At Home with Marni: Mixing it up at home

By Marni Jameson
Bay Area News Group correspondent

This is what happens when you're a health reporter with a weakness for home design.
I go to a party, which is to raise awareness (and money) for women who have heart disease. Like many parties for worthy causes, it's at a very worthy home.
I'm heavily distracted. I want to give myself a home tour, but that's not the agenda here. I force myself to remember that I am here as a concerned woman to raise awareness (and money) to help women fight heart disease. But would you look at that painting? I drift.
"Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women," someone important is saying.
Is that? Could it be? A Matisse? And is that a Picasso?
"It claims the lives of ..."
I am now standing so close to these art pieces I'm fogging the glass.
Who lives here, I whisper to a guest who is genuinely paying attention. She points to a woman, then to the only man in the place. He looks as uncomfortable as a dog in the feline shelter. I decide to rescue him.
So who has the eye, I ask him. You or your wife?
"Both of us," he says, aiming for humility, but his pride shines through, as it should.
He shows me around and seems to welcome the chance to break from the earnest women, many of whom wear red feather boas -- a sign they've donated a lot of money, not just awareness.
The art is the real deal, which gives me the hiccups. I always get them whenever I gulp and get excited at the same time, even without a martini. But the home's eclectic interior also impresses me. It has clearly been pulled together by someone with a brave heart and a confident hand. I want a brave heart and a confident hand.
I deconstruct the living room to see if I can divine why it clicks without seeming to try.
Walls the color of butter, a red velvet straight-lined sofa, a contemporary sleek white leather chaise, a classic French chair upholstered in zebra on top of a very faded Persian wool rug the color of the sea. Leaning against the dominant wall is a 6-foot-tall, Renaissance-style, 200-year-old painting of Sampson.
Opposite, a dress form wears the iconic Andy Warhol dress made of fabric imprinted with Campbell's Soup labels.
Days later, I'm still thinking of this room and how successfully the owners mixed old and new, and how hard that is to pull off.
How did they do that, I ask Deborah Wecselman, a Miami-based designer known for her eclectic interiors.
"A lot of rooms cohere because they are safe, follow the rules and coordinate, but they're not interesting," she says. "They have nothing unexpected."
Like a Warhol soup dress alongside a Renaissance painting. But how do you create an eclectic interior without looking as if you have a mental disorder?
Wecselman offers these tips for enlivening a stagnant interior while still making sure your room has a sure hand:

Have an anchor piece. Ground the room with at least one strong, large piece of furniture, ideally a solid-colored sofa or a pair of chairs that have clean, straight lines. From there you can have fun with art, pattern and accessories without making the room too chaotic.

Mix old and new. If your interior is all modern, inject something old -- a weathered piece of statuary or a distressed armoire -- to add character. If you have an Old World or traditional interior, insert something new, such as modern art or a contemporary pair of lamps to update it. "A blend of classic and modern creates a timeless look that isn't stuck in an era," she says.

Give old pieces a new twist. Sometimes the blend of old and new can happen in the same piece. A traditional chair covered in patent leather or painted in a shiny lacquer finish "will make the piece sexy."

Find your neutral. Pick one neutral you feel comfortable in -- gray, cream, taupe, wheat -- and play with value. (Translation: Use the same color but in light and dark versions.) Then layer in a bold color in a limited way.

Opposites attract. Next, try adding another color from the opposite side of the color wheel to give the room energy. If you put in teal, add pumpkin.

Mix patterns. Geometrics, florals, ikats and soup labels can coexist. The secret to having them click is to be sure the patterns all have one color in common, and that you have a large, solid-colored item (that sofa, for example) where the eye can rest.

More is not more. The biggest mistake DIY decorators make is having too much furniture. "They buy things they don't need to fill a space, then nothing works," Wecselman says. "Invest in a few good pieces. Edit the rest." And throwing in a Picasso or a Warhol doesn't hurt.