#InteriorDesign | Valentina Expressions

Persimmon

24 Feb 2024 4 Comments

by Valentina in Home Designs Master Tags: #2024 Colors, #Art, #Decorating with Persimmon, #InteriorDesign, #Persimmon Color

Aahh, Persimmon, nature’s sweet and delicious dessert! The soft kind that I can eat with a spoon for me it’s the best.
The predicted colours for 2024 are earthy and nature-inspired tones, Persimmon is one of them.

Persimmon colour is less strong and less attention-grabbing than orange, although it is part of warm colours, it is calmer and more relaxing than orange. It’s often used to celebrate transformation like the New Year in Hawaiian and Japanese cultures. On holidays and Christmas tables in Italy, persimmons are always present, it has been said to bring good luck and longevity.

Persimmon fruit ripens in the Fall, however, the energy of this colour, ranging from yellow to light orange, can be used to brighten any room in Winter and Spring as well.

You might want to pair a Persimmon colour with a Blue Nova recamier for a classic look or with a leather chair for a modern look. BTW, I love the shell chair almost Persimmon colour.

It seems most people would tone down Persimmon’s colour with neutral colours. My photos of the hanging persimmons above are very eloquent. Nature gives the inspiration with green leaves, brown stems and yellow blooms. Adding a light grey wall, a beige carpet or some light yellow pillows are all great combinations to complete the picture for a vibrant and balanced environment. Sometimes to look at a photo and study the details is enough to find inspiration. Ciao.

Valentina Cirasola is an interior-fashion consultant, author of 6 published books, a storyteller, and a blogger of many years. Her books are non-fictional practical ideas to apply in the home, fashion, cooking and travel.
Get a copy of her books here: Amazon and Barnes&Noble

My Thanksgiving Table is Ready

23 Nov 2022 10 Comments

by Valentina in The Good Life Tags: #BaroqueThanksgiving, #HolidayDecorating, #InteriorDesign, #ThanksgivingColors, #ThanksgivingTable, SilverandGoldColors

Visiting stores in the month of November feels a little bit like taking a ride on the carousel. Stores are filled with an exceptional amount of merchandise, all very shiny and glittery. All decorating styles are there for all tastes and pockets, Sottish, English, American Country, Urban, Modern, Abstract, French, Evocative of the past, and so on.
I limit the amount of time I want to spend in stores at this time, otherwise I will be dumbfounded in a few hours. Luckily for me, I shop with my eyes. If I don’t see immediately the item I am looking for, or that special something that catches my eyes, it means it’s not there and leave.
(Click on each picture to view it larger)

This year for Thanksgiving I am leaning towards a bit of Baroque style. As a table runner, I will use an Indian shantung fabric remanence from a jacket I made. It’s multicolors, shining with gold filaments. The tablecloth is a damask from Venice, Italy and the napkins is a fabric printed with paisleys.

I have always been attracted by gold and silver together, like the sun and the moon sometimes shine together in the sky. The energy they bring together is fantastic.

The chargers are not plates but mats heavily beaded and the napkin holders are made by me. My table décor often doesn’t match on purpose as I generally don’t match things in my daily life, except the shoes, I do match those. I love the intricate ideas that come in my mind when I decorate and find many ways to surprise people.

The two reindeers were too cute to pass up. They look almost like a McKenzie Childs’s design but they are not. Now, I need food, people and bubbles.

This is a day to really be thankful for our blessings. I wish all of you a great Thanksgiving. Ciao,
Valentina

My books on Amazon

Copyright © 2022 Valentina Cirasola, All Rights Reserved

Leopard Door

16 Sep 2022 12 Comments

by Valentina in Home Designs Master Tags: #HomeDecor, #InteriorDesign, #LeopardPrintDoor, #OriginalHomeStyle, #PersonalizedDecor

I have been a salmon swimming up stream all my life, the common thinking has never touched me, and conformism never interested me. Not being like everybody else has not been easy, at times I thought I caused my own challenges. Luckily those thoughts only lasted a few minutes and came to my senses.

