apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

All of the art frames in my living room are black. They really allow the colors to pop!

I'm also thinking of painting my buffet cabinet black, but I'm torn between matte and glossy.

Tell me about it! I just bought from my friends at ME2design.net in NYC... a black satin lacquer freestanding bar for a corner that I did not know what to do with! It converted the entire 18'x28' room into a dramatic Great/Party room just by adding that one piece!
It is great 'cause I also serve from it and it created additional bar stool seating in my room as well.

Love the black idea and to mix up wood tones! It does the trick!

I thought this adage was strange when I first heard it years ago, but since then I have noticed that it is really true. Most of the rooms that I like, no matter what the colorway, have something that is just noticeable and black in it - picture frames, a lamp base, a small sculpture, a vase, a part of a rug pattern, a very small piece of furniture - something. It doesn't have to be very large, either or dominate the room. I don't know why this is true for rooms that I like, but I do find it appealing.

A touch of black in this & that, here & there.

I never noticed this until recently, when I bought a black aquarium stand for my seventy-gallon tank. It was the only thing I could find in my price range, but I was nervous about how it would look because every other piece of furniture in the room was wood. I'm amazed at how great that pop of black looks in the corner.

Funny ... I bought a beautiful oil painting last year, a landscape featuring primarily greens and blues, that happened to be in a dramatic black frame. I worried about how that frame would fit in with everything else in my living room ... not a problem!

I think black works so well because most everything in most homes is much lighter -- the colors we tend to choose are often mid-level at the darkest. (Yes, I know there are exceptions.) So black is a strong, crisp contrast to those and tends to kind of complete the range of values we can see making everything seem more in focus, less washed out. (In an eggplant colored room, pure white does the same thing...)

Just a theory.

I use a lot of black, shelves, picture frames, groupings of vases, as one color in a fabric pattern, furniture legs, storage boxes, Asian decor accessories, etc.

I love colors, and a little black against the colors really brings things out. It's a nice punctuation for a room. A little bit here and there really makes a difference.

Does anybody know the artist of that horse painting? That is amazing.

source for those adorable blue pot?

Black lampshades on very dark iron lamp bases. The walls are painted light blue, so I also thought that black art - only drawings done in black ink, shadow portraits or paper cut-out images in black paper would be hung up in that room (in black frames of course).