MY VIEW
Penny F. Zeplowitz: Matchy-matchy decor is my kind of fashion
I have a confession to make. Our bedroom furniture matches. I didn’t realize it shouldn’t until I was watching the home decorating shows on HGTV last summer. To my horror, I discovered their interior design experts consider our bedroom set to be (gulp) too “matchy-matchy.” That’s their word, incidentally, not mine. Now you might wonder what that means.
Apparently, if your dressers, night tables and headboard are all the same wood and the same style, you’re out of fashion. Who knew? When we bought the furniture, we thought it was supposed to match. Obviously, many furniture stores today are still clueless because the various pieces of their bedroom sets match, too. In fact, isn’t that what the word “set” means?
A recent fashion article on the Internet revealed that my clothes are also too matchy-matchy. I always thought I just needed to wear colors that didn’t clash with each other. Now I’ve discovered that in order to be in the height of fashion this season, I must have a wardrobe “palette” (also their word) with a variety of colors that coordinate with a mixture of different patterns like plaids, prints and stripes.
I’ve been studying the numerous fashion magazines diligently. What I can’t figure out, however, is how my 5-foot-2-inch frame can accommodate wearing a plaid skirt, print blouse, striped sweater, long scarf and wide belt, as dictated by the fashion experts, without looking like I got dressed in a dark closet. After all, the magazines say I should be a Fashionista not a fashion mistake.
I’ve also discovered that fashionably adorning your house apparently can be as difficult as fashionably dressing yourself. I really didn’t realize how difficult until, with the scarcity of good television programming last summer, I began watching HGTV shows.
There I discovered the momentous decorating challenges that many homeowners with seemingly unlimited funds face when they buy a home.
Viewing large, palatial homes across the country each night owned by couples in their 20s both puzzled and fascinated me. Although the houses were spacious and attractive, the decorating dilemmas posed to the various designers on the program still seemed to involve massive renovations of bathrooms, living rooms, kitchens or great rooms with price tags of $50,000 and up.
Landscaping of the homeowners’ “green space” (which is what most of us call back yards) was equally pricey. Homes landscaped with lavish fountains, multilevel decks with space enough to host a large wedding reception and numerous plants made some of them look like commercial botanical gardens.
Building 25-foot-high ceilings was surprisingly the norm in some areas of the country. As someone whose height has never made it necessary for me to even think about high ceilings, I found it particularly amusing to watch a prominent designer struggle to make the ceiling of one such home actually appear lower with the use of draperies and paint colors to make the room look more cozy and welcoming.
I couldn’t help wondering why a homeowner would want to spend large sums of money to build such high ceilings in the first place only to have to pay his decorator large sums to visually “lower” them.
I also wondered how on earth these young couples could even afford their expensively renovated “McMansions.” Or can they?
Log into MyBuffalo to post a comment
MyBuffalo is the new social network from Buffalo.com. Your MyBuffalo account lets you comment on and rate stories at buffalonews.com. You can also head over to mybuffalo.com to share your blog posts, stories, photos, and videos with the community. Join now or learn more.
Reader comments
Learn more about our moderation system.