The most glamorous design style of the last hundred years spent its first forty years without a name. When the world first saw it, at a single dazzling world's fair in Paris in 1925, it was simply called modern. Twenty two nations built pavilions under one rule from the organizers: everything shown had to break from the past. Fluted columns, bold geometry, brass, lacquer, rich wood, sunburst curves. People called it moderne, or jazz modern, or just modernistic. The name we us

The paneling you see in every expensive looking home right now, the moldings, the wainscoting, the built in shelving that makes a room feel like it has a history, all of it began as a way to stay warm. In the cold stone houses of sixteenth century Northern Europe, wood paneling was nailed along the lower walls for one very practical reason. It insulated against damp and draft, and it protected the crumbling plaster behind it. The word wainscot did not mean elegance. It referr

Long before anyone spoke of a color of the year, brown was already the color we reached for first. The oldest paintings ever found, the animals on the walls of the Lascaux caves in France, were made roughly seventeen thousand years ago in nothing but earth. Ochre, raw umber, burnt sienna. The same warm browns painters still keep on the palette today, named after the Italian hills they were dug from, Umbria and Siena. The word umber even shares a root with the Latin for shadow

Ten common design mistakes make even beautiful homes look cheap. Every one of them is fixable on a real budget. Here is how.