2023 Color Wars
Once upon a time, there was but one agreed Color of the Year amongst the decorating Kingdoms of the earth. This special color appeared everywhere, on everything and peace reigned throughout the land. The elders still speak of the age of avocado refrigerators and the all-powerful, Great Accent Wall of Punjab.
As time went on, the designers became dissatisfied with the old ways and no longer wished to paint the entire Kingdom burnt orange or baby blue. Powerful factions began to break away and choose their own Color of the Year and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the color wars began.
These designers enlisted armies of paint manufactures to create the most fabulous color of all, every year thereafter throughout the Kingdom.
That brings us to the year 2023, where a myriad of paint creators juxtaposition for fame and fortune by giving you just the one color of which you have always dreamed to use in your custom luxury home.
Even wood stain manufacturers now have a Color of the Year and for 2023, Minwax has chosen a rich, warm stain called Aged Barrel. Minwax says Aged Barrel's traditional roots provide a grounded feeling in any room.
Let TLK Luxury Custom Homes be your champion in the explosion of wonderful colors coming on the scene this year.
Luxury Is Looking Up
One of the hottest trends in luxury homes right now is incorporating dramatic ceilings into the design. Ceilings that “make a statement” lift your custom home to a whole new level of luxury.
For the first time, designers now consider ceiling to be the fifth wall of your room that can actually add value to your luxury custom home. Mike Woodley of Woodley Architectural Group says, “Good design sells better and quicker, and the ceiling is an important part of good design.
There are so many styles available to dress the ceilings of each room of your home, but the first element to address is height. Eight foot ceilings no longer satisfy the luxury custom home buyer, but just another 12 inches brings you tons of options. By the way, Realtor.com® found that raising ceiling height to 10 or 11 feet from the standard 8-to-9-foot range, resulted in an average 50% jump in listing prices per square foot.
Tall ceilings aren’t really that “new,” you say. Well, we’re talking about a whole lot more than just a spacious entryway or great room with a plain white ceiling. We’re talking glamour, with a generous helping of ouuus and ahhhs..
Once you leave square feet in the past and open your mind to thoughts of cubit feet, your luxury ceiling design options become legion! Think texture. Think color. Think depth. Think shape. Think looking up into the starry night skies!
Even elaborate ceiling tiles have taken on a vastly upmarket look, from intricate metal and wood designs to ornate plaster effects. These are not you grandmother’s ceiling tiles. These tiled ceilings are to die for, as they say.
Imagine styles like tray ceilings, then dare to entertain the idea of coffered ceilings and barrel vaulted ceilings. Coffered ceilings are sunken panels of various shapes and sizes elaborately constructed into a grid pattern that is not only impressive, but helps to absorb sound in the room.
Vaulted Cathedral ceilings have two equal sloping sides that meet in the middle high point of the room, while conversely, vaulted barrel ceilings feature a grand, semi-circular arch resembling a barrel or circle, cut in half.
TLK Luxury Customs Homes could even vary the ceiling designs from room to room to set different moods though out your home.
TLK’s savvy ceiling designers can coordinate each room's “fifth wall” with the room’s other details to create a completely balanced, sophisticated look.
The right “fifth wall” treatment can whisper Country French in your kitchen, while a richly stained coffered ceiling brings a feeling of the British Aristocracy to your library or billiards room. From intimate conversation spaces through a gorgeous barreled ceiling hall, into an elegant dining room, the statement ceiling makes it all happen.
Luxury ceilings help set the stage to the drama that unfolds in your new custom home
Don’t kid yourself, there will always be drama… but with TLK Luxury Custom Homes, it’s drama in a good way!
Light Up The Night
Landscape lighting is one of the most dramatic improvements you can make to your home’s curb appeal. In fact, professional outdoor lighting design is an investment that will even increase the resale value of your home. We call it, spotlighting your home's value with landscape lighting.
