{Home & Design} Chad Alan Designs
www.chadalandesigns.com C 1
had Alan, 39, has a rich pro- fessional history that helps fuel his 12-year-old inte- rior design business. “I can pull from experiences work-
ing in millinery or in an opera house. I was even head florist of a paper-flower company for a while,” says Alan, who also has a design degree. “I’m not lim- ited to what we can find in stores — if I can imagine it, we can draw it, and we can build it.” Alan spent two years converting the harsh angles and stark white interior of
his Columbia Heights loft into a color- ful, art-infused space. The walls host a gallery of offbeat works: an oil painting of junk food, a custom mosaic, costume sketches from Alan’s theater days. A pal- ette of warm earth tones is energized with splashes of teal and quirky accents such as glass floor panels illuminated with neon light. “I love color and texture, and I despise
beige-on-beige,” Alan says. “Why settle for beige when you have a whole fan- deck of colors to choose from?” Like Ruiz, Alan occasionally has to coax clients into experimenting with colors, textures or furniture; he often does so by showing samples of custom-designed pieces, such as the light fixtures he created from cop- per refrigerator tubing. “No one can run to Pottery Barn and buy one of those,” he says. “The market is so saturated with really great knockoffs. It takes less than six months for a knockoff to hit Restora- tion Hardware. I think interior design is going toward working with more custom pieces, those things the Joneses down the street don’t have.”
Holly E. Thomas is a staff writer for the Magazine. She can be reached at
thomash@washpost.com.
In the colorful library, Alan added a curved
shelf one-third of the way down the window, under which he hung blinds. The setup allows light into the room while preserving privacy and artfully displaying the designer’s collection of mouth-blown glass spheres. “I had put them on dark lacquered shelves, and they just disappeared,” he says, “but the best part of them is when the light comes through them in the morning.” Alan hired a carpenter to build the shelf and attach it to the window frame, a two-day project that cost roughly $500.
2
Unimpressed with the look of matching
refrigerators and cabinets, Alan wanted an outside- the-box design fix for his KitchenAid panel refrigerator. After considering smoked mirrors and industrial diamond-plate steel, he settled on the Copper Stratos plastic laminate from Formica’s DecoMetal collection. A carpenter cut the laminate into panels, slid them into the doors and sealed the frame. Alan estimates a project like this one would cost about $950. The only requirement to try this at home? A refrigerator designed to accommodate panels. Visit www.
formicadecometal.com to browse finishes.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168