Interior Designer Answers Your Top Design Questions

Should you mount your TV over your fireplace?

Hell no, my name's David Netto.

I'm an interior designer based in LA

and I'm gonna answer some of the questions

that you've asked AD on their Instagram.

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Creative ways to use lights instead of using overheads.

Well, this is kind of a trick question

because you can't just use overhead lights

or you're gonna have a disaster on your hands.

You're gonna have a VD clinic waiting room,

you're gonna have a police station or I don't know what,

but it's not something you wanna live in.

It's not just creative.

You must have the primary source of light

that you live with be at eye height,

and then whatever's in the ceiling overhead is gravy,

but should be dimmed way down.

The best ways I know to do that,

to offset needing more light

in the ceiling is to use sconces.

That's one traditional decorating thing

that still works in any kind of room for me.

The other way is to furnish the room well enough

that you anticipate table lamps where you will want them.

They're not just a fancy option, they are the reason

that the room is sexy or that the lighting is successful.

Do you ever notice like lighting is a huge aspect

of why a place is desirable to be in?

The reason is because you want

to feel seduced by the lighting.

And if the lighting is a one-liner,

it's sort of like someone tearing all their clothes off

and saying, you know, here I am.

There's just no story to it.

And then you also want to distribute

the light evenly around the room.

So the sconces, if you have a pair on one side,

look for a way to put another pair

on the other side that answers.

The best countertop for a kitchen that gets a ton of use.

If you're a real cook

and you've got a house full of kids,

the kitchen's gonna get beat up.

So my first thought is to give into the fact

that it's going to get a beating

and offer something that actually looks better.

The way actually leather looks better

the more patina it is.

If it's really getting banged up,

I like to suggest that we use a material

called Vermont Soapstone for countertops.

It beats up evenly over time.

The first scuff or wine stain will be very upsetting,

but then after a few months,

the whole thing is scuffed up evenly

and it has this wonderful patina

like something from the 19th century

and it's actually the material that they used

to make lab counters out of before they invented composites.

And it comes from Vermont.

Vermont's my favorite state.

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What colors mix well

and what combos should I avoid?

Colors that mix well to me are colors that take a risk.

I like to do a little more R&D

than doing things that I know

are already in someone's mind's eye

because they're so easy to like, light blue, blue and white.

These are wonderful color combinations.

They have their place in the world, but when people call me

and they want something they couldn't have maybe done

on their own, I like to try to take risks with color.

And so these two colors, dark green

and brown would be one example.

Another example of a very successful color combination,

I think is dark green and dark blue.

This is a catalog of a French designer,

actually, he wasn't a designer.

The best designers are often not designers.

Charles de Beistegui,

and this is the Château de Groussay, which is full

of all these very strange kind of technicolor combinations.

Another way, giving you some real inside tricks here,

that I like to figure out how to mix colors

in an exciting way, is to look at the work

of a decorator called Jacques Garcia.

And he sort of brings new life

to rooms that are about the past in most ways.

You know, he likes, as Karl Lagerfeld once said,

I like my 18th century fresh,

and that's kind of what Jacques Garcia does.

So when I'm stuck

and I need some exciting color combinations,

I do look at the Jacques Garcia book

and I'm happy to tell you I always find an answer.

What color combination should you avoid?

Well, I don't know.

I only know the things that work.

That's why I'm in the video here.

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Colors are often very personally triggering.

You don't necessarily know why somebody loves a color

that you might not like at all.

I used to be very prone

to air sickness when I was a small child.

So I remember the colors of the insides

of airplanes in the 1970s

in these sort of mustard brown and orange.

I can't do that because I'm programmed

and we all are in one way or another.

Anybody trying to put together a color palette

can look at the same things that I'm looking at.

Every room needs a little bit of red

if it's gonna be exciting.

I mean, there are very few rules,

but that is one of those rules.

You generally don't want the red

to be dominant in any way.

If you're not working with a designer, it's safer

to do neutrals and then just do a pop of red.

There is no problem doing a room

that is predominantly white or off white.

