More or Less Cottage bedroom essentials

Style FILES

RIGHT: Currently on our inspiration boards: this summerchic room from Keith Summerour’s new book, Creating Home: Design for Living (Rizzoli, 2017, HC 240 pages, $68).

SUMMER ST YLE IDEA T TABLEAU VIVANT

Warm August days have us heading outdoors for most meals or to more casual settings than our dining rooms. Instead of leaving the dining table empty, turn it into a mini librar y and open-air cabinet of curiosities. Follow Atlanta-based architect and designer Keith Summerour’s lead, and stack it with coffee-table books and summer reads. Give the display height with a tall vase filled with f lowers or sculptural branches, add candlesticks and tapers for evening ambience and then set out a dish or tray to be slowly filled with summer-day mementoes: stones from the beach, a fallen nest, feathers.

VNOW & THEN errieres PRINT

NOW: Today’s pale and pretty versions.

A LONG-STANDING FAVOURITE OF TOP DESIGNERS, THIS CENTURIES-OLD FLORAL FABRIC HAS MODERN-DAY APPEAL IN BRAND NEW HUES.

THEN: The 1960s’ more saturated colours.

NOW: Soft and subtle, the fabric’s four new colourways — Canary, Spring, Aqua and Pebble — give the iconic floral an understated look. The pattern is equally at home in a château, condo or cabin. Follow the influential designers that made Verrieres popular and use it in several spots in the same space: on windows, furniture, pillows …. With this print, more is more. $474/yd. At Lee Jofa (Canada) and Brunschwig & Fils (U.S.). THEN: Brunschwig & Fils introduced Verrieres to North America in 1960, but the fabric was originally created by textile magnate Jean Jacques de Luze in Switzerland in 1810. The pattern became famous in the ’50s, when decorator Henri Samuel used the blue version in abundance for writer Louise de Vilmorin’s château outside Paris. In 1984, New York designer Mario Buatta did the same in a bedroom in the Kips Bay Decorator Show House.