This week we welcome Designer and Artist Marika Meyer, who has a lot of advice about fabrics and rugs from creating and running her own firm, Marika Meyer Textiles. Marika discusses her style that mixes beautiful patterns, polished pieces, and rooms that can provide both beauty and space for young families. Marika also talks with us about how to keep a room looking elevated and gorgeous even when it is heavily used, the process of creating fabrics, and how she picks a color palette for her collection. What You’ll Hear On This Episode: Trials and triumphs about the removal of both a cast and trees on the roof, some patio construction, repurposing a terrarium, and some creative fixes for lighting up a ceiling, Marika combined her love of business and data with art and photography when following a career in design and opening her own firm. Being a designer is a very personal business, so you better make sure you are into people before you choose this path! Our homes can be the background for great stories, and it’s okay to design a beautiful and edited space knowing it won’t stay perfect forever. Why the phrase “practical luxury and functional beauty” perfectly sums up Marika’s work. How to keep a room looking elevated and gorgeous using basics as the backdrop and the “little black dress” of the room. Ways we can design a room for purposefully for exactly how we plan to use it, how much we plan on entertaining, etc. More about the process of creating fabric from start to finish and taking a painting into a pattern. How Marika picks the color palette for her collection. The dirty little secret about her giant Palladian windows in a design house and how we can use Roman shades to add layers and hide mistakes. How we can use textiles, tones, different values, and colors to make a neutral room lively. Mentioned In This Episode: Ep #66: Andrew Cogar and Kristin Kong Ballard Suzanne Kasler Chairs Meyer Interiors Marika Meyer Textiles @marikameyersinc Decorating Dilemma: We love your thoroughness, and actually this is a lovely dilemma. First, if you were to move the eating area to the top of the L shape on the porch, you could take advantage of the more narrow space without sacrificing the light. One trick could be putting together two square tables to make a larger rectangle, and you could separate the tables and pull them apart if you need more distance. We agree that Option #1 could work, and it appears as if the view is nicer from the backside, so maximizing that view would also create a nice space to add in more seating to fill out that area, augmented by two sets of chairs on the existing porch that could be easily pulled in to the conversation area if needed. Some school house benches that also serves as a cocktail table could be fun and easily defined. The layering of texture is key, and we believe in you!