Interior designing tips and guide

I let the gorgeous landscape serve as my inspiration. Flying into Arizona, I was taken by dramatic shifts in landscape, from the flat red earth to the dusty brown canyons to the snow- capped peaks, and knew that I wanted to somehow capture that same feeling in this wonderful couple’s room. I also wanted to draw on the family’s Native American heritage, which I knew was an important part of its identity. Luckily, of course, my two sources of inspiration were not incompatible because so much of Native American symbolism is grounded in an appreciation for the earth. Native Americans perform a traditional Hopi dance with the Arizona Mountains as a backdrop.
The colors used in this room-sand tones, deep reds, and oranges-reflect the local terrain. With all the Navajo blankets and Native American crafts in the room, I didn’t bother hanging any artwork on the wall. That would have been overkill. Natural Elements 103 EMHE had learned about the couple, Percy and Terry Piestewa, from former POW Jessica Lynch. Lynch’s roommate and best friend was the Piestewases’ daughter, PFC Lori Piestewa, who was the first American woman killed in Iraq. Jessica and Lori had a pact that each would take care of the other’s family if something happened to them.
Lori was only twenty-three when she died, and she left behind a young son and daughter, now being raised by Percy and Terry. When we first met the family, they were living in a mobile home (that, frankly, had seen better days) in Tuba City, hoping to move to Flagstaff so they could be closer to relatives. I almost always start any design with whatever’s going to be the impact piece, and in a bedroom that’s usually the bed. For the Piestewas, I built a detached headboard for the simple platform bed from indigenous trees. The headboard, with its rough- hewn, unfinished timber is meant to recapture the connection between the wood in our homes and the trees it comes from-and not, if you’ll forgive the pun, fade into the woodwork. I also used local wood to create two “teepee” lamps, a mantle over the fireplace, and the rungs of which are a ladder for hanging handcrafted Native American blankets.
The room didn’t really need any wall art, because it had so much in the way of artful crafts, including a rustic twig basket filled with red, black, yellow, and white corn (symbolizing human beings of different colors living together) made by a Hopi woman who’s a friend of the Piestewas. While the Piestewa room echoed the world outside their doors, a bedroom I did for Beverly Turner echoed a place she couldn’t get to so easily- the beach. Beverly has been the adoptive mother to eighteen kids with special needs. Despite suffering from a neuromuscular disease, she is raising kids with many different disabilities, including autism, bipolar disorder, and blindness by herself. Many of her kids were also abused or neglected at one time in their early lives. The inspiration for this bedding was a tile floor I saw in a Cuban restaurant in New York City. To create the mural, we sketched organic shapes on the wall, then came back and filled in color with a paintbrush.