Fatal Distraction

Ah, the sofa.

We sink into it after a long day. Toddlers climb on it, teenagers flop on it and party guests spill on it. When no one’s looking, the dog tries to curl up on it, and the cat rubs up against it.

In short, we really use this piece of furniture. We wear it out faster than anything else, and each time we replace it, we run the risk of committing the most common of the 10 Deadly Design Sins.

You know, the decorating mistakes we laypeople make when not under the influence of a professional interior designer.

These are the things that make designers wince and pale when they respond to what designer Abby Menhenett calls the “911 Designer” call.

In an informal survey of 10 Orange County designers, the most frequently mentioned error--Deadly Design Sin No. 1--involved regrettable furniture buys. The most common object of the furniture-buying goof? The sofa.

Here’s what generally happens, designers say.

You know you need a new sofa; it’s been in the back of your mind for months. One Saturday, you decide to go out and just look. It’s the last day of a sale, and you find a sofa that looks about right and seems like a great buy. You get it home and whoops . . . it’s too big.

You can’t return it, so you either live with it or you make that emergency designer call. Corona del Mar designer Susan White says she’s recently gotten three jobs that way.

“I just got one today. Somebody needed a 7-foot sofa, but they didn’t think about how deep it was or how tall or how it relates to the scale of the room. The reaction always is ‘Oh, my God, it’s the wrong size,’ but they don’t understand why,” she says.

Besides the weekend impulse buy that doesn’t fit, other goofs include settling for furniture in a color that doesn’t quite work, buying too much furniture for the room and purchasing poor-quality furniture that doesn’t last, the designers say.

Other common mistakes that made the list are:

* Art and accessories: Pictures hung too high or too low, groupings not balanced. Not enough accessories or too many knickknacks in no particular order, accessories that are too dressy for the room or vice versa.

* Balance and scale: Wrong mix, such as volume ceilings and tiny stick furniture or oversize furniture crammed into a small space.

* Window treatments: Skimpy do-it-yourself draperies or treatments that are underscaled for the room.

* Furniture placement: Pieces hug the walls.

* Color: Failure to grasp what that small sample will really look like on the walls or in a houseful of carpeting.

* Too trendy: Flagstone entry flooring, stark-white walls and neutral color schemes don’t work everywhere.

* Competing design themes: Formal flooring such as marble, paired with country-style brickwork on the fireplace and casual accessories.

* Mixed flooring: Too many types of hard-surface flooring such as wood, tile and marble all visible from the same spot.

* Poor lighting: Foliage blocks the natural light from outside, or there is not enough good general lighting and eye-level lighting. Lampshades are too dark, or their design offers poor light.

And there’s a bonus category--Keeping Something That’s Ugly. (Yes, they mean that old recliner.)

These are the most common mistakes designers see, and they agree that when it comes to the most costly errors, mistakes involving furniture and window treatments are the hands-down winners.

“Accessories can make or break a room. But if you make a mistake on a lamp, you can find another place for it,” says Menhenett, of Design Associates West in San Clemente.

But, like a new car driven off the lot, furniture is hard to dispose of.

People either sell it at a loss or struggle to fit it in. White, of White Design, says she’s having an upholsterer cut down part of a client-purchased sectional that turned out to be too large.

On another job, White had to keep the too-big sofa, so she put decorative pillows on it, pulled an occasional chair out of the room and installed heavy artwork over the fireplace to balance the sofa.

Her pet peeve is the wrong mix of scale and balance--when the furniture looks out of scale with the space. That problem is common in new homes because builders have gone overboard with volume ceilings, she says. You end up with a table that’s too small for the dining room, or furniture that looks too spindly for the space.

Antique pieces that looked great in the living room of the old house might have to go into a guest room in the new one.

You can have the same problem in older houses if you buy new furniture, says Leslie Barish of Design Consultants in Huntington Beach. A large contemporary sofa dwarfing the older chair sitting next to it is a mistake she sees often. For continuity in an overall look, the older piece could be reupholstered to get today’s bulkier style, she says.

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More often, furniture ends up being too big for the space because large furniture stores and design showrooms make things look smaller than they are.

Once you get the furniture, where you place it is the next problem. Most people put it up against a wall.

“It goes back to when we were little kids and we filled in the lines in the coloring book. People use the room’s walls as boundaries,” White says.

The longest wall doesn’t necessarily have to hold the sofa, she says. Traffic flow and balance have to be considered also.

To create more interest and height, designers will “float” a sofa with a console table behind it or angle a small desk or chair in a room, Barish adds.