I have always lived in original homes with beautiful views and when the architecture wasn’t what I wanted, I created originality with home décor. Here, I present you my new entry door painted in a blue leopard print. I took me one week to paint it but the results gave me a great satisfaction and I feel to have been repaid for all the efforts.

I go in and out that door and feel a huge surprise every time. I can almost hear the screaming of a realtor if one day I will decide to sell this house, rest assured it is not going to happen anytime soon.

To top it all, I marked my territory with my initial on a wrought iron piece. What’s your reaction to the leopard door?

Dan Antion is still offering this Thursday Door Challenge. Please visit with us and discover many stories beyond beautiful doors in the world.
Ciao.
Valentina
Amazon Author’s Page

Birds Landed On A Door

21 Apr 2022 10 Comments

by Valentina in Home Designs Master Tags: #InteriorDesign, #InteriorDoors, #MuralsOnDoors, #PaintedDoors, #ThursdayDoorChallenge

Leonardo Da Vinci bought many birds kept in cages only to take them home and set them free.
I thought of the same thing when I painted one of my interior doors with birds.

Master bathroom door painted by Valentina Cirasola

The flowers I painted don’t exist in nature, they exist in my fantasy and have big seeds. The birds I painted are also fantasy birds, they resemble parrots and in my imagination, they talk. I made them a couple, in my world, living creatures do reproduce.

I know one thing, I painted a cage and set my birds free, because in my home everyone is free even those characters living in my fantasy.

Are you curious to see behind this door? This is a bathroom and this is the immediate corner.

I have the tendency of painting every white surface and also like to design only one interior door in a different color or paint a mural on it, just to create an element of interest. I don’t know where this habit came from, but I started this trend a long time ago, then my clients followed it. Now, almost every client I have served has one different color door in their home.

Doors do close and divide spaces for privacy and functionality. The way I conceive them is about one world set into another world. I like to learn how and what people see in their doors through this Thursday Doors Challenge hosted by Dan Antion. Ciao,
Valentina
Amazon Author’s Page

Valentina Cirasola is an interior-fashion consultant, author of 6 published books, a storyteller, and a blogger of many years. Her books are non-fictional practical ideas to apply in the home, fashion, cooking and travel. Get a copy of her books here: Amazon and Barnes&Noble

Bubbles On The Walls

17 Nov 2021 6 Comments

by Valentina in Home Designs Master Tags: #ColorScheme, #Corridor, #HomeRemodeling, #InteriorDesign, #QuirkyInteriors, #WarmColors

How easy it is to get uplifted and pick up some good vibrations from the universe with just a bucket of paint? It’s very easy and this is what is happening to me. This year, I have decided to restyle my home just with paint and colors. From room to room, slowly my home is changing face. This is my corridor.

My entire home is full of fantasy, it follows nobody’s trend or style. I live in colors, a lot of colors, they make me feel happy and energized. This corridor was a bit dark and always a tight space. After a paint job and a lot of gold bubbles, the space looks visually larger and illuminated.

Corridors usually divide rooms on the left and on the right, usually are built narrow and without windows to save space, but they are the places people go through often during the day. I never understood why people want to turn an already dark corridor even darker using the darkest colors, but that’s their prerogative. I want a corridor to lead me into light and fun. Here I see a lot of rhythms the exposed beams create with the stripes under the passageway to the corridor, the golden bubbles and the reflection in the mirror.

The home is an older house, I bought it for its character, I left all the details native to the house to keep the originality. I will never exchange it for a modern shoebox built today.

I painted this mural a few years ago and I still like it. I wanted to reproduce a fantasy Italianate-style building façade with some sign of life in a room and a couple kissing in the window. Italians are very expressive and are not stingy in love.

