Linda Woodrum's Design Basics

HGTV Dream Home designer Linda Woodrum shares her tips on how to fix decorating mistakes and find inspiration.

By Kathy McCleary
PHOTO

After decorating nine Dream Homes and running her own interior design business, TS Hudson Interiors, in Hilton Head, SC, Linda Woodrum is an old hand at creating beautiful rooms from blank slates.
HGTV: How do you decorate when you're starting from scratch with an empty room?
Woodrum: You always need a starting point. With the 2006 HGTV Dream Home, we had that location and those views. Most of us in our real lives don’t have that. So your starting point can be a color, a room, a piece of furniture, a memento, a place you’ve been and responded to emotionally and want to recreate.

In the HGTV Dream Home, the sitting room that connects the main part of the house to the guest quarters didn’t have those dominant views, so I really was starting from scratch. Lake Lure in winter is a cold, mountainous area where the trees all lose their leaves and it’s very brown. It made me remember how much I miss spring now that I live in the south. Spring in the northeast is so powerful — you have the gray gloominess of winter, and the first green of spring is a wonderful time of anticipation and expectation.

PHOTO

Walking into the bright green sitting is a little like entering a hobbit haven, complete with ferns, bird’s nests and tables made from twigs.

So I designed that entire room with the image of spring in mind. First I found the Tibetan rug, and the brown and cream weave made me think of the ground in late winter. Then I added the Sherwin Williams paint on the walls ("Sassy Green") and the upholstery in the same color. Then I just kept piling it on – I brought in pots, because spring is the time when you repot your plants, and ferns, and the twig table. Once you get your idea, you just build on it in any way, shape or form you can.
PHOTO

Sometimes the item that provides the inspiration for a room (in this case a pot of sunflowers) doesn’t make it into the final mix.
What if you make mistakes?
You have to learn to let go of things; that’s called "editing." In the HGTV Dream Home master bedroom, for instance, I had a large urn filled with sunflowers that I thought would be perfect for that room. But when we got the room together and I put the urn in there it just looked dumb. It was too cute; too contrived. And that was probably one of the first purchases I made for that room! Sometimes, the thing you fall in love with, the thing that inspires the idea for the whole room, is the thing that ends up not working and you have to let it go. The master bedroom still has that sunflower idea – yellows and browns and blacks, but it's not overdone. There’s one found art painting of a sunflower, but nothing that screams, "This is the sunflower room!"