It’s a game-changer to find a piece that can be a chameleon, enhancing many different spaces without growing stale. Three designers share their tried-and-true favorites.
Walls That Talk
“Over the last several years, my collaboration with Oakland-based painter Caroline Lizarraga to create custom murals for clients has become one of my favorite parts of the design process. I first contacted her to create an abstract design for my home—a blobby black and white mural in my great room with layers of deep olive green and gold threaded through it. The resulting vision was so exciting that we ended up working together on several more projects, including a client’s bedroom with a periwinkle mural painted to look as if we dip-dyed swabs of silk and threw them against the wall. Caroline’s singular combination of artistic mastery and vision has become a jumping-off point for so much of the creativity that my team and I are able to conjure. Just knowing that whatever wild or bizarre concept we cook up—hot pink billowing fabric, rainbow geodes or abstract ceiling fresco—could actually become a real-life decorative surface allows me to think outside the box and push the bounds of what our walls and ceilings, and even the faces of our furniture, can become. Commissioning custom decorative artwork also transforms the experience of a home. With a canvas or fine art in a frame, you can consider them simultaneously a piece of art you love and an investment that you can take with you; with decorative artwork, it goes directly onto the walls, ceiling or floor of a property and you don’t take it with you. There’s something really powerful about that message for a client: ‘I’m investing in me, this time in my life and my story.’” —Noz Nozawa, Noz Design, California
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