#ChristmasColors | Valentina Expressions

Christmas My Way | Valentina Cirasola | Interior Designer

10 Dec 2018 Leave a comment

by Valentina in Home Designs Master Tags: #ChristmasCelebration, #ChristmasColors, #ChristmasDecorating, #ChristmasLights, #ChristmasThemes

This week, business coach Georgia Lee London interviewed me on BeLiveTV, an online TV feature of Facebook I use also for my business. The topic was Decorating Christmas. We spent the first few minutes talking about my business and personal life just as an introduction to her audience, then we moved on to Christmas and how to decorate it.

I like to admire all the joyous display of lights around the towns, highly decorated stores and homes illuminated over the top, just like everybody else, to me this huge display of lights is another form of art expression. The bigger the better is what most people think Christmas should be and that is fine. I can’t imagine Christmas not being so lit up anymore. There was a time in my life when my native country went through an austerity period of many years.

Now, I am here in the wealthiest country in the world, where people don’t mind spending $5,000 for Christmas decorations, I want to soak it in as much as I can, taking tours through neighbors and enjoy their labor to put up such a spectacle for the public. I saw a program on the Italian TV dedicated to the transformation of homes in Brooklyn N.Y. every year at Christmas and this is a photo I found of one of the Italian homes. Stunning, it looks like Disneyland. Their electric bill, I imagine, is huge for a couple of months.

(Click on the photo to view it larger).

Deep down inside I have remained a person who likes “conservation”, moderation and classy décor. I would never have such a display of power even if I had servants, labor, chauffeurs, and butlers.
To me, Christmas is about lighting up a way to our new self, welcoming a new year of opportunities to realize our dreams; it’s about resting, renewing our family and friends’ ties; share food and allow our “Supreme Being” (whomever or whatever it might be) to enter our life. Everything else is just consumerism.

Here, in this video, one can see my ideas of decorating Christmas the easy way, easy on the pocket, easy to put up and take down. I care to create pleasant atmospheres around the home by displaying interesting vignettes in different corners of each room. The most important thing is to find a theme, choose the colors, sculpt with various light levels and never leave corners in the dark.

Your Christmas can be anything you like and if this event is not in your belief, celebrate your life. Ciao,
Valentina
http://www.valentinadesigns.com

It’s my hope that through my writing and my suggestions I am enriching your aesthetic sensibility towards design, style and inspiring you to live in beauty. I love to encourage my clients to show their personality through various expressions of décor, or the clothes they wear. I have loved my profession as an interior-fashion designer since 1990. I am here ready to offer consultations on-line if you need. Check out one of my books on the subject of colors, the third in line of my collection, ©RED-A Voyage Into Colors.
Amazon: http://goo.gl/qNxXrB
Barnes&Nobles: http://goo.gl/q7dQ3w
The Road To Top Of The World, fourth book recently published is also available.
https://tinyurl.com/y7tuyfh8

Light and Happiness To All | Valentina Cirasola | Interior Designer

23 Dec 2012 22 Comments

by Valentina in Home Designs Master Tags: #ChristmasColors, #ChristmasThemes, #HolidayWishes, #RedVoyageIntoColors

We have overcome Dec.21st and we are here, alive and kicking, in a new era of the Universe.
This date marked the end of selfishness and the beginning of brotherhood; the end of individualism and the beginning of collectivism; the end of hatred and the beginning of love; the end of lies and the beginning of truth.
Gee, why did we have to wait so many centuries for this!

With these new perspectives in mind, I hope the humanity will come together to work towards a better future for the entire world. Let’s enjoy the festivities and the celebrations from now to the end of the year.

Thank you for your continued support as clients, friends and friends on my blogosphere.
I want to thank all of you creative bloggers for the new mark, I reached 500 Likes this month, received 5 stars on the Blog Of the Year 2012 Award and new subscribers.
Thanks again for brightening my day.