Luxury architectural and landscape lighting should be a dramatic journey that moves guests through one area of your outdoor living space into another. TLK Luxury Custom Homes will use subtle lighting along paths, pool edges, and doorways, creating definition, insuring safety, and tying everything together. In areas where more light is needed, for instance for cooking or dining, the TLK team will increase the number of lighting fixtures to direct the light exactly where it's needed.
TLK Luxury Custom Homes can design landscape lighting systems that really impress! Then, because every element is professionally installed and connected to a central power source, you’ll have control everything from one spot in your home.
Lisa and TK Kneedler will work with you to determine which elements of your home you want to feature and what you might want to hide or disguise with lighting. For instance, you might want to show off exquisite landscape elements like a water feature with a wash of light. On the other hand, you might want to direct attention away from a storage area for pool equipment.
Landscape lighting can also “set the mood” for a moonlight swim or a romantic al fresco dinner. Warm lighting usually looks more elegant and can be more relaxing in comfortable outdoor living spaces.
Low level lighting may be best to direct the eye along the path. while artificial “moon lighting” transforms larger, sweeping areas into an enchanting glen with an almost mystical quality.
On the other hand, cool, bright lighting is best to dramatically accentuate some of the more grand elements of your architecture.
Although one of the most effective design elements of your custom luxury home, architectural lighting sounds a little daunting and therefore, is often ignored completely. Be bold and allow TK Kneedler to show you the perfect balance of utility and elegance.
You don’t need to know the difference between lumen and wattage or be able to calculate how much each light is needed to cover the area you want to accent. Simply, let TLK Luxury Custom Homes do all of that for you.
Finally, custom-designed landscape lighting not only surrounds your home in luminous luxury, but it also protects your property after dark. TLK Luxury Custom Homes believes that their clients are really looking for security and serenity. With Lisa’s keen design sense and TK’s law enforcement experience, their team is uniquely qualified to give you both.
Luxurious Master Suites
Graduating from “master bedroom” to “master suite” has become one of the most popular home remodeling projects in history. Popular especially with people who have worked hard to build a good life and a great future for themselves.
There are a few unmistakable things that say, "We've arrived." You know like purchasing a Lamborghini, going on a six-month European tour, buying a beach house or adding a luxurious Master Suite to your home.
Think 5-star, mountain top, Aspen retreat or Presidential Suite of a grand hotel instead of simply a big bedroom.
Is adding a drop-dead gorgeous Master Suite to you home or building one into your custom home plan really worth it? When homeowners in a recent study were asked if they were happy with their Master Suite addition project, 100% of the respondents said YES! They all gave the project 10 out of 10 in the "Joy" factor.
What makes luxury Master Suites so popular? Walking into your perfect Master Suite is like driving your carriage into your very own castle and pulling up the draw bridge to make the world go away. The answer really is creating the perfect oasis for you with everything that you want in it just the way you want it. The key is to work with a luxury custom home builder who understands that and will guide you painlessly through the process.
TLK Luxury Custom Homes will help you decide how big your oasis needs to be to give you the Wow Factor you deserve. For instance, owner, TK Kneedler has learned by experience that your new addition should occupy from 350 to 600 square feet to give you a truly luxury custom Master Suite. He knows that you'll be happier if the space is designed to give you divided private spaces than if it is not. There are so many details that TK and his designer wife, Lisa can offer you that you may never even have imagined.
For example, carving out a cozy reading nook away from your magnificent king-sized bed will give you the perfect way to finish the latest David Baldacci novel long after your husband has turned his light off and gone to sleep. You certainly want an enclosed water closet to ensure you the privacy you need when "the need" arises. Little things like that explain why people love their Master Suite additions!
What are your Master Suite options?
Well, to begin with, she's definitely going to want a spa-like Master Bathroom and he's going to want a roomy, kick-ass glass shower. You will probably want to think about His and Hers walk-in closets and perhaps a dressing room. Ask yourself this: should the purpose-built vanity be in her dressing area or in the main bathroom itself?
