Faced With a Lack of Style, Invent It

The basement display room at Reincarnations' basement display room shows how lackluster spaces can stand out when filled with interesting furniture. (By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)

Stewart agreed. "Color is the single most exciting change one can make. Color is for free, almost. It doesn't cost much to get a can of paint.

She said, "These days the popular thing to do to enrich a room is a three -- if not four -- color scheme: one color on the walls, one on the trim . . . and one on the ceiling."

A trick that "heightens a room, makes it grander -- not squished," is to draw a line on a wall where a chair rail would be, then paint one color above the line and one below. "Say a wonderful orange on top and sage green on the bottom. Fresco painters have been doing this for centuries," Stewart said, with a flourish of historical justification.

Another way to add oomph with minimal investment: "Say you have a blue room. Take a light yellow and paint a six-inch-wide border around the window and the door. It enhances whatever pitiful architectural detail there is."

She said, "You have to have a little bit of boldness in your heart. Take a banister rail, often painted black. Do something special. Make it different from everyone else's. Paint it black and white stripes. It will be done tastefully, but get their attention."

Chris Torres is nothing if not bold. The designerand owner of Reincarnations Furnishings, a madly creative home-furnishings shop on 14th Street NW, sniffed, "Everyone wants small in D.C. They live in 500-square-foot apartments and have a million tiny things."

He approaches rooms differently: "Do fewer things and buy medium to large pieces. People will say, 'Wow, large sofa!' Same with color and drama and scale. I'll do a red wall or a brown wall and, 'Wow. Look at the drama of this wall!' You don't need to do castle furniture, but do big stuff, light it well and use dramatic color. The impression is big."

Drawing attention to something smashing goes a long way toward diverting attention from things that are less so. That's a specialty of Deb Gorham's. The real estate agent, who's the president of the regional chapter of the International Association of Home Staging Professionals, recently turned a neat trick on a house in Herndon that had a miserable view.

The small hillside backyard dipped toward a major intersection. From the kitchen window the eye leapt over the five-foot fence surrounding the property. "You could read the license numbers of the cars as they headed toward Georgia," Gorham said.

Twelve six-foot Leyland cypress trees were purchased and planted around the patio, snugged at the rear of the house. "We wanted to suggest lots of green instead of lots of street, so we turned it into a little Tuscan setting," she said. "What caught your eye first was the cypress."

The basement of a 1940s house in an up-and-coming Arlington neighborhood was a different story. "How can I put this nicely? It was a pit," Gorham said. "So we turned it into what I then called the Pantheon Theater."

Deep red silk moiré was hung over insulated wall board covered with fluffy batting. "Just luscious. It looked like a bordello," she said. The ceiling was painted black, low pile carpeting was installed and black velvet drapes held back with tassels framed the second-hand screen that the owners bought at a camera shop along with a used projector. Two days and $1,295 later, the pit was an over-the-top home theater.