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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

Ontological Decorating

05:44 / 28.02.04

I'm moving out of my current hellhole and into a very nice house closer to civilization. The bedroom is the smallest I've ever lived in (possibly ever been in), about 7 feet by 10 feet with a little closet that will probably fit my steamer trunk/dresser.

My thoughts, possibly misguided, were that since the room is small, rather than trying to make it look bigger by keeping everything light colored, I would try to make it seem cozy and enveloping by using darker colors and trying to somehow 'soften' things with draperies or something.

At the same time, I've always liked the idea of a room which has pulp/mad scientist sensibilities: scientific or pseudoscientific diagrams, physics equipment (I used to have a bunch but I had been carting it around for three moves and it just had to go), a whiteboard, but also goth motifs and objets from 'the Mysterious Orient'. (Apparently I want to live in a Nine Inch Nails video or something.)

So far my only idea, an attempt to blend the 'darker' with 'softer' and 'mad scientist' with some feng shui thrown in, is to drape some kind of coarse black netting along one of the corners, and affix postcards and pictures of mathematicians and philosophers to it with alligator clips attached to colored wires. Not that I know where to find this netting.

Note also that I have no furniture, and little money. I intend to buy a bed—I want to have a sort of lofted bunk bed so I can cram a desk underneath, but I also hope to have sex again so I'm bringing a female friend with trustworthy taste to go furniture shopping—but anything else in the way of shelving or endtables or whathaveyou should probably be reclaimed wood decorated in a clever way.

I know I'm all over the place, here... but, anyone got any ideas on what else I need to be thinking about, or where to start?

12:57 / 28.02.04

Maybe you could paint the room black, and then white in maths/physics formulae over the top ? I've got no idea what this would look like - I suspect quite insane, but maybe in a quite stylish, mysterious way. You know, the genius in his wilderness years, that type of thing

*

14:24 / 28.02.04

Black walls with white equations, text, etc. is exactly what I was thinking as I read. But if you do that I recommend interesting lighting to make the room seem not so oppressive-- the best idea I can come up with for the mad scientist/occultist theme is EL wire or tape strung around the ceiling (Try Wie da Mark). This can be purchased in various colors and it isn't hideously expensive for a small room like this, but you'll have to wire it to a box-- relatively simple but still involving some electrical know-how. I think this would look quite kick-ass and possibly prevent induction of actual mad scientist mentalities due to the darkness and oppressiveness of the space. For the cheap version, get a couple of the color kinetics splash lightbulbs (also available from Wie da Mark) and put them in interesting fixtures-- I know they're colorful, but they can also be a plain white strobe. They're pretty cheap, they'll NEVER burn out (well, okay, in fifteen years maybe) and the colored light will definitely soften the hard edge industrialism just to the point of tolerability. Using chrome and glass as decorating elements may also help. Take a trip to a junkyard and see what mechanical things you can take apart and use as furniture or objets de whatever.

Black netting can be purchased from any fabric store; look for "tulle" or mosquito netting in black. That has really fine holes but you can tear it artistically.

15:55 / 28.02.04

My sister has a bedroom of similar dimensions. It has a single high cabin bed, with a wardrobe, shelves and a seat under it on one side of the room, and the other side is empty except for a sink.

The wall on that side is *covered* in photos, which makes it seem smaller than it is. I think if you're gonna do sciency things, keep them decent sized, even if it means having fewer.

Ikea has good high double beds. Could paint a big piece of black (or dark coloured- I'd have a burgandy colour) material with white sciency things and pin it on the underside of the bed. If the material and the walls are the same colour, might make it a nice hidey hole under the bed, if theres any free room under there.

And bean bags. Mmmm, cooshie.

23:40 / 01.03.04

I think you may need to sort out the layout of the space before you get too heavily into theme/colour scheme. This has been my experience, anyway. If you have a preferred colour palate, you will automatically superimpose it over the room anyway, but it's always good to figure out what furniture you want and where to put it first, so you can do a better job of distributing colours/theme objects around the room. Another important aspect when selecting colour is the position of any windows. Certain colours look terrific in all lights, but some colours look hideous at certain times of day (my mother's peach kitchen in the morning comes to mind). Take home some paint chips and tape them to the walls - black comes with a variety of undertones (reds, blues, purples). It's important to pick one that works for you, and that isn't going to turn an unbearable shade under certain types of light. That's about all I can say for now, except, in a small space, put things on wheels whenever possible.

