Interior Designer Answers Your Top Design Questions From Instagram - Q&AD - Architectural Digest

Should you mount your TV over your fireplace? Hell no. My name's David Netto. I'm an interior designer based in LA, and I'm going to answer some of the questions that you've asked AD on their Instagram. Creative ways to use lights instead of using overheads. Well, this is kind of a trick question because you can't just use overhead lights or you're going to have a disaster on your hands. You're going to have a VD clinic waiting room. You're going to have a police station or I don't know what, but it's not something you want to live in. It's not just creative. You must have the primary source of light that you live with be at eye height. And then whatever's in the ceiling overhead is gravy, but should be dimmed way down. The best ways I know to do that, to offset needing more light in the ceiling, is to use sconces. That's one traditional decorating thing that still works in any kind of room for me. The other way is to furnish the room well enough that you anticipate table lamps where you will want them. They're not just a fancy option. They are the reason that the room is sexy or that the lighting is successful. Do you ever notice like lighting is a huge aspect of why a place is desirable to be in? The reason is because you want to feel seduced by the lighting. And if the lighting is a one liner, it's sort of like someone tearing all their clothes off and saying, you know, here I am. There's just no story to it. And then you also want to distribute the light evenly around the room. So the sconces, if you have a pair on one side, look for a way to put another pair on the other side that answers. The best countertop for a kitchen that gets a ton of use. If you're a real cook and you've got a household of kids, the kitchen's going to get beat up. So my first thought is to give into the fact that it's going to get a beating and offer something that actually looks better. The way, actually leather looks better, the more patina it is. If it's really getting banged up, I like to suggest that we use a material called Vermont soapstone for countertops. It beats up evenly over time. The first scuff or wine stain will be very upsetting. But then after a few months, the whole thing is scuffed up evenly and it has this wonderful patina like something from the 19th century. And it's actually the material that they used to make lab counters out of before they invented composites. And it comes from Vermont. Vermont's my favorite state. What colors mix well? And what combos should I avoid? Colors that mix well, to me, are colors that take a risk. I like to do a little more R&D than doing things that I know are already in someone's mind's eye because they're so easy to like. Light blue, blue and white, these are wonderful color combinations. They have their place in the world. But when people call me and they want something they couldn't have maybe done on their own, I like to try to take risks with color. And so these two colors, dark green and brown, would be one example. Another example of a very successful color combination, I think, is dark green and dark blue. This is a catalog of a French designer. Actually, he wasn't a designer. The best designers are often not designers. Charles de Besteguy. And this is the Chateau de Grousset, which is full of all these very strange kind of technicolor combinations. Another way of giving you some real inside tricks here that I like to figure out how to mix colors in an exciting way is to look at the work of a decorator called Jacques Garcia. And he sort of brings new life to rooms that are about the past in most ways. You know, he likes, as Karl Lagerfeld once said, I like my 18th century fresh. And that's kind of what Jacques Garcia does. So when I'm stuck and I need some exciting color combinations, I do look at the Jacques Garcia book. And I'm happy to tell you I always find an answer. What color combination should you avoid? Well, I don't know. I only know the things that work. That's why I'm in the video here. Colors are often very personally triggering. You don't necessarily know why somebody loves a color that you might not like at all. I used to be very prone to air sickness when I was a small child. So I remember the colors of the insides of airplanes in the 1970s and these sort of mustard brown and orange. I can't do that because I'm programmed and we all are in one way or another. Anybody trying to put together a color palette can look at the same things that I'm looking at. Every room needs a little bit of red if it's gonna be exciting. And there are very few rules, but that is one of those rules. You generally don't want the red to be dominant in any way. If you're not working with a designer, it's safer to do neutrals and then just do a pop of red. There is no problem doing a room that is predominantly white or off-white. Create a largely white backdrop and then drop in something weird color-wise as the hot sauce. Hit it hard with two shakes of Tabasco and get out alive. Should you mount your TV over your fireplace? Hell no. This is something I'm on record as saying in print as often as I can. The bane of flat screen TVs is that now they end up going over everybody's fireplace and it's pretty much the worst thing you can do for a room. That being said, the convenience can be irresistible, but you're asking me, should you and not could you? And I'm saying, no, you should not. You should find somewhere else for that because the fireplace is the holy grail of the life of the house and we should watch the fire and not the TV. Framed TVs are kind of a blessing. They are innocuous. What I would not do is put the pictures that they show of flowers and views, you know, fantasy seascapes and stuff like that, just turn it off. But a framed TV is a lot less ugly than a non-framed TV. When you get a framed TV, you can hang other framed things around it and create what's called a salon hang that sort of disguises the impact of the TV. What design styles mix well? Anything that is enough of a completely disparate point of view tends to be exciting because it creates a tension and a conversation between the two objects and the two styles. So the styles that mix well are super modern and medieval. 