Kristy Bowen

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Style guru Martha Stewart knows how to create a beautiful home with impeccable base elements, furniture, and decorative accents. This includes her choice of wall decor, which can often prove a challenge, especially if you have a lot of walls to fill. While you can always go for the expected artwork or a mirror, Stewart shows off another fun alternative. When decorating a room in her home with multiple large windows and ample wall space...

Choosing the perfect material for your flooring can be a calculation of aesthetics, durability, and the ever-evolving wheel of flooring trends. While modern day homes are often filled with natural stone tiles or beautiful hardwood, another possibility may be coming back into style. Terracotta tiles, which were very popular around the turn of the millennium, are again growing in popularity with designers and homeowners. Terracotta fits with a variety of aesthetics, where it offers warmth, a ha...

Extra toilet paper rolls and paper towels can be some of the most unglamorous things to display out in the open. This means that usually these items are tucked away in cabinets and drawers, where you face the danger of cluttering your cupboards and still finding they aren't in reach when you need them. There are actually a lot of clever DIY ways to hide extra paper products attractively in plain sight, many of which are inexpensive and friendly. Some of them may employ things you already have...

Retro trends cycle in and out, especially when it comes to spaces like the kitchen, where utility and convenience are often at war with style and aesthetics. Tile counters, which once had their heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, may be just one of the many options when it comes to tiling your counters, but HGTV's Property Brothers Drew and Jonathan Scott have often gone on record to suggest they are never a good idea – even if some designers are loving their fun vintage look. Issues with cleaning...

Choosing the right countertop color for your kitchen can be one of the most important decisions you make in the space. Not only will counters stay with you for years (possibly decades), but they will greatly inform your kitchen design, possibly enduring many decor scheme changes and waxing and waning trends over time. While one great way to bring in a dramatic and bold look has been choosing colorful countertops, these pigment-saturated materials may be on their way out in favor of more earth...

While kitchen design trends change and evolve over the decades, some ideas have much longer tenure or come back into vogue over time, providing inspiration and guidance even a century later. Kitchens of the 1930s, which marked a departure from turn-of-the century cooking spaces, may once again be influencing modern kitchen design today in new ways. The sleekness and glamour of this particular era compliments modern-designed and contemporary spaces, where some of the tricks and tips still hold...

Lighting options in many rental units can be less than inspiring, particularly overhead and ceiling lights, which vary from decades-old yellowed fixtures to dreaded builder-grade flush-mount dome lights (jokingly called "boob lights") that plague many apartments. Since changing out rental fixtures can be tough and may result in losing your security deposit, renters are often stuck with ugly and ill-fitting ceiling lights until they move. An ingenious TikTok hack, however, may save you months,...

Thrifting can often produce beautiful treasures that might be rarer and more expensive finds than you imagine. Hand-blown glass, particularly the colorful shades and intricate patterns of Murano glass from Venice, can occasionally turn up on thrift store shelves at a steal compared to its high price on the collector's market. With a centuries-long history of glass manufacturing in Italy, these pieces can be found in all sorts of variations, from art glass sculptures and vessels to light fixtu...

While the design world has been filled with neutral-driven minimalistic spaces for the past couple of decades, maximalism is slowly creeping in as an alternative to spare and sparsely decorated homes. Favoring a "more is more" philosophy, maximalist spaces revel in pattern, color, and other eclectic elements to exert their charm. However, a specific kind of maximalism is on the rise that is particularly rooted in history, storytelling, and personality. Called "heritage maximalism" by some, th...

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Some spaces once popular in older homes have fallen out of fashion in modern constructions. Case in point: the sleeping porch. These outdoor escapes were once beloved as an alternative to confined bedrooms. In a time before air conditioning, these porches took full advantage of outdoor breezes and open air. The introduction of electricity and AC led to the ability to sleep comfortably year-round, and these kinds of spaces disappeared.
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Gallery walls can be a great way to display a wider selection of art in your home. A well-designed gallery gives you the chance to create a grouping that not only fills up a larger portion of any big blank wall, but also adds personality, charm, and visual interest. The look of a gallery wall tends to accompany more maximalist design aesthetics, since, in a more minimalist space, the various pieces and frames can appear overly cluttered and weighty compared to a single larger piece of art. De...

The brisk pace of many people's days can often make you feel like cleaning is an uphill battle. This is especially true in the bedroom, which in the tasks of nightly slumber and getting ready for the day means your bedroom can become a sea of disorderly bedding, messy piles of clothes, and odds and ends like medication, water glasses, reading material, remotes, etc. on all available surfaces. HGTV's Nate Berkus, however, has an easy suggestion that can set the tone for an organized and neat s...

Looking for a playlist of the top Halloween songs for this year’s Monster Mash? There are a number of delightfully sinister tunes in all musical genres and eras that fit the bill, from classic fun novelty to songs to dark and moody rock legend favorites. Many feature Halloween's favorite figures like vampires and Frankenstein's monster, while others are catchy meditations on death and mortality.
This list is great if you're looking for Halloween party ideas or something to listen to while doi...

While more neutral-driven and minimalist interiors have dominated the past couple of decades, the design world has slowly been moving away from these less populated spaces in favor of more color, pattern, and texture overall, leading to beautiful layered maximalist spaces that allow plenty of room for marrying the present with the past. Vintage and antiques can add charm, history, and greater depth to any style of décor, but especially in rooms that revel in small and ornate details. Using vi...

TJ Maxx is full of items for any style of home, including more modern and contemporary spaces. Where they really shine, however, is vintage and antique-inspired decor, which line the aisles of the store in abundance, making many of the chain's retail sections feel very much like a charming antique curio shop or textile stall. Much of the retailer's decor and homewares bring in influences from a number of eras, including French provincial, Victorian, art deco, and midcentury modern. These piec...