Renovate to Sell

Value added to homes by redecorating and restyling a home has been highlighted by many shows on HGTV and DIY Network lately.

Selling property is much easier when the house looks stylish and well-presented. Though most people know this, it is becoming more important with today’s property market. And most realtors will agree: well-presented homes perform better during the sale.

Potential renovations or redecorating include painting, furniture placement, lighting, kitchen or bathroom modernization and flooring.

Cheek Interiors can help you with all of these decisions, even if you want to do it yourself but want suggestions. Contact Cheek Interiors for your design consultation.

Home Trends 2012

So, you survived the holidays, put away all those decorations and now want to freshen up your interior design. With 2012 in full swing let’s look at what will be “hot” for home interiors this year.

ORANGE!
Pantone, the color industry leader, has named “Tangerine Tango” the Color of the Year for 2012. This great color is a “vivacious and appealing reddish orange” tone. You will find it popping up more and more in home decor as well as fashion. It’s a great accent tone when paired with creams, browns and camel.  
Other colors that still thrive this year are purple tones, grays and greens.

TEXTURE!
Mixing decor materials can be challenging but the affect will give your home charm, depth and character. Some great combinations to consider are natural stone with shiny metals, leather with glass and wood with soft fabrics. Layering texture is good to remember when using monochromatic design themes – a palette of all whites, creams and browns is beautiful, but more interesting if texture is applied.

LIGHT!
Mirrors are an easy way to create that illusion of more space and light in a room. Over sized mirrors will be the trend and can be found in all styles from ornate traditional to sleek modern.  Mirrored tiles and mirrored furniture are still popular and mix well with any decor style.

PRINT!
Wallpaper is slowly making a comeback and the 70’s inspired prints are great! The graphic prints combined with modern color can set the tone for a room or be a bold statement in a small powder room or hallway. I even love the thought of using a touch of it in the back of a bookcase. Warning: handle these patterns with care. If you select the bold pattern for your wall choose your furnishings carefully!!

INDUSTRIAL!
“Up-cycled” industrial materials are showing up everywhere in home design. Scrubbed wood tables with metal edging, “factory” metal stools with raw finishes, over sized pendant lighting and interesting metal objects as accessories. This look can be achieved through flea market finds if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.  A little ingenuity can add a fun conversation piece to your room.

GLOBAL!
Vintage fabrics, handmade embroidered pillows, tribal prints, Moroccan inspired lighting – add some culture to your interiors. Again, the layering of these keeps your room from getting stale. These are accents you can change out with your furniture and keep the look fresh.

Let Cheek Interiors assist you with a room update or color consultation. It’s amazing what can happen with fresh perspective!

Best Wishes for a bold, wonderful, inspiring 2012!

Christmas Decorating Ideas

With the holidays creeping up on us quickly, I thought I would pass along a few fun and quick holiday interior decorating ideas.

Christmas Vases
These are very versatile and can flow with what you have already set up around your house for the holidays. You can fill these vases with:

• Wintery items like pine cones, evergreen boughs, and holly. If you want a bit of glitz, take it a step further and add a little spray paint, glue, glitter.
• brightly colored ornaments (use some of your own ornaments especially if your tree has a few too many!)
• candy

Along those same lines is the Cranberry Flower Frog.

• Use hard cranberries as support to hold stems of flowers in place (like you would if you were using rocks or marbles). Cover the cranberries with water. It lasts around a week.  

With fruit in mind, a pomander is pretty fun to make as well.

• Use a rubber band to make an even ring of whole cloves around an orange or grapefruit (some people do 3 or 5 rows). Martha Stewart says that if you shake each orange in a pomander in a plastic bag of powdered orris root and give a good shake, these pomanders can last up to a year. They smell good to boot!

Happy Holidays from Cheek Interiors! We are always here for your interior design needs.

(images from marthastewart.com)

Live Well, Laugh Often, Love Much...and add a little color!

I like to think that these words are more than just a phrase found in vinyl letters adorning most kitchen walls or on weathered wood plaques over doorways. They speak to the very desire we all have to not only exist in our dwellings, but thrive there. Creating an environment that comforts you, entertains you and inspires you is our goal at Cheek Interiors.

Le Corbusier said, “The home should be the treasure chest of living.” Sometimes it takes a simple update of your space - sometimes a complete renovation to discover this “treasure chest” within. Changing aspects of your home like wall color, lighting and accessories can transform your rooms and start to create that finished look you desire. We love nothing more than helping our clients dig for this treasure chest and producing homes they can “live well” in.

Let’s take the wall color for an example. I am so over beige. Color is BIG now and can be really intimidating for most people. If applied well to your space it will make an impact and add much needed life to your room! Purples, Greens, Oranges, Blues are showing up in the market place and adorning my fabric books. Choosing your color palette is where you need to start and some form of inspiration will drive this palette. Sometimes it’s a great piece of art, sometimes it’s a rug, sometimes it’s that pillow you had to have…but it goes with nothing! Let this be your starting point and build off of that.

Don’t think that every room in your house needs to look the same, but having a sense of continuity from room to room is important. So choose color palettes that will compliment one another…this also helps with changing out art and accessories within your house when you get bored and need to switch things up.

