House to Home with Debbie Travis

Decorating expert and television personality Debbie Travis appears in The Telegram’s My Home each week.

the sculptural furniture and modern art. In the living room shown here the period furniture pieces were chosen for their straight-line quality, which meshes with the homeowner’s collection of modern art. The Tabriz rug is infused with pale shades rather than the usual saturated colours to complement the pastel palette, and link up traditional with modern.

The captivating homes each provide unique design ideas. The walls in the entry hall of a posh pied-a-terre in Manhattan are Venetian stucco decorated with swirling lines of gold. The ceiling is painted in high gloss peacock blue drawing the eye up and into the next room, where similar shades of blue show up in curtains and cushions. The master bedroom in a family home in Miami demonstrates how to decorate over a king size bed. While Cullman and Kravis usually look for a large piece of horizontal art or a group of smaller pieces that can hang in a grid, they discovered a large sculpture made up of many smaller pieces that hang in glorious shapes and colours over the headboard. A sophisticated beachfront vacation home utilizes slim lines of bronze bands as crown mouldings and as an inlay on the entryway walls.

As I lingered over the stunning roomscapes, 13 projects in all, I noticed that blue appears in almost every scene. I asked Cullman about this, and she recalled that “blue is the most universally preferred colour in the spectrum. Blue in all its incarnations, from pale ice to vivid sapphire, resonates with many people in a variety of locations and of styles.” That’s one more decorating tip to keep in mind.