Life must not be serious, a bit of quirk in our days doesn’t hurt.
In my home we drink bubbles every day as a celebration of life, thus I thought of transferring that bubbly feeling onto the walls.
Call it weird, strange, unusual or whimsical, when I go through this corridor I feel happy vibrations. Ciao,
Valentina
Valentina Designs

Valentina Cirasola is Italian-born, trained Interior and Fashion Designer. She loves to remodel homes and loves to create the unusual, as much as she likes to restyle people’s images. She is a storyteller and finds inspiration everywhere to write her stories. She needs your story to design your dream home or your dream look. She is the author of 6 books. Check out her books on
Amazon and Barnes&Noble

Create Beauty Every Day | Valentina Cirasola | Designer

11 Aug 2021 2 Comments

by Valentina in Home Designs Master Tags: #Appreciation, #CreateBeauty, #CreateRituals, #InteriorDesign, #LifeInHarmony, #LiveInBeauty

I was born in beauty, in a country that has created beauty in every corner from the sea to the mountains, in the cities or in the country. I lived in beauty, I accepted beauty as my oxygen. I cannot help but having beauty all around me.
Seeing the masterpieces of the greatest artists of all times, walking in cities made with great architecture, breathing beautiful fashion made by people who understand shapes, forms and colors and savoring the best whole food, all helped me shape my insatiable thirst for beauty.

I say it many times, beauty is contagious and multiplies, show it to people, it will make them want to copy it and create their own.

What is beauty? The Webster dictionary defines it as such: “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit”.

In my daily routine, beauty is doing things that eliminate stress, add peace to the soul and clarity to the mind. Beauty is doing certain things I learned in my antique world that helped me being different from the mass.

Creating beauty is not only about beautifying a home. It’s about creating sensible rituals, like pick up a card and send it to someone near or far for no reason at all, or organizing a Friday night tapas a home with friends.
Creating beauty is about dating the partner who lives with us in the same home, just to kill a deadly routine, or learning to use every beautiful thing we own, antique, historical, inherited or with an emotional attachment, because the special occasion is only today.
Creating beauty is writing for yourself, it doesn’t matter if you publish it or not.
Making wines from a simple grape grown in the backyard creates beauty.

My ideas of creating beauty are endless.

We live in too much ugliness, people have become mean and feel nothing anymore, society has become deaf to all the problems of humanity, we must beautify our little world as much as we can, it’s our responsibility to make it livable for us and the people we love.

On my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/designsvalentina you will find all the episode of the series I started a few weeks ago. It’s called simply: “Create Beauty Every Day”. Every Thursday, I appear on a video and talk from my studio on how to create beauty. They are short and to the point episodes. Perhaps some people think my messages are about common sense, perhaps common sense is not so common anymore. Ciao,
Valentina

It’s my hope that through my writing and my stories 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 their home décor, or the clothes they wear. Now, I offer consultations on-line on home and fashion. Two of my books are on design and colors.

Amazon: https://amzn.to/2Bxhq08
Barnes&Noble:http://goo.gl/q7dQ3w

A Spring Table | Valentina Cirasola | Designer

02 Apr 2021 2 Comments

by Valentina in Home Designs Master Tags: #ColorfulDining, #Inspirational, #InteriorDesign, #SpringTable, #SpringTablescape

Eating just to fill up the stomach is a necessity to survive and get the daily fuel needed to have energy for all activities we schedule in a single day. What if we would elevate that food necessity by adding beauty to something more spiritual that really supports us? I am talking about our soul. Just like exercising and doing beauty routines, the soul needs care. Loving ourselves even in the small details of life is important to assure a serene voyage through life.

Ever since the world has been in lockdown, I miss people sitting at my table sharing food and stories, geez… I only know how much I miss it, but it doesn’t stop me from taking care of myself more than I did before. My table is well set every day as if I had guests coming, but in reality it is set only for the two of us and our spirits.