Do you want to head off to the kitchen to get your midnight snacks or do you want a hidden mini fridge and microwave in your Master Suite? Espresso machine for your morning coffee?
Do you want a vaulted ceiling, a tray or coffered ceiling in the main bedroom area? Do you want a ceiling fan or a chandelier?
Do you want an overall sleek modern look or a more elegant and luxurious look? The beauty and style of the space is just as essential to your comfort as cozy bedding is.
Do you want to add a fireplace to your master suite? Skylight? Heated flooring? Private access to the patio? French doors?
TK and Lisa Kneedler will help you with lighting and fixture options and don't forget the view. What do you want to see when you gaze out of your new Master Suite windows?
TK will also discuss any special needs that you and your family have or that might present themselves in the future. For example, the height of the homeowner plays a big part in design of the shower and tub.
Large, luxurious large master suites on the ground floor check all the boxes for both safety and accessibility now and into the future.
Whatever you want; whatever you need.... TLK Luxury Custom Homes are the go to experts in Master Suites.
Pantone Contrasts 2020 & 2021
For over 20 years, Pantone’s Color of the Year has influenced product development and purchasing decisions in multiple industries, including fashion, home furnishings, and industrial design, as well as product packaging and graphic design.
To arrive at the selection each year, Pantone’s color experts at Pantone Color Institute comb the world looking for new color influences. This can include the entertainment industry and films in production, traveling art collections and new artists, fashion, all areas of design, popular travel destinations, as well as new lifestyles and socio-economic conditions.
Pantone could never have predicted the Covid-obsession that would overcome America in 2020. However, when they choose Classic Blue for the 2020 color of the year, they were prophetically spot on.
Suddenly, we were living in a world where we didn't feel quite as secure as in years past.
Leatrice Eiseman, the executive director of the company’s Color Institute, believes that “Blue, from an emotional, psychological standpoint, has always represented a certain amount of calm and dependability. It’s a color that you can rely on.”
"There are many different blues in the Pantone system, but Classic Blue really gave us that feeling of confidence and stability,” Eiseman says.
Once in her yearly speech to the nation, Queen Elizabeth II referred to 1992 as Great Britain's "Annus Horribilis." Without fear of contradiction, 2020 could be called America's Annus Horribilis.
As time dragged on, 2021 was looking pretty darned gray as well, but now we're coming back. We're back at work and we're back at play. Weddings and birthday parties are being booked and our masked days are disappearing.
To recognize this emergence into the light, Pantone chose two colors of the year for 2021...
gray and yellow and called them Ultimate Gray and Illuminating.
Illuminating is a bright and cheerful yellow sparkling with vivacity, a warming yellow shade imbued with solar power. Ultimate Gray is emblematic of solid and dependable elements which are everlasting and provide a firm foundation.
Grandmillennial Style
House Beautiful recently carried an article by Emma Bazilian announcing the rise of the "Grandmillennial" style. Grandmillennial is the new favorite of the young, Instagram-posting, décor aficionado with a passion for floral chintzes and antique wallpaper. Some people are affectionately calling this new decorating trend "Grandma Chic!"
The core decades that Millennials are drawing from seem to begin in the 1920s and range all the way through the 1960s.
Designer, Meghan Hopp describes Grandmillennial Style as "stepping away from the sort of Modern, Minimalist, white-wall, clean-line design and hearkening back to more traditional kinds of shapes and styles. A lot of color, a lot of pattern mixing, it's really a much richer aesthetic." Hopp, a Grandmillennial herself, is fond of matching classic floral prints over several pieces, hanging vintage wallpaper everywhere and loves the combination of old and new."
Millennials are becoming more comfortable displaying their own individual style and rejecting the high-pressure move for everyone to be minimalist. Ms. Hopp calls it returning to authenticity, coming back to what they really like without feeling the need to always be "young and fresh and, you know, of the moment." Millennials are saying, "No. This is what I actually, really like and I'm not going to wait until I'm 85 years old to live my truth!"