“I tell my clients that design is a matter of 2 inches, sometimes just moving things so the proportion between them is better does the trick,” she says.

Though the furniture faux pas was the most common error designers mentioned, it wasn’t No. 1 on everyone’s list.

For designer Pat Sullivan, the biggest mistake people make is using “make-it-yourself valances” or ready-made drapes. There’s never enough material and no lining, and the end result looks cheap, she says.

“The feeling that ‘My mother did it; I can too’ is in all of us. Me too. I’ve tried it all. There isn’t a mistake I haven’t made,” says Sullivan, of Possibilities Interior Design in Mission Viejo.

She teaches an adult education course on “Taking the Mystery Out of Interior Design” and warns her mostly do-it-yourself students to beware of anything that looks too easy. Just because you can wallpaper doesn’t mean you can make drapes, she tells them.

She cites as an example the $9 drapery swag device she saw in a television infomercial and decided to try on her daughter’s family-room windows.

“I spent $125 in drapery hardware to hold up that $9 piece of plastic. The weight of the fabric made the heads tip over, and the whole thing hunkered down over the room,” says Sullivan, who ended up taking it all down and having a treatment made.

It used to be that people overdid their window treatments with three layers: sheers, a valance and stationary panels. Now they are vastly underscaling them, say designers Lisa Weber of Lisa Weber Design in Fullerton and Rene Mendoza of Tuscany Design & Company in Orange.

Often, it’s just blinds and a valance, and there’s not enough weight to the treatment, they say.

But the hardest thing for people to do by themselves is work with color, Weber says. They have a blue carpet, for instance, and they pick out a peach wallpaper with a little blue dot in it from a wallpaper book. But once it’s on the wall and you step back from it, the tiny blue dots become invisible, she says.

Or they don’t carry through with color, Mendoza adds. People will use it in draperies, but they won’t pull it through in the upholstery or florals to balance the room.

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Yet another color pitfall is color balance. A room might be heavily weighted with cool colors like blues and greens, but the eye wants to find a place to rest--it needs a warm color to balance it, White says.

“What I see a lot,” says designer Kay Leruth of Mission Viejo, “is people buying furniture where the color is off a little bit, but they think it’s OK because it was a good deal. Or the colors are safe because everybody has it.”

But because it’s safe or they settled for the slightly off-color, the design doesn’t have any personality, pizazz or sparkle, she says.

For Laguna Hills designer Eileen Klein of Eileen and Associates, the single biggest mistake people make involves lighting. Generally, they ignore it.

“Lighting is the orphan child of design,” laments Klein, who points out that without light, there is no color or space.

She recommends more use of recessed lighting, more wall sconces and table lamps for midlevel lighting, light-colored lampshades and pagoda-shaped shades that are wider at the bottom.

Klein and other designers, such as Pam Stovall of Fountain Valley, bemoan trends, including stark-white walls and neutral color schemes that people get stuck in. Picking ideas out of magazines or getting them through design-house tours is commendable, but, Weber says, people try to use too many ideas. They end up with country-brick flooring and sleek contemporary furniture.

People have the same problem when it comes to hard-surface flooring. They mix tile, wood and marble, and the results send a confusing message, Mendoza says.

Then there’s the problem of the piece you just can’t seem to part with--such as that comfortable old recliner.

“I don’t believe in throwing everything out; I try to work with pieces they have,” Sullivan says. “But there are some pieces you just can’t work with. Often, it’s the recliner, and it has just got to go. It’s ruining the look.”

Comfort doesn’t have to be sacrificed, she says, adding that today’s recliners can look attractive.

Dealing with an item that is valuable but ugly is another problem.

“If it’s a family thing, I encourage them to keep it,” Weber says.

One client wanted a rose-and-mauve color scheme but insisted on prominently displaying a large and valuable, but extremely orange, vase. Weber’s suggestion was to start a collection and keep it in a separate cabinet or go with a peach color scheme instead of mauve and rose.

Instead, the vase took up residence on the hearth.

That brings us to Corona del Mar designer Gene Zettle’s pet peeve: people who hire designers and then ignore the advice they get.

He and other designers say the real problem behind our Top 10 design mistakes is lack of planning. Poor lighting, inappropriate fabrics, the bargain that doesn’t work are all symptoms. Failure to plan is the major problem.

“People are most reluctant to do it because it’s no fun,” Zettle says.

It’s certainly not as much fun as shopping for something and finding, hmmmm, a sofa on sale that seems like a great buy.