01:17 / 02.03.04

Good advice all around. I will wait to have some sort of idea of what kind of furniture I'll be using before going berserk...which is fine, 'cause it will take me a while of patient alertness to find the right flavor of tchotchkes, I imagine.

19:13 / 02.03.04

If you want to space it out and still look cozy, white ceiling & dark walls. I'd advise staying away from black.
If you can do it, get a half-gallon of green chalkboard paint -- it's the same dark green as chalkboards and you can actually use it as a chalkboard. Extra fun: get colored chalk.

If you're a student, one wall at least will be consumed by shelving of some sort. Easiest: planks (1x4s or whatever you can find) held up by cinderblocks/bricks/ornamental, concrete garden wall pieces. To make it actually look halfway decent, PAINT them. You could also use milk crates -- see if you can't attach 'em high up the wall and PAINT them too. With dark green walls, I'd use a warm kinda muddy color, like a purplish-brown eggplant color or something. Buying cheap paint: ask for seconds or rejects. People are always returning gallons cuz the color's not quite right. Stores want to offload them, so they sell 'em cheap.

Devote an area of the shelves closest to the door to decorative objects, like vacuum tubes and electronic components. (Maybe the inch and a half of wood on the outside of the concrete supports?)

If it's really small, you're kind of handy and you have the latitude from the landlord, consider rigging some sort of fold-down Murphy bed arrangement off one of the walls. Make sure you've got a mattress for it first and measure from that, because those fuckers are expensive as hell.

Artwork in frames is always nice, and sometimes you can get shabby old picture frames for free from salvage yards. I did. Currently used to display four luridly colorful Hindu deity postcards, stuck onto a piece of black-spraypainted foamcore board. Framed postcards and xeroxes (especially on colored paper) are great.

08:37 / 04.03.04

Grant, you really need to have your own TV show.

Tune in now for Grant's Cool and Interesting Space-Saving Ideas.

12:11 / 04.03.04

Cheap, sciencey wallpaper: go foraging in charity shops and car-boot sales for knackered old science and engineering books with simple diagrams and illustrations (soundwaves, light passing through a lens, circuits etc). Old A-Level text books and training manuals are good for that sort of thing. Tear the pages out and paste on the wall (whole pages, not just the illustrations) with standard wallpaper paste. Best if the paper has aged and gone a nice shade of golden brown. Looks nice with a coat of varnish, but that could be pricey if you're doing a big area. Probably best limited to a single wall. Might not be approved by your landlord/lady

22:13 / 04.03.04

And if you do that, and it's not old-enough looking and yellowed, give it a rub over with some tea or coffee, and leave to dry.

23:03 / 04.03.04

When we had cable, my better half became addicted to HGTV -- the home improvement network. Most of what I suggested *came* from TV shows. It's amazing what they'll do out there.

That chalkboard paint, by the way, is as cool as hell. I have friends who used the black kind to paint their fireplace. Visitors are encouraged to put graffiti on the mantel....

19:36 / 05.03.04

I'd also advise against black paint, that will make the room more suffocating and also absorb a hell of a lot of light. I agree that burgundy or like a midnight blue would give you the cozy feel. Another way to create an illusion of more space might be to paint it two-tone, say midnight at the bottom and some pale hue starting around the level of your lofted bed. You could also use texture to push the walls outward while sticking w the dark color you prefer - a lot of glazing techniques (like sponging, ragrolling) are extremely easy to do and only require another can of paint & a can of glaze (& a sponge, or whatever). Those faux effects give the walls much more depth. If you're good w paint, actually, you could even fade it out toward the top, making the ceiling seem to recede further.

19:37 / 05.03.04

oh, and this may be too-science and not-enough-occult, but I love things like graph paper and blueprint paper... blueprint paper could look beautiful on a dark blue wall. you could actually just wallpaper-paste it right onto the wall.

15:59 / 01.04.04

i would also advise against the black. for all the reasons mentioned above, but also cos it's hard to paint over when you move.
the chalkboard paint is awesome, but what also rocks is magnetic paint. anything you paint will become magnetic, and then you can just stick things up on yr wall w/magnets! easy! i think you can even paint over it if you don't like the color, and it will still be magnetic.