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How to Decorate

Ep. 189: Houston Week Designer Marie Flanigan

How to Decorate

Ballard Designs

Arts, Business, Design

4.2785 Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2021

⏱️ 59 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s Houston Week! We are kicking it off with Houston-based designer Marie Flanigan. Marie is an award-winning interior designer and the author of The Beauty of Home. Her work has also been featured in publications such as Architectural Digest, ELLE décor, Vogue, Southern Living, Traditional Home, and she also recently had a role on HGTV’s internationally broadcast series Property Brothers: Brother vs. Brother. We talk about Marie’s love of texture, fireplaces, breaking conventions, and the importance of how a space makes you feel. What You’ll Hear on This Episode: How Marie transitioned from her career in architecture to design. Molding or no molding? Marie’s love of using fireplaces as the focal point. How to decide on a focal point in a room. How lighting changes and affects design. Marie’s guidelines for mixing materials, particularly wood. Creating a flex space in the home using sliding doors. All about a growing topic: home offices. How Marie uses sconces. A bedroom in the Telluride project. How Marie likes to use sculptures and “found objects” as art. What is so thrilling about tension in design? Decorating Dilemma Hi Caryn, The first thing I would do is come up with a way to make the dining room feel special. Add drapery, paneling throughout the room, and I definitely think it’s important to case the entry. One thing that casing does for rooms is it allows you to start and stop a wall finish. Then I would take a look at the architecture of the space to see if first I could recess the mud function into the wall and then be able to close it off with doors. That way when you are using the dining room, you could shut off the mess that accumulates in mudrooms. If that’s not possible, I would definitely go with the paneling idea and let the mudroom cabinets be an extension of that paneling so that it follows the same detail of molding on the cabinets. Just make sure you have doors in that area so you can “hide the mess”. You could perhaps lacquer the room or choose a fun color to paint all of the woodwork so that way the garage door just disappears, or you could even have the paneling go across the doors to hide it. Another thought is if you don’t use the dining room often, you could restyle the dining room table so it’s more of a round entryway table and you relocate the chairs to somewhere else while they aren’t in use. If you really want to embrace this as a more casual room, you could even do a built-in banquette under the windows and change from a round table to a square or rectangular table that would allow it to be pushed towards the corner more. Then you could use that bar cabinet for storage. A large area rug could also help to feel the space larger. Good luck, Caryn! Mentioned in This Episode: Marie Flanigan Interiors Marie Flanigan on Instagram The Beauty of Home Forbes & Lomax Lutron Switches Bocci Outlets Telluride Project

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to How to Decorate from Ballard Designs, a podcast all about the trials and triumphs of decorating and redecorating your home.

0:07.7

Each week, they'll help you unleash your inner decorator.

0:10.6

I'm Caroline. I write the How to Decorate blog.

0:12.7

And I'm Taryn, and I'm a product designer.

0:14.6

And I'm Karen. I head up Ballard's branding team.

0:17.0

We're your host. Join the expert team at Ballard Designs for tips, tricks, and tales from

0:21.4

interior designers, stylists, and other talents in the design world. Plus, we'll answer a listener

0:26.4

question at the end of the show. So don't forget to send them to podcast at Ballarddesigns.net.

0:30.9

Yes, we love answering them. And now on with the show. All right, so we have a very exciting

0:36.6

week for everyone. Karen's got a little smirk on

0:40.3

her face. Even more exciting than usual, Caroline? I can't imagine. Yes. So hopefully everyone

0:45.9

remembers back in, I believe it was November of last year. We did something a little different

0:51.5

for our Nashville store opening. We did five podcast episodes, one each day, the week of our Nashville store opening, because we could not do any in-person celebrations like we normally would.

1:04.1

But we wanted to commemorate the store opening, really celebrate opening in our first store in Tennessee.

1:13.9

And we are back with Houston Week because we're opening a brand new 10,000 square foot store in the River Oak Shopping Center in

1:19.2

Houston and we're really pumped up about it. I know Karen just went. I did. I was just there. Oh my gosh. So I went

1:26.9

just last weekend a few days before they did their

1:30.7

soft opening. And it's so gorgeous. Oh my gosh. It's right next door to Ann Taylor and it has

1:36.5

lots of beautiful big windows that face out to the street. So there's tons of sunlight. There's so

1:42.8

much gorgeous product in there. It's got all of

1:44.8

our spring introductions, lots of outdoor, but also a lot of that core stuff that we all know and love.

1:50.6

Of course, you can never fit everything in a store. I don't care how big it is. You got to go to

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