Set designer Lee Levy's decorating strategy is simple: “Look at what you have. If you don’t like it, just change it,” she says. It doesn't have to break the bank. Since she moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles with her boyfriend, Seth Powsner (he's also a set designer), that has been their guiding principle for crafting a totally bespoke home in a Highland Park rental. When Lee spotted the place with high wood-beam ceilings in a Craigslist ad, she was immediately smitten. “I don’t really like renovated places,” she explains. “They're often cheaply done and don't have charm.” She'd rather make her own fixes, “on the cheap and renter-friendly.” As in, any cosmetic changes must be removable.
Can you spot the DIY? Lee even gave this vintage IKEA cocktail table a new look by applying a layer of iridescent film. The rug was a quarantine purchase from Urban Outfitters.
First on the list after signing the lease? Painting the walls white. “It brightens up the place like crazy,” she reports. And once her landlord approved of her paint job, he gave her the green light on her next big agenda item: the ceilings. The space in between the beams was brown—to match the wood?—but painting that bit white totally transformed the feel of the space. Her landlord even told her he's going to start painting all the ceilings this way.
Lee scored this set of vintage dining chairs from a dealer on Craigslist and reupholstered them (originally red vinyl) in midnight blue fabric. The table is from CB2. Lee covered one entire wall with terrazzo-patterned contact paper.
Throughout the apartment, Lee has found easy, subtle ways to update surfaces and fittings. In the kitchen, she covered the cabinets in marbleized contact paper from Home Depot —"It wasn’t that far off from the original cabinet color, so it’s not too imposing"—and she switched out the hardware with some simple pulls sourced on Amazon. In the dining area she installed new sconces and added overhead light with an industrial fixture she jazzed up with blue metallic contact paper—all that lighting was from Home Depot. Do you sense a theme? Lee loves contact paper. Next to the dining table she created an accent wall with a subtle terrazzo-patterned version—"it started out with the shelf and then I just kind of went ballistic and did the whole wall."
-
Lee sourced these tubes for a photo shoot at a store that sells linoleum floors and carpets. She brought them home, covered them with fabric, and used this group of seven to create a graphic, three-dimensional wall element.
The kitchen cabinets have a new look thanks to marbleized contact paper from Home Depot and new pulls from Amazon.
Working in set design means Lee and Seth are always on the lookout for interesting materials. Case in point: Lee recently used some rubbery drawer liner from the Dollar Store to revamp an IKEA mirror, explaining, “I liked the color!” It's a skill she honed at her last job, where she was constantly building sets on the cheap. “I had a tiny budget, so I had to find creative ways to make things look good," she says. “I learned about a lot of different faux surfaces for wall treatments. If you go to Home Depot, for instance, you can get a brick wall, you can get tile. Now, I’ll see a material and then I’ll get inspired by what I could do with it."
Lee gave a standard IKEA mirror a makeover by edging it in rubbery drawer liner she sourced a the Dollar Store. “I liked the color, so I just glued it on and made a shape to it," she explains. "I cut out the shapes that I wanted. I kept it more subtle. I didn’t want to go crazy.”
|
发表于 2020-8-26 04:39:52
v
已绑定手机