Merry Christmas to all of you and families and if you don’t celebrate any religious events, celebrate yourself, your achievements and all your loved ones. Ciao,
Valentina
http://www.Valentinadesigns.com

Valentina Cirasola is an Italian Interior Designer and former Fashion Designer, working in the USA and Europe since 1990. She blends well fashion with interior and colors the world of her clients. She has been described as “the colorist” and loves to create the unusual. She is the author of three books available on

Amazon: http://goo.gl/xUZfk0

Barnes&Nobles: http://goo.gl/q7dQ3w

My Christmas Village | Valentina Cirasola | Interior Designer

21 Dec 2011 Leave a comment

by Valentina in Home Designs Master Tags: #CharlesDickensChristmasVillage, #ChristmasColors, #ChristmasDecorations, #HandPaintedChristmasHouses, #HowToDecorateChristmas

I can finally take care of “building” my village. This year many days ran together, during the course of many weeks I lost at least one day every time and wondering where did my time go. How did I manage that? This year has been a real lesson for me and I will take care of my busyness at the beginning of next year, but now it is time to think of my Christmas village.
(Click on each photo to view it larger).

Charles Dickens Christmas Village by ©Valentina Cirasola

Years ago, I fell in love with hand painted houses representing Charles Dickens’s village. I was new in USA, seeing Christmas villages in stores were new thing for me, just as everything else was. I started to collect as many little houses I could until one day I had no more place to store them and stopped the collection.
The village I build for Christmas every year is my fantasy, not a real village. The style of architecture does represent Victorian England of early 1800s, the small statues of people are dressed in Victorian fashion, so darling, but everything else is a fantasy. I have a theatre for plays, comedies and ballet performances, the Opera House is grand. I have many pubs and restaurants, hotels, various shoppes, antique stores, a seamstress’s house, playgrounds for kids, the light house and a barn, an ice skate ring with moving people (battery operated), a few library buildings, a train station with a sound of a train coming and a real moving train, a battery operated toy. In my village there is no police station, no hospital, no government buildings and no schools. Hey, this is my village and in my fantasy we all learn from each other, we are all good to each others and help one another.

It takes many hours to put the village up, string all the lights inside the small houses, creating attractive streets and passages over bridges and gardens, arrange the houses to design an inviting village with the main drag with all the fashionable stores just as if I were a certified city planner. I like to place street benches next to cozy corners or views, kids and carriages in the right spots and attach all the sounds to make the village come alive. I like to keep all the lights and sounds turned on all day, but at night it becomes magic. The lay out of my village varies every year, streets and things to do are never the same and I amaze myself how many solutions I can create. It’s playtime!

I leave the rest of the room in suffuse lighting to allow the village to be on stage, when is completed it is quite beautiful. December is the only time of the year I can live almost in history, I get to step back in time to experience a much simpler and slower life even though is only in my fantasy and through toys. Perhaps during Charles Dickens’s time they said the same thing about a slower living style before the 1800s.

In a separate area of the room, away from the village display, I don’t miss to set up a spirituality corner with my little manger made in Germany by wood workers artists who are still designing small items all by hands and some angels made of Venetian glass made in Murano. LED light strings and candles everywhere illuminate the rest of the house.

The custom of turning on shiny, bright and colored lights in December comes from the burning the “Yule Log” in Germany, a medieval pagan festival that occurred every December to celebrate the winter Solstice and the short dark days of winter. The burning of the Yule Log was a way to welcome light, the return of the sun and it represented Jesus as the light of the world.

However I want to look at it, I am one of the few people who decorate Christmas in a different way. The important thing is to celebrate a new light that will take the darkness of the winter away from our life and project us into the New Year with a renewed spirituality and new goals toward the humanity and ourselves.

I hope you will come up with your own different display too and please remember I am always ready to decorate and design with you.
Have a Happy Christmas and happy holidays. Ciao,
Valentina

www.Valentinadesigns.com

Valentina Cirasola is an Italian Interior and Fashion Designer, working in the USA and Europe. She blends fashion and interior well in any of her design work. She loves to remodel homes and loves to create the unusual. She is the author of the forthcoming book on the subject of Colors entitled ©RED-A Voyage Into Colors, due to be published very soon.