Since this blog is just getting started, I would love to get feedback on what YOU would like to have advice on or products that YOU are interested in knowing more about. I really sometimes forget that the information I come across every day is not common knowledge. So let me know what interests you and I will do my best to share a few great design tips!

Oh, and as for the “Laugh Often and Love Much” – we all create our own happiness. True Joy comes from within. It can’t be purchased or reupholstered. I do feel however, that if you invite me to assist with your home interior design, we can share a few laughs and you can tell me all about the ones in your life you love and treasure the most.

Live well.

Inspired Design - Anderson, SC Downtown Hotel by Cheek Interiors

The inn downtown
By Charmaine Smith-Miles
From the Anderson Independent Mail
Posted March 16, 2011 at 6:46 p.m.


Lynn and Steve Kay buzzed around their 14-room boutique hotel in downtown Anderson Wednesday, stocking cabinets with dishes, checking lights and giving suites a last check.
...
“I want someone to come here and experience the most restful night of sleep they’ve ever had,” Lynn said. “That’s what I would want. So that was my goal when I picked out the mattresses, the pillows and the linens. I want it to be perfect.”
Welcome to The Bleckley Inn, the first boutique hotel for Anderson, located in the city’s heart. The inn has been under construction for two years and opened for guests this week.
...
Two fountains frame the covered entry way into the inn. Once inside, guests can ascend the winding staircase with its metal and wood railing and crystal chandelier, which leads to the rooms and suites. A large living area sits just to the left and is furnished with comfy chairs, couches and a fireplace.
There is a dining area, which can seat 100 people, also located on the first floor of the inn. Bare brick and stone walls decorate the space and a skylight lets in the afternoon sun. A full kitchen is at the rear of the dining room, in a separate space along one end of the first floor.
...
The Kays bought the Benson Street property first, about six years ago. Then, in quick succession, they purchased the other properties.

“We didn’t have an idea for how to develop it until we had the Clydesdale horses here in and we saw the needs of their staff,” Kay said.

The Budweiser Clydesdales were a main attraction for Anderson’s 2009 Soiree. The team of draft horses stayed in the Carriage House for the weekend of the event. But their handlers had to travel up Clemson Boulevard, near Interstate 85, every night, Kay said.

“There was no option for them downtown really,” Kay said.

He and Lynn began their research immediately. Don Chapman, and his architectural firm, Chapman and Associates, designed the inn. Anna Cheek of Cheek Interiors — also an Anderson native — designed the inn’s interior.

There’s the expected presence of hardwood floors, granite counters, and rich earth colors through the inn. But there are unexpected details, such as the stained glass in the ceilings in the business meeting room, the decorated tile trim in the bathrooms and the balconies from some of the rooms that overlook the courtyard.

And Lynn Kay is particularly proud of the Aveda bath products in every room, which she had to apply for. In order to approve to carry the products in the rooms, Kay said she had to show that the inn is environmentally friendly.

Indeed, the Kays have installed energy-efficient appliances here and will have waste bins in each room where guests can discard the recyclable items. It shows that this Anderson couple has tried to think of everything.

“It’s very overwhelming,” Lynn said. “But we want it to be perfect. And we want this to enhance downtown Anderson, because we feel like downtown Anderson is important to this community.”

To Read the Full Article click HERE.

Spring Cleaning? Try Spring Revamping!

Warm weather is here, and everyone is getting the winter blues out of their homes. The most obvious way to do this is with the obligatory spring cleaning list. We all know it, and most of us hate it (at least until all of it done and you get to enjoy the rest of the season).

But at Cheek Interiors, we know that there are other things you can do to freshen up your house and help it shake off the winter blues.

1. Fresh Paint - This is one of the most cost-effective face lifts you can do for your house. But often people are faced with many questions. What color? Accent wall or no accent wall? Partial wallpaper? What about existing furniture? Cheek Interiors can help you with color scheme selections to brighten your room and help create a space that is perfectly you.
2. Window Treatments - This is another easy way to update your home. After time, curtains fade and get dusty bringing an overall drab feeling to your room. Window treatments in the form of new curtains, valances, and so forth, can refresh, add style, and update all at once. Why not do the paint and the window treatments all at once and get your room closer to that perfect space right away. Cheek Interiors designs and fabricates window treatments just for you and your space.
3. Modernize your Lighting - This is not always the cheapest update for your house - even for DIYer's - but it does go a long way to update and modernize your space. Have you ever been in a house with the original 1970's fixtures? If you have, you know it. New lighting fixtures can help you get a more contemporary feel in your house, enhance mood through dimmer switches, or add some dynamic flair with track lighting to spotlight certain areas. At Cheek, we can help with light fixture selection and replacement.

There are other great things you can do for spring cleaning, like getting out the spring cleaning list, your rubber gloves, and a little elbow grease or even planting some new flowers in the garden/flower bed.

But while you do that, why don't you invite Cheek Interiors over to revamp your space with some new color schemes/fresh paint, window treatments, and new lighting. Cheek can even help accessorize your room with the procurement and placement of accessories.