Beverly Ferguson-Your Color Coach

Beverly Ferguson’s new Excite Van made its way over to “The Faraway Isle”,
more commonly known as Nantucket, Massachusetts.

The presence of Beverly’s Excite Van generated much interest in this community
of seaside villas, rose covered cottages, and gracious estates. Island residents’ and visitors’ questions were enthusiastically addressed by Beverly as she toured the roads of this exclusive community.

Watch for Beverly and her van in your town and be sure to wave!

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In my 20 plus years as an Interior Designer I have heard many stories from clients telling me about their experiences with designers. It is so hard to know how to choose a professional designer…and what is a good designer anyway?!? 

This question is the best place to start;  I always like to preface the term “designer” with the description “professional”. Being invited into someone’s home where you view their private spaces and see how they live from day to day, is a very intimate experience. The client has invited me into his/her home and trusted me to a degree that most people outside of friends and family never experience. I do not take this lightly. Winning a job and being in charge of suppliers, workrooms, fabricators and installers is no small task and can involve thousands of dollars worth of materials and labor. Why is it then that so many clients assign this task to someone who is a “dabbler” or someone who has a “knack”? 

The design field is not unlike other professions, we pay professionals every day to perform tasks which we cannot or are not willing to do ourselves. It takes education and experience to make a pro. Unlike dentistry or plumbing which is very inaccessible to the average person, just about anyone can gain access to fabric and paint. Fabric and paint can be dangerous weapons in the wrong hands <LOL>. These two items are the obvious components of decorating and design but design is a bit like a game of chess. You can play on many different levels from the superficial to the sublime. The professional designer is thinking about elements of the space in a far more subtle and complex fashion than the person with little or no training and experience. While it may seem that nuance is not important, many a grand decorating scheme has been lost for want of attention to detail that was missing. 

Most people are surprised to hear that there are no standards in many states for Interior Designers. In the state I live in, Massachusetts, just about anyone who gets a tax number can hang out their shingle and call themselves a designer. The result is a wide gamut of capabilities from the housewife decorators to the top pros. How then can you separate the wheat from the chaff? 

     1) Professionals earn their living from their designs; they are serious about what it is they do. They have a passion for their work because it takes someone with passion and perseverance to pursue this profession. Look for someone who does this as their major source of income. 

     2) Membership in professional associations reinforce the practitioners’ commitments to their field. Many associations insist upon ongoing education as a requirement for their memberships. Two of the most prominent groups for interior designers are ASID (American Society of Interior Designers) and IDA (Interior Design Association). 

     3) Experience is key. Because each design job is custom and therefore not like any other, there is always a new challenge which hasn’t been seen before. Classroom education can only begin to prepare a designer for working in the field but it’s only when the rubber hits the road that the real learning begins. I have been in the field for over 20 years and I am still learning. While I love to encourage young people and often mentor them, I would want a seasoned professional in charge of my job. 

     4) Personality and style have to mesh with yours or else there will be difficulty in communication. Communication is essential so that you don’t wind up with someone else’s vision instead of your own. Remember that it is your home and should reflect your tastes and lifestyle. A true professional does not churn out a one-note “look” but is capable of taking your ideas and placing them into a workable context. Be very wary of someone who is known for giving their clients a “look”. This is often the hallmark of someone who is not comfortable with problem solving or creative thinking. They have one or two formulas and make you fit their box…not a good thing! 

     5) Referrals are my lifeblood and so I make a point to give my clients such a high degree of service that they are more than happy to share my name. This is the ultimate compliment and I like to think that I make a new friend out of each and every contact. Respect is important and listening to my clients is the way I can best serve them. A good designer listens but also is intuitive. Often clients cannot verbalize their needs or just aren’t in touch with what they want. It is a skilled designer who is paying attention to the signals and asks the right questions to get the client to identify his/her needs. You see, no matter how attractive the design, it is absolutely of no value if it doesn’t function. Good design is workable design for real people, not for magazine articles.  

How do designers get paid? 

Interior designers work in several different ways. Basically, we are all paid for our ideas; this is the basis of what we provide for our clients. The products that we help them acquire are the fleshing out of those ideas. Sometimes, a client may only want a consultation. For this service, expect to pay a flat fee or an hourly rate.  

