The juicy orange walls of this Antonia Hutt dining room have been on my mind ever since we posted it in Met Home’s story Mad about Saffron. And if a paint can stick in my mind that long, I think I need to buy it by the gallon (I have an email into the designer for the exact paint number; I’ll keep you posted).
Warm hues are said to cater to our social side and in a kitchen or dining room, stimulate appetite and conversation. I am not 100% sure this is true but with an orange this warm, this inviting–it just might be. So I think I am going to give it a whirl on our new kitchen walls. I love it–and I better because a color this strong will undoubtedly resonate throughout the surrounding rooms.
So that brings us to the next question: If our saffron kitchen opens up directly into our living room, do I carry the color through or give the other walls breathing space?
I think the living rooms palette has to at least reference the adjacent kitchen with complimentary colors. This space below by Jonathan Adler may just be the palette I am going for–browns, greens, creams, and few touches of orange in a rug or pillow to connect the space.
But I am also batting around the idea of painting the back wall of the living room a few shades softer, in a color like this Martin Senour Zinnia Orange. It would create a continuous flow between rooms and on just one wall, the color is a surprise rather than an expected matchy-matchy paint job.
We start painting in the first week of August; I’d love to hear your thoughts!
I was completely dazzled by this lighting display at the Kitchen and Bath Show. Giant light bulbs and upside-down wine glasses shimmering and dangling together made a fantastically whimsical display against the stark Chicago convention center. The show is over; it’s long since been torn-down, but I keep thinking about recreating it in my dining room. On a smaller scale with four cordial glasses and three regular bulbs (or CFL for a green statement and spiral design), I know it would be so charming over a dining table! But how to do it? I am not going to lie; I am not fully sure, so I call my go-to guys at 
First, I’ll need to buy a flat base plate to put over my ceilings electrical box and drill seven holes into it so I can run my pendant wires and the twine (holding my cordial glass bases) through it.
I have been bitten by the glassblowing bug. 
With only a brief safety rundown and demonstration, they had me gathering molten glass from a 2,075-degree kiln. This heat makes this the most intense art form. One, there is the danger-factor of burns, glass combustion and just the pure shock of heat exposure (my eyes teared, my nose ran and I am missing arm hair), but once you get over the fear of fatal injury, the real intensity comes from the unpredictability of hot glass. It is constantly morphing and a second too long in the glory hole or too few rotations or too sharp a tilt of the blowpipe, and your hot glass will lose whatever shape you were just working towards. As a first-timer I was, of course, a bumbling mess of near-disasters, but my instructor kept me at a certain pace to prevent them.
Glassblowing is all about seamless flow and unwavering control. And when done well, the sequence of steps is as much of an art as the final product.