"I think color and pattern have started to make a comeback," Hopp continues. "We're really in this age of sort of like Maximalist design and I think it's going to go even further in 2020. We started off with Millennial Pink and now we're going the whole hog; we're all in!"
Designer, Lilse McKenna says that Grandmillennial Style is “Classically informed". The look is so vastly different from the social media accounts that are clearly just so trend-based. Those of us who are drawn to this style are trend-averse at our cores."
Colors of the Year 2019
Every year the major paint manufacturers announce their Colors of The Year and every year, those colors are fabulous!
BEHR’s paint color of the year is this beautiful blue called Blueprint. BEHR's Larayne Boaz suggest that you "reimage and dream a new mood or feeling in your home with Peaceful Blue S470-3, Blueprint S470-5, and Deep Breath S460-7." Larayne adds that "These livable blues are soothing and provide a sense of coziness. They are all very versatile and easy to imagine in any room."
This beautiful, neutral gray pictured below, called Metropolitan was Benjamin Moore's Color of The Year for 2019. How could we use this color in your home? Oh, let me count the ways!
Ellen O’Neill, Benjamin Moore's Director of Strategic Design Intelligence says this of the color,“Comforting, composed and effortlessly sophisticated, Metropolitan AF-690 exudes beauty and balance. It’s a color in the neutral spectrum that references a contemplative state of mind and design. Not arresting nor aggressive, this understated yet glamorous gray creates a soothing, impactful common ground.”
PPG Paints announced that a delicious green called Night Watch to be their Color of The Year for 2019. Night Watch is a dark, neutral, jade with a malachite undertones.
Dee Schlotter, PPG senior color marketing manager, says,“Night Watch is about bringing the healing power from the outdoors into your home through color. The dark green hue pulls our memories of natural environments to the surface to recreate the calming, invigorating euphoria we feel when in nature."
When Pantone announced Living Coral to be it's 2019 Color of The Year 2019, it spawned a frenzy of of coral love all over the globe. This bright and cheerful color, with its warm, playful presence is not only available as interior paint, you can also get it in everything from fabric to nail color!
Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute, explains ”Living Coral emits the desired, familiar, and energizing aspects of color found in nature. In its glorious, yet unfortunately more elusive, display beneath the sea, this vivifying and effervescent color mesmerizes the eye and mind. Lying at the center of our naturally vivid and chromatic ecosystem, PANTONE Living Coral is evocative of how coral reefs provide shelter to a diverse kaleidoscope of color."
Like everything you add to your home, what's really important is how it makes you feel when you see it or touch it. Everything about your luxury home should extravagantly express both your unique style and lifestyle. Paint accents are just one of the many ways TLK Custom Homes does that for your luxury home.
Mixing Magnificent Metals
Although mixing your metaphors is a definite no-no, mixing gorgeous metals when decorating your luxury custom home is very much in vogue. This inclination has been growing over the last couple of years and we predict that metal mania will continue trending well into 2018 and beyond.
Mixing metals can add character and an intriguing contrast to a room. For instance, mixing warm metals like rose gold or copper with cool metals like silver create a particularly sophisticated look. Brass and chrome used together with black lacquer is another chic combo popping up right now. Blending different finishes like matte gold and metallic gold is another sleek way to go.
Adding a few mixed metal pieces to your current interior design is a great way to see if this design trend works for you. Try adding a brass lamp, a nickel vase and a copper tray as accents to see how the combination grabs you before you buy large pieces that could become an expensive regret. Metallic fabric is another great way to test the waters on your mixed metals adventure.
You might find that you like brass and chrome together, silver and polished nickel, or antique brass and oil-rubbed bronze. As luxury home builder, TK Kneedler always says, "Free your imagination!"
Like everything you add to your home, what's really important is how it makes you feel when you see it or touch it. Everything about your luxury home should extravagantly express both your unique style and lifestyle.