Julia Buckingham never shies away from color. The Modernique® designer and author is known for blending modern and vintage pieces to create warm, timeless looks. Here, Buckingham reveals her strategy for designing two rooms in one space and using color to bring it all together.
1. Infused with the personality of my client, this happy, colorful and whimsical space contains inherited goodness — Asian treasures and custom-designed sofas with textural and “wow” fabrics that are seen from multiple vantage points. The red crystal chandelier adds a Modernique element, mixing the modern color with an antique classical shape. The crazy cool mid-century fiber art, hung on an acrylic rod, takes the cake when it comes to unexpected three-dimensional art.
2. In most city homes, there is a contiguous long and narrow equation to address while designing. It has to feel harmonious, but the individual spaces do not have to be the same in terms of colors, elements, styles or feel. The melding and colliding of disparate themes and moods is the way that I see best in design. If you design each room independently and then regroup to make sure that they can live together without matching, you have a unique space — one that is unlike anyone else’s.
3. The use of disparate colors is one of my favorite design tactics. It’s within these unexpected pairings that we see the contrasts within a space even more clearly. If you stop and say to yourself that you like something within a room, yet you don’t know exactly what that is, that’s the emotion that I strive for. Everything feels harmonious without one or two items fighting for all of the attention.
