Seattle Homes & Lifestyles Blog

HGTV’s Kenneth Brown Shares Design Tips

April 22nd, 2008 at 11:38am Lindsey

Celebrity interior designer Kenneth Brown spoke to an eager crowd of designers and design-lovers at Saturday’s "Eye on Design" consumer event at Seattle Design Center. While going through a slideshow of projects he worked on for HGTV’s reDesign and for his own eponymous firm, he entertained the audience with behind-the-scene stories and practical design advice. 

Photograph by Sara Coe, courtesy of Seattle Design Center

A staunch defender of his field, Brown first argued that homeowners should hire designers for their knowledge and design skills. A good designer will stay in his or her budget and deliver what you want the first time, Brown says. He added that if homeowners attempt DIY-remodeling or
-redecorating, what they would have paid a designer will be spent in making mistakes or buying unwanted things. 

Other specific tips and tricks of the trade:

• When looking for an interior designer, interview more than one. Pay attention to who talks more in the interview—you or the designer. The designer should be the one listening to your needs and vision. 
• Bigger is not always better; when thinking about building spaces, know that smaller rooms and house can be cozier and lend themselves to have a bigger design impact. 
• Make sure you know what you really want. When you say you want a "modern, bathlike spa," what does that mean? Does it mean dark walls or light walls? A big tub? No tub?
• Don’t get stuck on "following the rules": Why does everyone think that wall-to-wall mirrors are necessary in bathrooms? Think outside the box and you might find a solution that is creative and unique.
• If you want your bedroom to be like a luxurious hotel room, think about installing wall-to-wall draperies. It creates a cocoonlike feel in any room.
• Think about how you use all the spaces in your home; in one project, Brown installed shelves in a hallway for the family to place rotating framed art and photographs.
• A kitchen remodel is like a cosine—it will be increasingly exciting and then increasingly frustrating, and then exciting again. 
• Good design can happen on any budget if you do the design right. 
• Never pick out your paint in the hardware store under fluorescent lights. Take a piece of white paper and poke a hole in it; look at only one color through that hole in natural light and in the light in your home. 
• Have a design plan and stick to it. You can’t judge a project before it’s finished—trust that the original plan will look great in the end even if it scares you now. 
• If you are going to go ahead with a project without an interior designer, make sure you can see everything fresh. Brown advises that homeowners move all the furniture out of a room, take a picture of the empty room and then make a plan.
• Layer the lighting in a room. Know that even art lighting can serve as a good layer—it bounces light off of the art and into the room. 
• Art can create a vista for a room, like a window, especially art with a horizon line. 
• Another great way to get art in your home is to buy a large canvas, tape off sections and use remnant paint from hardware stores to create your own abstract art. 
• Brown also likes to buy books with beautiful illustrations, like Audubon’s Birds of America, and then frame the art. 
• If you’re building a house, remember to budget money in for the furniture after the structure. 
• Brown believes in the principles of feng shui: "It just creates a nice flow," he says.
• Think of the six degrees of separation phenomenon when trying to get a room to work together. For example, the rug doesn’t have to match the window draperies as long as the rug connects to the sofa, and the sofa connects to the lamp shades, and the lampshades connect to the window draperies.

It turns out that the Seattle visit wasn’t only inspiring to the audience at Eye on Design; Brown find many inspirations of his own in Seattle. Check out his blog to read what he thought about the doors in Susan Mills’ showroom and the Seattle landscape.

Entry Filed under: Events, Home Decor, Inspiration