18th century French and Italian 1960s, wicker furniture. Design styles that don't mix well are things that are wimpy or don't have a different enough point of view to wanna be next to each other. If you look at two pieces and you're wondering if they're gonna work well next to each other, I would ask yourself, am I excited to look at these two pieces or am I just trying to solve the problem? The emotional response that you have to objects and the juxtaposition of objects is usually the best way to figure out if something's gonna look successful. I remember when I didn't know how to do that. I made a lot of mistakes. Don't feel bad. Mistakes are the only way to learn. How do you determine if a vintage piece is ugly or chic? Well, this is kind of a trick question because a lot of times the chic things are ugly. What you want to get better at as your taste evolves is not being afraid of ugly things because you're gonna put it next to something that makes the whole composition successful. Notice I'm not saying pretty, I'm saying successful because lots of times pretty and chic really have nothing to do with each other. If you want to feel not so much that you care that it's chic or not, but that it says something to you, then you're actually doing the most important part of collecting and decorating, which is you're making a personal connection with the object. If you're looking for something vintage, you should keep your eyes peeled for whatever is a great thing that could come from the region of where you're looking. So if you're looking for something vintage in Maine, you might want to look for the best decoy duck. If you're looking in an Italian flea market, maybe you're looking for a Venetian mirror that's all dusty and nobody cares about it. The first thing you want to establish is where are you and what could the best thing be that crosses your path in that part of the world? Next question. Good colors for someone who's afraid of color. The good way to get into a comfort zone with that is to talk about fashion connections. So if you ask someone what their favorite color sweater is to wear that they're comfortable with, they would tell you and then you would say, well, there's a color that we want to use in a room for you. If you ask someone why Hermes boxes are so beautiful when they're this bright, screaming orange, but you're not afraid to have an Hermes box handed to you, then let's find a way to put an orange blanket over the back of a chair in one of your rooms or even do more with it. There are ways to trick people into relaxing that are sort of psychological cues, which a good decorator has quite a few of. There's a lot to be said for sticking to one color in a space. I would say if you do it boringly, which is to sort of half do it, you know, you do a chair and the pillow on the chair is the same color, that's kind of not going to be too exciting. But if you did the same color on the walls, the chair, a version of it on the carpet, then there's a painting and the painting has that color in it. Something like that can be one of the most sophisticated rooms in the world, because generally the more you see of it, the prettier it is. I don't get a lot of natural light. How can I make my home feel brighter? This is a lot of our problems, dear writer. I don't feel bad. You can make your room feel brighter by causing distractions internally. Counterintuitively, one of the ways to do that is to paint a room darker. So if you paint a dark color, it makes the space feel bigger and more mysterious. The light that you do have will actually feel like more. Another way to do this is to paint the floors bright, high gloss white. Any kind of floor paint to me is a sort of dazzling way to lift a room and make it feel hip. You do have to be careful because there's very little oil-based paint. Only fine paints of Europe is still a high gloss paint that gives you the effect that I'm talking about. And that will also give you reflected light. You can bring metal into play in the room and you can have a metal coffee table with a glass top. You can have metal lamps. I would say go heavy on the metal and heavy on the mirror. Another trick is using picture lights on all the pictures because then you get this soft glow. It doesn't look like you're compensating for anything. It looks like it was always intended to be that sort of English country house atmosphere. I can't afford all new furniture, but I want to keep my house from feeling dated. Any tips? Well, sure. I love budgets, okay? Any good decorator is not a snob because great decorating is about creativity and getting excited about finding opportunities. It's not about spending money. My first recommendation would be take things away because most people need editing rather than more decorating. And then I would say scrape together the money that we do have and put an architectural mirror into a room. Turn one wall into a mirrored wall and then it'll double the light of the windows, which costs nothing. It will reflect the furniture that we did have money to buy. And it's a way of bringing glamor for relatively little expense. If you can't afford all new furniture, which many people cannot, there's no reason to be discouraged by that, you probably can afford a big, beautiful tree. And I would say that you should go to the flower market and get the most beautiful black olive tree and the biggest one you can fit. And then you go to a hardware store and you buy an uplight. And then you put that in the corner next to the new mirrored wall and you're halfway to a Billy Baldwin room with no new furniture. What piece is most worth splurging on? I think that the piece that's worth splurging on is the piece that you care about. This is your house. It's supposed to be about your dreams of how you're gonna feel at home. One answer to that might be the most beautiful sailboat model in the world, as big as I can get. Somebody else would say, why are you giving me a boat model? I don't care about this. I don't live near water. I want an incredible desk. I'm a workaholic and all I do is sit at my desk. I want the desk to make me feel like everything I ever dreamed would happen in my life. So this is a highly subjective thing, but the thing worth splurging on is the thing that the client or the person using the room cares about the most. If you have kids or pets, you still have to have a beautiful house because the house will be compromised. I mean, I'm not gonna use the word ruin. I have a father of two, beautiful girls, and I loved my dog deeply. And we just accepted that the impact that they had on the house would be something and not nothing. But it didn't stop me from buying anything that I really wanted because I was worried that they would mess it up. It just didn't. You're lucky to have the dogs who cares about the furniture. You know, just go for it. What are affordable upgrades that make a big visual difference besides paint? You can put wallpaper on the ceiling. You can buy the biggest size Noguchi paper globe pendant and hang it in the middle of the room. Get rid of all your rugs and refinish the floors and then have everything look kind of stark and elegant. One way you can lift a space without spending terribly much money is buy beautiful books and stack them artistically. Make a composition of the books on the coffee table and then buy one object that's a great sort of beguiling thing. Could be a bust of Voltaire or it could be an abstract modern sculpture that you find in a flea market that's not valuable but it's pleasing to you. How to start furnishing an empty apartment when you don't want to rush the process? I would start with the sofa because what good is life if you haven't got somewhere to sit when you come home? Try to get some of the lamps in place right away because you're never gonna like it unless it's nicely lit. I mean, if it's me, what I care about are chairs because they're like characters in a play. You just can fall in love with a chair the way you can to almost any other piece of furniture, for me. So I would buy one beautiful sculptural chair with a very strong direction in it, embedded in the DNA of it as to how you want everything else to end and let the chair do the talking until you buy all those other things. Thanks for all your questions. It's been a pleasure to answer them, as best I could. And good luck out there with the shopping and the decorating.