How to Work with an Interior Designer 

When I go to serve a client solely on a consultation basis, I too charge for my ideas. Consultations only are rare however because most of my clients are looking for window treatments, carpeting, or furniture. When not working on a consultation only basis, my personal business model does not charge a design fee but rather depends upon a fair profit for the items I provide for the home. My design services and installation are bundled into those items. My prices are not inflated as a result but rather I offer this as value added service. When I visit a home for the first time, we will talk about design problems and solutions but sometimes my client will want to take those design solutions for which I have not charged and shop with them at other vendors. When this happens I feel as if I have failed in communicating to my client that I provide a very real value added service. It is difficult to come up with a design solution, once you have it though, it is easy to take it and shop to it. Price alone should never be the determining factor in choosing your design professional. Taking my ideas and sending them to another vendor to produce is dangerous because the concepts and ideas I have developed are being read by a third party person. Remember that game of “telephone” you played when you were a kid? Enough said! 

Everyone Deserves Good Design 

Many people think that using a designer for shades, shutters, blinds or draperies will be expensive…or that designers are only for the wealthy. This is the furthest thing from the truth. As I explained above, my design services are value added, that means that I include my design expertise at no extra cost and guarantee the best price for comparable goods and service. Using a design professional such as myself will insure that mistakes (and they can be very expensive mistakes) will not be made by choosing the wrong product for the application or choosing something that just does not look right. Custom products are intended to last for many years. You don’t want to spend the next 15 years looking at something you really don’t like. In the long run, I will save you money and time by giving you the most efficient solution for your needs while fitting your budget and lifestyle. That’s what custom is all about, it’s about you…choose wisely!

How to Put More Light into a Room by Using Window Treatments I admit it, I’m writing this with a bit of a bias because as you might imagine by the title of this article that I live and work in the sunshine deprived northeast. Oh yes, here in New England  we get our sunny days to be sure but summer is fleeting and spring is almost non-existent. My clients with almost no exception, sing this same song…”I don’t want to cover any of my windows!” They cling tenaciously onto every little photon that finds its way into their homes. If they only knew that they could magnify the quantity of light in their spaces through a judicious use of properly specified window treatments…good news, I am here to let the secret out of the bag. Window treatments don’t just make your home beautiful, they provide privacy, modulate light, create ambiance, protect furnishings against ultraviolet fading, and regulate temperatures. Why would anyone be willing to toss aside all of those benefits for what they mistakenly think is the optimum amount of light. You can have your cake and eat it too.  In order to understand how we can obtain more light from window treatments a short lesson in optics is in order; Light travels in a straight line from the sun which is up in the sky…(I know you’re saying, duhhhhh! but please hang tight with me for a minute) Because light travels in a straight line from above and because of the way windows are positioned in homes, the surface in a house which gets the most light is the floor. Think about it for a second, light comes down through the window, smack dab onto the floor which then in turn reflects that light beam bouncing it onto walls and ceilings. So floors get the most light, walls the second most and ceilings the least. To illustrate this, look at your white ceiling, you know that it is white but if you carefully observe, you will see that it looks gray because it receives diminished light. 

OK, so now that we are all scientific experts, how can we use this knowledge to give us more light? Window treatments which can be louvered are the way this happens. Two of the best to this end are shutters and soft shadings such as Hunter Douglas Silhouettes. Every one of those louvers or vanes is a horizontal surface like your floor and it accepts light in the same way, so every one of those little louvers and vanes becomes a reflective surface which can be directed into your room much like a telescope uses a mirror to direct light. The result is controllable illumination which takes the local light at the window and deflects it into the far corners of the space. Light becomes more evenly distributed. In the case of shutters, not only does the light become directed but when doing so, a beautiful lineal pattern of shadows are cast across walls and surfaces creating an aire of mystery and romance.

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With the Silhouettes, the fabric vanes are sandwiched in between two sheer fabrics. Not only are the vanes reflecting light but the quality of the light is gently filtered and softened by the sheers. The sheer fabric also acts as an ultraviolet light filter screening out 65% of UV rays while still allowing you to enjoy your views and to have ventilation.

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Frank Lloyd Wright said that “less is more” and that is a tome to which most designers pay homage. In this instance however, less is far from being more. The addition of the proper window treatment will enhance the quality and quantity of light which enters your home

Today was a great day, months of preparation and teamwork were made real at the ribbon cutting ceremony this morning. Our 2000+ square foot showroom and design studio, located in Middleton, MA is smack dab in the center of town and open for business! Many of our clients, friends and family came to enjoy the smartly catered event and to view the many lovely things assembled with an eye toward detail.