This is my Spring table. My home is furnished with enough objects to decorate a table in any season and for any occasion. I use everything in my home, even décor from various rooms that don’t belong on the table, appear on my tablescape from time to time. I orchestrate a nice, interesting sceneries and set the stage for a good eating experience. Everyone can have a unique tablescape, it’s doubtful someone else will come up with the same look. The décor of each home is original to the person living there.

(Click on each photo to view it larger).

The other day on Facebook I read this passage, I wished I knew her name, I couldn’t agree with her more: “

“It’s impossible to ban living beautiful…
Taking joy from the little details…
Because everything beautiful is infinite…
And you will never lose your values…”

Treat yourself to a bit of opulence, quirkiness, originality, or whatever strikes your fancy. No matter what the situation is today, this is the time to love yourself more than ever. Ciao,
Valentina
Amazon Author’s Page

Copyright © 2021 Valentina Cirasola, All Rights Reserved

Valentina Cirasola is an Italian Interior Designer established in 1990. Often people describe her as “the colorist” as she loves to color her clients’ world and loves to create the unusual. Currently, she consults on colors based on clients’ personalities and lifestyles. She creates atmospheres using the proper lighting that is going to add harmony and peace to the homes and she helps clients creating fantasy rooms instead of typical rooms looking like furniture showrooms. She is the author of six published books, two of which are on design subjects. Amazon and Barnes&Noble

Teatime | Valentina Cirasola | Designer

12 Feb 2021 2 Comments

by Valentina in The Good Life Tags: #DecoratingForTeatime, #InteriorDesign, #TableSetting, #TeaTime, #TheArtOfDining, TeatimeTheme

At the end of last month, I organized a teatime chez moi, it was about time to see some humans after a year of distancing. It seems I have put my body on an energy-savings mode. In fact, I just got around to post this short video on my YouTube channel after the teatime event two weeks ago.

Teatime is a precious time to spend with a few chosen friends. Setting a nice table to go with tea and small morsels is a way to show your friends you care for them and want to catch up with life or their latest news, help them with their challenges if any, or just want to spend some quiet relaxing time with them.

Only a few things are needed for a successful teatime. Good food all made in small bite-size and an exciting conversation with lively people are a must. The rest are all the frills that help create a nice teatime experience, such as a theme for the table setting, the right colours to go with a selected theme, background music, and a pleasant atmosphere from good lighting.

You can choose any theme for your teatime table. The idea is to group items in the same theme without being too much of a matchy-matchy. I selected a botanical theme, thus some of my teacups are floral and some have some nature elements (ladybugs). My plates have grapes embossed in the glass, and some plates are shaped like shells. The wood napkin rings are carved as shellfish and courtyard animals. The runner is designed with birds propped on branches. I added the fresh flowers and mixed them with the dry flower composition.

https://youtu.be/Q6srnOUWoQo

This is a small example of a theme. Go ahead, invite someone you have not seen in ages. It’s still February and in most places in the world, it is very cold, a warm delicious tea with small morsels at teatime will make you feel like a human again. Ciao,
Valentina
Amazon Author’s Page

Valentina Cirasola is an Italian interior designer who was established in 1990. People often describe her as “the colourist” as she loves to colour her clients’ world and create the unusual. Currently, she consults on colours based on clients’ personalities and lifestyles, she creates atmospheres using the proper lighting that is going to add harmony and peace to the homes. She helps clients create fantasy rooms instead of typical ones like furniture showrooms. She is the author of six published books, two of which are on design subjects. Amazon and Barnes&Noble

Does Your Book Cover Talk? Valentina Cirasola | Author

03 Feb 2021 2 Comments

by Valentina in Books Blog Tags: #BookCoverMeaning, #BookCoverReveal, #BooksByValentinaCirasola, #BookWorms, #InteriorDesign, #NatureandHomeInteriors

She was impressed with the cover and asked me if it meant anything. Yes, it does.
The book is about the relation between nature and our home interiors. Human beings are not islands of their own, people are connected to other people and in turn, we are all connected to the universe. The universe is made of vegetation and creatures that sustain our life and planets that sustain our emotions.
Building a square, rectangular, or round home is not only about the functionality of the geometry, but it is also very much about how a home communicates with nature, the natural light that infuses a home, the exposure to wind and sun, the outdoor colors that will determine the indoor colors, the vibrational energy of colors and much more.

