practical birthday gift. And if you are worried about the birthday kids not favouring these children's throw rugs, think again. They tend to get attracted to the children's throw rugs because they form an excellent colourful relief which stands out on the floor and grabs their attention.

While rugs like these were earlier patched together by grand moms as a tradition, by patching scraps of cloth into a colour patterns, the process has become professional in today's times.

Manufacturers of children's throw rugs for birthday presents now use the help of design specialists when it comes to manufacturing these rugs with carefully thought out patterns and static animations. Contemporary designs try to weave in the element of design with education forming a very efficient blend. In fact so practical are children's throw rugs for birthday presents these days that you have some of them even fashioned out as chess or a checkers board making these children's throw rugs for birthday presents, an excellent choice.

So the next time round you choose a Barbie doll for a birthday girl or a toy Uzi for a birthday boy, that is more likely to get the hosts to frown, try a gifting them with a children's throw rug for a birthday present. Perhaps you'll see a smile on them then.

Thanks To : Dark Beauty Guide