Design Winners Offer Tips for Home Decors

Some decorating tips can be obtained from this year’s Hexter Award-winning designers for decorating suggestions.

Both suggested that most walls, floors and major upholstery be in neutral colors. Accent these with small splashes of color. The accents can be changed inexpensively and quickly.

Plan for rooms to fulfill more than one function by placing some furniture on casters and selecting light, easy-to-move pieces to make rearrangement easier.

The prize-winning residential entry of Janet Rosenberg of Design Studio in Upper Montclair, N.J., was a Manhattan apartment that had been turned from a two-bedroom into a one-bedroom apartment by removing the wall between a bedroom and the living room.

But before pulling down walls, she suggests, try to open space by removing a door and widening a doorway. Room dividers do not have to be walls, she suggested, but can be pieces of furniture.

The Hexter Awards (which have been given for 27 years by the Cleveland-based fabric firm) also singled out the Los Angeles Design Studio for its commercial design project.

The firm’s head, Joel M. Bernstein, noted that a useful technique is to provide something attractive for the eye to observe. Changes in scale also provide the necessary counterpoint, he said.