Create a largely white backdrop

and then drop in something weird color-wise

as the hot sauce.

Hit it hard with two shakes of Tabasco and get out alive.

Should you mount your TV over your fireplace?

Hell no.

This is something I'm on record

as saying in print as often as I can.

The bane of flat screen TVs

is that now they end up going over everybody's fireplace

and it's pretty much the worst thing you can do for a room.

That being said, the convenience can be irresistible,

but you're asking me, should you and not could you?

And I'm saying no, you should not.

You should find somewhere else for that

because the fireplace is the holy grail of the life

of the house, and we should watch the fire

and not the TV.

Frame TVs are kind of a blessing, they are innocuous.

What I would not do is put the pictures that they show

of flowers and views of, you know,

fantasy seascapes and stuff like that.

Just turn it off.

But a frame TV is a lot less ugly than a non frame TV.

When you get a frame TV, you can hang other frame things

around it and create what's called a salon hang

that sort of disguises the impact of the TV.

What design styles mix well?

Anything that is enough

of a completely disparate point of view

tends to be exciting because it creates a tension

and a conversation between the two objects

and the two styles.

So the styles that mix well are super modern

and medieval, 18th century French

and Italian 1960s wicker furniture.

Design styles that don't mix well are things that are wimpy

or don't have a different enough point of view

to want to be next to each other.

If you look at two pieces

and you're wondering if they're going to work well

next to each other, I would ask yourself,

am I excited to look at these two pieces

or am I just trying to solve the problem?

The emotional response that you have to objects

and the juxtaposition of objects is usually the best way

to figure out if something's gonna look successful.

I remember when I didn't know how to do that.

I made a lot of mistakes, don't feel bad.

Mistakes are the only way to learn.

How do you determine if a vintage piece is ugly or chic?

Well, this is kind of a trick question

because a lot of times the chic things are ugly.

What you want to get better at

as your taste evolves is not being afraid of ugly things

because you're gonna put it next to something

that makes the whole composition successful.

Notice I'm not saying pretty, I'm saying successful

because lots of times pretty

and chic really have nothing to do with each other.

If you want to feel not so much that you care

that it's chic or not, but that it says something to you,

then you're actually doing the most important part

of collecting and decorating,

which is you're making a personal connection

with the object.

If you're looking for something vintage,

you should keep your eyes peeled

for whatever is a great thing

that could come from the region of where you're looking.

So if you're looking for something vintage in Maine,

you might wanna look for the best decoy duck.

If you're looking in an Italian flea market,

maybe you're looking for a Venetian mirror

that's all dusty and nobody cares about it.

The first thing you want to establish

is where are you and what could the best thing be

that crosses your path in that part of the world?

Next question, good colors

for someone who's afraid of color.

A good way to get into a comfort zone with that

is to talk about fashion connection.

So if you ask someone what their favorite color

sweater is to wear that they're comfortable with,

they would tell you

and then you would say, well, there's a color

that we want to use in a room for you.

If you ask someone why Hermes boxes are so beautiful

when they're this bright screaming orange,

but you're not afraid to have an Hermes box handed to you,

then let's find a way to put an orange blanket over the back

of a chair in one of your rooms or even do more with it.

There are ways trick people

into relaxing that are sort of psychological cues,

which a good decorator has quite a few of.

There's a lot to be said for sticking

to one color in a space.

I would say if you do it boringly,

which is to sort of half do it, you know, you do a chair

and the pillow on the chair is the same color,

that's kind of not gonna be too exciting.

But if you did the same color on the walls, the chair,

a version of it on the carpet, then there's a painting

and the painting has that color in it.

Something like that can be one

of the most sophisticated rooms in the world

because generally the more you see of it,

the prettier it is.

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I don't get a lot of natural light.

How can I make my home feel brighter?

This is a lot of our problems, dear writer, don't feel bad.

You can make your room feel brighter

by causing distractions internally, counterintuitively,

one of the ways to do that is to paint a room darker.

So if you paint a dark color,

it makes the space feel bigger and more mysterious.

