Sofa for Pets and Getting the Right Tan

What is the best sofa upholstery for people with pets?

If the cat or the dog rules in your home and are allowed on the furniture, you need one that will hold up to it. Cats and dogs shed hair, and ridding the sofa of them can be a nightmare. Claws can get caught on loosely-woven fabric. There are going to be dirt marks.

The best solution? The highly-recommended choice is leather. Hair slides right off, and there are no threads or loops  that can get pulled. There might be tiny holes, but none so big enough to be noticeable.

The second  best choice is microfiber. If you can live with a synthetic material sofa, this is a good choice. It holds up really well to dirt marks and stains, clean-up is easy and the non-woven nature of the fabric makes removing hair a lot easier.

Top: Klein  Sofa with Chaise in microfiber, Right: Leather Anson Sofa, www.roomandboard.com

How to pick the right 'tan' or 'beige' for walls

Picking a neutral color such as tan for the walls may seem like the simplest choice, but certainly not the most fool-proof. Tan and beige are tints of brown. The color brown is just a mix of two complimentary colors: red and green or yellow and violet, or blue and orange. Each one gives a very different kind of brown, and so are the tans and beiges extracted from it. Commonly, a tan can have either have yellowish or a pinkish cast. Consider the color of furniture and cabinets when selecting the right one. Light wood stains such as cherry and caramel look better with a yellowish tan. Darker and redder stains such as mahogany, umber and dark oak look better with pinker tans. 

Photo credit, top: www.kraftmaid.com

How to select furniture for a small space

Scale is probably one of the most important elements of design. Just like a wrong-sized dress on a woman, scale can make or break a look. For a small space, filling it with a jumble of tiny furniture and accessories is not really the best solution. To make the best impact when there isn't a lot of space, using pieces on a bigger scale makes each thing feel important.