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A small selection of the custom rugs we have available

My two fabulous Hunter Douglas Reps, Scott Yellen(l) and Joe Morales (r)

Too Pretty to Eat!

Pergo, the market innovator and leader

Green design at its best

We had several of our manufacturer’s reps spend some time with us. It’s always great to have the reps speak directly with our customers because they are able to lend great detail on their particular product lines…they are the specialists…we receive excellent training from them throughout the year but we always learn something new at events like today’s. That’s because our customers are asking questions from their unique vantage points. Thanks to all our customers for helping us to be better designers!!!

Now that I have a showroom complete with furnishings, it will be a place for me to bring all of my clients who wish to touch, sit and experience the quality we have to offer. Of course I continue to offer my shop-at-home service but now my clients have a choice. 

Chuck:  Do I have to sign a confidentiality agreement for this information? 

Beverly:  Hahahah, no, I call these my “secrets” because they are principles of good design that are generally known by professionals but overlooked by homeowners.  In a room, there is an order of importance as to how we see things. Because as humans, we stand upright, those things or objects that are in your direct line of sight are the things we notice first, walls, artwork, anything in the strike zone of eye level to waist high is in our primary vision.  

Chuck:  Why is this important to know? 

Beverly:  It is important to know especially when you talk about floor coverings, countertops or any horizontal surface. Your eye tends to skim over horizontal surfaces because they are not in your direct line of sight, they don’t present themselves to you like a vertical surface. Vertical surfaces are in your face!  Not only that but a carpet or rug is in your peripheral vision. That is, you see it but it’s on the outskirts of your visual range. I mention this because I watch so many people take their color samples, be it a paint chip or fabric swatch and place it down on the rug for a color match. I tell my clients not to obsess because;

1) your paint or fabric is not going to live on top of your carpet,

2) your floor covering is in your peripheral vision, therefore not as important as objects in your line sight and,

3) you are at least 5 feet tall if not taller.

Our eye’s ability to judge color is much weaker than we think. Our eyes are really built to see pattern and movement much better than color. Physically, we have more receptors in our eye for seeing black and white than for color by a large margin. When you get a distance from a color, it begins to get difficult to accurately assess it. You are 5’6”, the carpet is “down there”, there are dots of color in the carpet that are about 2” big, those dots of color could be a range of many possible colors at a distance. This is true especially when you “suggest” color by having another field of color like those dots somewhere else in the room. Because our brains want everything to be the same, our eye will make up reasons for that to happen. When you think about all the parts that make up the room and think about them in context, this way of viewing color matching with Persian Rugs makes so much sense. 

Chuck:  So what you are saying is that there is a lot of latitude in color matching, or should I say “coordinating”, when working with Persian Rugs. 

Beverly:  Yes, that’s it in a nutshell! I like to coordinate rather than match because good designers don’t match. They know that matching results in a “flat” room. More about that subject in another conversation! 

Chuck: OK, so you’ve really clarified the color matching, oops, color coordinating part of working with Persian Rugs. What about the lively patterns they can have and how they can get along with other patterns in a room. 

Beverly: This is probably the one aspect of decorating that frightens most people most often…the word is BUSY! Aaaagh, everyone is terrified of this and consequently many people resort to safe solids with a patterned rug. Safe is OK if that is where you like to be but if you’re there because you’re afraid, then you’re missing the boat and you know it!Your room is like an orchestra, there are hundreds of musicians playing different bits of music, yet they all blend together to form a harmonious wonderment. Your room may not have hundreds of decorative components but it’s got more than a handful and they all have to get along, play nice and be greater than the sum of their parts. This knowledge of putting patterns and objects together is what gives a decorator room such panache. 

Chuck:  Is there a formula that homeowners can use to get the decorator look? 

Beverly:  It’s about scale. You can successfully put 6-7 patterns in a room and have it look great and never  look busy. The thing to remember is that the scale of the patterns should be different. Some are big, some small, some close and tight, and some open and loose. Some are linear and crisp, some are organic and fluid. You’ll want to mix it up like this to make it work. All of these patterns support each other, including the rug. The additional pattern in the room just makes the rug look better and better. Putting a Persian Rug in a room filled with nothing but solids makes the room look more like a museum instead of a house filled with life and love. 

Chuck:  Wow, I never knew how sophisticated decorating can be. My head is spinning with new ideas for my own house! Beverly, thanks so much..