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Photo shoot styling

Styling a Chic Mid-Century Modern Home; Before & After

11/19/2018
26 Comments

The problem with your room isn’t always the paint colour. Often, it’s that the room hasn’t been styled yet. And a good designer can recognize the difference.  There’s almost nothing that makes me happier than styling a room which is really when the look and feel or another way of saying it–atmosphere–enters the room. You…

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How to De-Tuscanize Your Home; Before and After

04/22/2018
84 Comments

This is the view from their home. My lovely clients Crystal and Rob built their home almost 10 years ago when the Tuscan brown trend was going strong. Five years ago, they bought the property next door and built a summer house which I decorated for them. Suddenly, they loved being in that space more…

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Mixing Metals: How to Update a Brown Kitchen by adding Brass

09/17/2015
36 Comments

Barbara built this house with her husband 5 years ago ago. He wanted a wood stained kitchen and although she’d love to have a white kitchen now, she wasn’t prepared to paint it in this phase of the decorating project.

Her biggest complaint was with the pendant lights, they created a lot of visual glare and she wanted them replaced.

Also, she needed drapery to block out the sun in the wintertime when it slanted through the windows.

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Where to Start When You Have a Blank Slate

05/10/2015
43 Comments

Jacqueline called me and said:

“Help! My laundry room is finished, it’s white, I followed all the advice on your blog right down to copying the shelves in your laundry room, but now that I have a white Maria Killam laundry room and I can do anything I want, I have no idea where to start!

What colour should I paint it? I painted it BM Grey Owl because I had some leftover paint but it’s doing nothing for me!”

I said, “First, Grey Owl is almost like a neutral, muted blue/green grey that would look great in a bathroom with lots of blue grey marble that coordinated with it, but for your laundry room to look fabulous, it needs a colour!

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Before & After: The Pinterest School of Styling

03/29/2015
27 Comments

Interior design & styling by Maria Killam As I lay by the pool on my recent vacation in Kauai, I had already read both of the beach novels that I brought, so I went through my client’s library  and pulled out The Alchemist. My sister Elizabeth posing for my photo Three years ago, when my client…

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How to Photograph Your Projects to Get More Business

02/01/2015
15 Comments

Advice for new decorators and designers sounds like this: “Pay a professional photographer to take photos of one great project, or even one room decorated well, and show that on your website.” And before you tell me that you barely made any money on the job so you can’t afford to pay to have it photographed, that’s…

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Photo Shoot Preparations

11/28/2013
22 Comments

My photographer came today to shoot my house, now that I finally made a decision on my drapes and they have been installed–I’ll give you a hint, they’re HOT PINK–so Tuesday I drove into the city to buy flowers and Elizabeth came with me. Here’s where we went: 12:20 pm We arrive in Vancouver and…

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