Just Like New

Lauri Ward is bustling around a spacious living room in Marina del Rey, pushing furniture and rehanging pictures. It is her specialty act: transforming a so-so room into a stylish interior without bringing in a load of new furniture.

“Anybody can do this,” she is saying to the TV crew filming the instant make-over for a feature on the evening news. “You just have to know the rules.”

She clusters three scattered chairs to make a conversation area and pulls together some plants to create a little indoor garden. From a bedroom she produces sconces, which are then hung on either side of the fireplace, and she seriously prunes a shelf crammed with photographs in wildly assorted frames. When she is finished, the room looks like a candidate for House Beautiful, proving Ward’s optimistic philosophy that “most people know what they like, and own nice things, but have a hard time meshing them together.”

Ward, a New Yorker who was on a national publicity tour for her new how-to book, has been described as a trailblazer in the growing world of do-it-yourself interior decorating.

It was a gradual transformation, she explained, relaxing after the TV shoot. She started her career as a conventional interior decorator and is a member of the American Society of Interior Designers.

“I went to New York University for undergraduate work and then the New York School of Interior Design. I learned ‘style’ and ‘color’--your basic decorating courses. Like every other designer at the time--this was 20 years ago--I went to people’s houses and told them how to create a new look by getting a lot of new furniture.”

She didn’t like the emphasis.

“I came home one night and said to my husband, ‘This is all about sales--the more furniture you sell, the more money you make, and I don’t want to come from that place.’ ”

Nor was she comfortable being viewed as a decorating dictator.

“In those days, it was one style per designer, and even today that usually holds,” Ward said. “Most designers have their own ‘look,’ and clients see their portfolio, and that’s what they get.”

It was her feeling that clients often had perfectly good furniture and accessories that just needed some artistic overhauling. In 1981, she founded Use-What-You-Have Interiors, putting that philosophy to work.

Unlike interior designers who oversee an entire project, choosing everything down to the doorknobs, Ward--and the designers she has trained--work as consultants. For a per-room fee (an average of $295 to $395 per room, depending on size), the designer spends a few hours in a home and leaves the client with a complete blueprint for the make-over.

It worked as a business approach for Ward, who’s in demand for seminars and also created a national decorator training program.

She was also realizing the same decorating mistakes appeared repeatedly in the houses she visited, no matter the size or opulence of the home.

Over the years she gradually distilled the major pitfalls into a tidy list of “Top 10 Decorating Mistakes,” using them as guides for her own make-overs. Now she has put it all together in her book “Use What You Have Decorating” (Putnam, 1998). Ward teaches her readers how to recognize and solve their decorating problems.

“We all know people who ‘have the decorating eye,’ ” she said. “Well you don’t need that eye. You just need to know what the rules are.”

A decorating primer, the book devotes one chapter to each of the 10 most common decorating mistakes with before-and-after case studies.

“I’ve seen thousands and thousands of homes, and every one has one or more of these mistakes,” she said.

Ward likes to compare a home to a jigsaw puzzle: “People have all the pieces, but invariably they are in the wrong spots.” The purpose of her book is to help people put the pieces in the right place.

That doesn’t mean her clients never step into a furniture store. It’s her contention that “everybody needs something,” and after laying out a plan that may call for new slipcovers or accessories, her decorators also may suggest helpful sources.

“We are not saying use everything you have, we are saying use what you have effectively,” she said.

And she also has a list of “Don’t Use What You Have” offenses, including refrigerator magnets, doilies, cluttered window sills and patterned paper towels.

Has she ever seen a house that is beyond help?

“I am always asked that question, and my answer is always the same: ‘Never, never!’ ”

Ward insists she is not interested in putting conventional designers out of business.

“The New York Times says that only 6% of people use an interior designer,” she said. “My book is for the other 94%. Everybody deserves a beautiful home.”

Most interior designers would go along with that.

“I think she’s right about educating the public, and her book sounds interesting,” said Jack Lowrance, president of the Los Angeles Design Group. “There are designers who only like to do their look, but a well-trained designer is going to work with a client, not be dictatorial. I do a lot of work reusing 80% or 90% of what a client has: If you are professional enough, you can create a good look with it.”

He disagrees with Ward’s contention that a set of rules can make up for a natural “eye.”

“I have had some clients with such innate good taste I wonder why I am there,” he said. “But there are definitely people who don’t have a natural eye and that’s why they hire designers.”

Lauri Ward’s Web site is https://www.redecorate.com.