The light that you do have will actually feel like more.

Another way to do this

is to paint the floors bright, high gloss white.

Any kind of floor paint to me is a sort of dazzling way

to lift a room and make it feel hip.

You do have to be careful

because there's very little oil-based paint.

Only Fine Paints of Europe is still a high gloss paint

that gives you the effect that I'm talking about

and that will also give you reflected light.

You can bring metal into play in the room

and you can have a metal coffee table with a glass top.

You can have metal lamps.

I would say go heavy on the metal and heavy on the mirror.

Another trick is using picture lights on all the pictures

because then you get this soft glow.

It doesn't look like you're compensating for anything.

It looks like it was always intended

to be that sort of English country house atmosphere.

I can't afford all new furniture,

but I want to keep my house from feeling dated.

Any tips?

Well, sure, I love budgets.

Okay, any good decorator is not a snob

because great decorating is about creativity

and getting excited about finding opportunities.

It's not about spending money.

My first recommendation would be take things away

because most people need editing

rather than more decorating.

And then I would say scrape together the money

that we do have and put a architectural mirror into a room.

Turn one wall into a mirrored wall

and then it'll double the light of the windows,

which costs nothing.

It will reflect the furniture that we did have money to buy,

and it's a way of bringing glamour

for relatively little expense.

If you can't afford all new furniture,

which many people cannot,

there's no reason to be discouraged by that.

You probably can afford a big, beautiful tree.

And I would say that you should go to the flower market

and get the most beautiful black olive tree

and the biggest one you can fit.

And then you go to a hardware store and you buy an uplight,

and then you put that in the corner

next to the new mirrored wall

and you're halfway to a Billy Baldwin room

with no new furniture.

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What piece is most worth splurging on?

I think that the piece that's worth splurging on

is the piece that you care about.

This is your house.

It's supposed to be about your dreams

of how you're gonna feel at home.

One answer to that might be

the most beautiful sailboat model in the world,

as big as I can get, somebody else

would say, why are you giving me a boat model?

I don't care about this, I don't live near water.

You know, I want an incredible desk.

I'm a workaholic and all I do is sit at my desk.

I want the desk to make me feel

like everything I ever dreamed would happen in my life.

So this is a highly subjective thing,

but the thing worth splurging on

is the thing that the client or the person

using the room cares about the most.

If you have kids or pets, you still have

to have a beautiful house

because the house will be compromised.

I mean, I'm not gonna use the word ruined.

I'm a father of two beautiful girls

and I loved my dog deeply,

and we just accepted that the impact

that they had on the house would be something

and not nothing, but it didn't stop me

from buying anything that really wanted

because I was worried that they would mess it up.

It just didn't, you're lucky to have the dogs.

Who cares about the furniture?

You know, just go for it.

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What are affordable upgrades

that make a big visual difference besides paint?

You can put wallpaper on the ceiling.

You can buy the biggest size noguchi paper globe pendant

and hang it in the middle of the room,

get rid of all your rugs and refinish the floors

and then have everything looks kind of stark and elegant.

One way you can lift a space

without spending terribly much money

is buy beautiful books and stack them artistically.

Make a composition of the books on the coffee table

and then buy one object that's a great

sort of beguiling thing, could be a bust of Voltaire,

or it could be an abstract modern sculpture

that you find in a flea market that's not valuable,

but it's pleasing to you.

How to start furnishing an empty apartment

when you don't wanna rush the process.

I would start with the sofa

because what good is life if you haven't got somewhere

to sit when you come home, try to get some

of the lamps in place right away

because you're never gonna like it unless it's nicely lit.

I mean, if it's me, what I care about are chairs

because they're like characters in a play.

You just can fall in love

with a chair the way you can't

almost any other piece of furniture for me.

So I would buy one beautiful sculptural chair

with a very strong direction in it,

embedded in the DNA of it as to how you want

everything else to end

and let the chair do the talking

until you buy all those other things.

Thanks for all your questions.

It's been a pleasure to answer them as best I could

and good luck out there with the shopping

and the decorating.

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