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The Citizen, 2000-05-10, Page 23THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MAY 10, 2000. PAGE 23. Home & Garden 2000 For a beach vacation, step into the powder room Everything is possible when you set out to create a personal style in your home. You may live in a subur­ ban semi, a downtown loft or a condo in the sky but that doesn’t matter: with the right idea and the right tools you can turn it into a palace. Or a beach cabin. That’s the message brought to you by a great new book which sets out to instruct and inspire homeowners who are burning to make something unique and special of their home environment. We’re not kidding about the beach cabin: one of the styles featured takes a very ordinary little powder room in a newly-built Canadian home and transforms it into a beach side cabin. You almost expect to feel the warm sand beneath your feet as you enter. The book is called Room Recipes - Cooking up Style with Colour. It’s a big handsome book, jam-packed full with ideas and projects for creating style in your home, written by Jane Lockhart and published by Benjamin Moore Paints. If you’re a follower of Jane’s do-it- yourself design series on HGTV, One House, Two Looks, you’ll know just what to expect from Room Recipes: great ideas, a sure eye for colour, and easy-to-follow instruc­ tions. The book takes a “just do it” approach to interior design, giving enthusiastic and practical advice on every aspect of interior decoration, from the principles of colour to dressing a window and working around less-than-perfect furniture. “Room Recipes details 11 distinc­ tively different room styles which you can reproduce in your own home”, says Lockhardt. “We give you everything you need except one essential item — ypur own personal touch. In the case of the powder room — which we call, sensibly enough, Beach House — you’ll probably want to include mementos of family vacations on far distant beaches.” A grand illusion like all the styles demonstrated in Room Recipes, Beach House began life as an idea Create a butterfly garden By Muriel Edgar So you have been admiring the butterfly gardens in the gardening magazines but do not know where to begin? Read on and you can have a garden right out of the pages of a magazine. When purchasing your butterfly house there are a few considerations to keep in mind. I will briefly outline the most important points: • Removable roof or side for clean­ ing • Ventilated under the eaves • Drainage holes unless made from rough textured material • Constructed of aged and natural materials • Elongated entrance holes, prefer­ ably four • Furnished with vertical standing twigs, inside Now that you have purchased a functional house, the placement is just as important. The requirements are as follows: • Attach it on a solid cedar rail or post • Place at a sheltered height of three to six feet • The front of the house must be facing a south/east position and in a sunny location with at least 10 hours of sun You have done all the above now you can sit back and relax, right? then became a selection of colours. Since the idea is to reproduce a little old cabana on some beach, some­ where, the palette consists of washed-out, sun-bleached colours, and the paint techniques chosen create the illusion of well weathered surfaces. But beaches and summer vacations also include lots of bright colours, so provision was made for accents of complementary colours to reinforce the vacation feeling. But — it really is a powder room In Room Recipes, Lockhardt explains that a sure-fire way of developing a successful space is to select your style first and then a palette of colours and be sure to make every important item in the room contain at least one of those colours. The powder room in question contained a large shiny white object, which did not comply with the colour rules. It couldn’t be removed, so it was partly disguised with a CPC (Colour Palette Correct) fabric toilet tank cover. The ceiling was also disguised as a blue summer sky filled with fluffy white clouds. Room Recipes gives full instructions for turning ceiling into sky. The illusion was made even more convincing in Beach House by adding four hollow wooden faux beams, just below the ceiling. The lower part of the walls were also disguised — this time as wain­ scoting made of faux vertical pan­ els topped by a genuine chair rail. All are appropriately weathered. Along the wall immediately above the rail is a row of dancing starfish. These are three-dimen­ sional creatures made from dry­ wall compound stencilled into place on the wall and painted bright orange. Details, details Small shelf units, weathered in the same way as the wainscoting, were installed to hold accessories and a few personal mementos of happy days spent on beach vaca­ tions. Pastel coloured towels hang Wrong - butterflies need a reason to come to your yard. Attracting them is simple: • Plant flowers and shrubs that butterflies find irresistible, around your butterfly house. A good rule is any nectar produc­ ing plant that has a large open bloom, i.e. coneflower, butterfly bush, lavender, sedum, liatris, dill and yarrow. • Place a shallow pan with a few small stones at the bottom and fill with moist clean sand. Keep the sand moist, since they love to have 'puddle par­ ties’. • Add a large flat stone near the entrance of the house. It works like a heater. • In you your plate near bananas, will love sliver of pear inside the house to help attract new tenants, but be very cautious of this because you do not want to attract bugs in your butterfly house. • Avoid chemical sprays on your flowers and shrubs. Now, you can sit back and enjoy a therapeutic past time. the morning or when have time to relax in garden, place a shallow of the sliced over-ripe fruit Butterfly House, i.e. peaches, pears. They it. Also slip a small from hooks, and other powder room essentials are contained in stainless steel beach buckets. In addition to presenting 11 sepa­ rate room styles — all created in a typical, newly-built, Canadian home — Room Recipes also explains the basics of colour selec­ tion and describes how different combinations of colour can be used to set a mood and to influence the appearance of a room. There is also advice on how to treat the exterior of your home to get full enjoyment from decks and other add-ons. Room Recipes - Cooking up Style with Colour is available only from Benjamin Moore retailers. It is illustrated throughout with over 100 original colour photographs, and contains detailed instructions for 33 projects, inside and outside the house. A unique feature of the book is a section of removable Room Recipes Cards with colour samples to help you in selecting furnish­ ings, fabrics and accessories. Suggested retail price is $13.95. The description of Beach House, the main level powder room begins on page 50. Secret Ingredients: • add lots of weathered textures to surfaces and materials • choose bright sea, sky and colours for walls and floors • accent with shells and classic stainless-steel beach buckets • add some soft and wavy lines within the design • don’t forget to add a splash of bright colour • accent with pictures from family vacations to beach resorts - News Canada Trellises & Obelisks several styles to choose from in clear pine, clear cedar or pressure treated wood. 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