In my book cover, I wanted to combine an architectural feature and an element of nature.

The book could have not come at a more appropriate time than this lockdown time.

We have been forced to stay home for a year now. Before the lockdown, some people usually didn’t even spend more than 30 minutes a day in their homes and now they are forced to like their sofas, their kitchen, and unfortunately their staycation. Before lockdown, life was hectic and most of us were always on the run, trying to pack as many activities or appointments as possible in one day basically leaving the home for just the necessary activities, washing, sleeping, washing clothes, and preparing kids for next day school.
Due to the constrictions of social distancing and businesses being temporarily closed or partly closed, people now feel confined and are feeling their home as a prison.

With my book, I wanted to give people a new outlook on the home by turning to nature for new solutions.
I wanted people to see the home, maybe, as they have never seen it before, as a warm cocoon, from which to grow personally as a single entity or together with family and nurture those dreams that have not yet come to a realization.
We must stay home, might as well, make some improvements that will allow a renewal of vital forces.

Back to the meaning of my cover. The flowerpot is like the person growing, blossoming, or transforming into a new self, and that new self is resting on a large, bold architectural capital, a feature representing the foundation of the house, large enough to support all emotions, unexpected changes, dreams, development, and everything that can happen to our lives in this ghastly time

Does the cover of your book reveal a meaning? Ciao.
Valentina
Amazon Author’s Page

Valentina Cirasola is an interior-fashion designer, author of 6 published books, a storyteller, and a blogger of many years. Her books are non-fictional practical ideas to apply in the home, fashion, cooking, and travel. She never gives up trying new things and doesn’t fear failure. Some years ago, Valentina became a TV producer/host producing shows under her label: Valentina Design Universe. The goal of her shows is to entertain, inspire and inform, while she is living her passion.
Get a copy of her books here: Amazon and Barnes&Noble

Design Nature For A Colorful Home

31 Oct 2020 6 Comments

by Valentina in Books Blog Tags: #BooksByValentinaCirasola, #DesigningWithNature, #HomeHarmony, #InteriorDesign, #NatureandHomeInteriors, #NatureColors

I will be finishing this year with a bang and I am happy. I present to you my new book ©Design Nature For A Colorful Home. It will be published on Amazon and Barnes & Noble by Nov.6, 2020. Watch the trailer here.

The book delves into the relationship between nature and the interiors of our homes. It also focuses on how to take advantage of nature’s colors and turn them into doable solutions.

“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken” ~ Leo Tolstoy ~

I have introduced the concept of healing stones based on the colors of the rooms and explained the reasons we might need them. Of course, people do what they want in their home, but when they suffer headaches, depression, or other ailments, never occurs to them it could be related to the colors or other elements missing in their home. The home has a spirit that will love you if you create an inspiring, healthy, vibrant home for the body, mind, and spirit. Everyone will feel comfortable in a home conceived with harmony and that’s when love grows.

The launch of the book ©Design Nature For A Colorful Home will start on Thursday, Nov. 5, and will end on Thursday 12, 2020. With the election in the middle, I didn’t want to detract attention from the country’s big event.
I will be very grateful to anyone who wants to participate in my launch and the book tour. Every participant will receive a free ebook and a tangible gift. Thank you in advance. Ciao,
Valentina

Copyright © 2020 Valentina Cirasola, All Rights Reserved

It’s my hope that through my writing and my stories 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 their home 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 it. Check out one of my books on the subject of colors, ©RED-A Voyage Into Colors, Second Edition.
Amazon and Barnes&Noble