Like a decorating fairy godmother, Debbie Travis seeks out the homely — the pedestrian fireplace, the white box bedroom, the run-of-the-mill floor — and waves her magic paintbrush. Woosh! The humble becomes elegant, the sterile is suddenly cozy.
It’s great fun to follow her transformation of “befores” into “afters,” even if you know in some distant corner of your mind that painting faux lattice trim is fraught with far more angst than Travis reveals on her television show, The Painted House, or in her series of six decorating books.
But never mind. Travis believes that with a can of paint you can do anything. Follow her around for 10 seconds, and it’s hard not to be a believer.
Her latest decorating book is Debbie Travis’ Painted House Bedrooms (Clarkson Potter, $19.95), written with Barbara Dingle and photographed by George Ross. It has plenty of showstoppers: closet doors painted to look like burled wood, faux French paneling and a painted floor rug complete with fringe. But it also has a lot of good ideas for people who will never investigate the difference between crackle varnish and crackle medium.
Shadow stripes, for instance, are relatively easy to do. The idea is to paint your room a luscious color, and Travis says rich creams, taupe, hunter green, cobalt and cranberry work best. Then divide the wall into 12- or 14-inch vertical stripes. One stripe will be left plain, the next will be treated to semi-gloss or high-gloss varnish so that when the wall dries, it will be one solid color with stripes of sheen.
Shadow stripes are a popular effect in wallpaper. By re- creating them in paint, Travis says that you can have the same look “at a fraction of the cost and in the same time it would take to hang the paper.”
If you’re more ambitious, you could paint both horizontal and vertical stripes on a white wall and create a gingham check. In this decorator’s hands it is an amazing effect. She keeps her stripes wide — again, they’re 12 or 14 inches — and executes them in lettuce green on cream walls.
By using a translucent, tinted glaze instead of standard paint, her stripes deepen where they cross and remain pale and luminous when they don’t. And they have an interesting texture because Travis drags a brush in the wet paint to create the illusion of a fabric weave.
But Painted House Bedrooms is not just about paint. Travis is clever with curtains. She hides white Venetian blinds behind sheers that dangle, via satin loops, from a row of decorative drawer pulls. And she hangs menswear flannel curtains from black grosgrain ribbon loops, each secured with a silver blazer button.
As for headboards, Travis conjures interesting ones. She’ll paint a faux wrought-iron headboard onto a plain jane wall or recruit an antique door as a headboard, making it more impressive by adding a strip of medium-density fiberboard and covering it with an embossed wallpaper. Then she’ll finish it off with a deep crown molding.
Several of her rooms have four-poster beds that appear to be antique. Look closely and you’ll see that the posts are actually homemade with standard-issue newel posts meant to sit at the bottom of stairways. For added decoration, Travis tops her posts with gilded pineapple finials designed to decorate curtain rods.
Being an artist, Travis is never at a loss as to what to hang on the walls. In one bedroom she writes “dream” in gesso on a white canvas. In another she mimics Andy Warhol’s pop art. She blows up a friend’s picture on a photocopier until she has just a detail of the face — the eyes, forehead and a bit of the nose. Then she color copies the image in green nine times and hangs up a tic-tac-toe grid.
Debbie Travis can do anything — etch nursery rhymes on a mirror, cover a shelf in silver leaf, pinstripe a desk (it takes two coats of black paint and lines drawn with a dressmaker’s white chalk pencil).
But her greatest talent is imparting a sense of the possible. If you long for a rug at the foot of your bed, don’t fret if you can’t find one in the right colors. Get out a can of paint and create your own.
