Fabric Choices Show What Makes You Tick

Fabric choices, even more quickly and certainly than an assemblage of furniture, establish the style of a room. At the same time, they provide insight to the taste, personality, and overriding spirit of the people who live in a particular space.

Through the selection of fabric, very disparate types of architecture and furniture can be unified. Geometric and abstract patterns can give furniture from any era a modern look. There are floral prints for every taste and style, elegant antique document prints, exotic ethnic patterns, checks and stripes to bridge designs within a room and from room to room, and, not least, novelty prints make a highly personal statement, usually with whimsy.

Interior designers often say their clients fall in love with a fabric pattern only to finally choose something "safe." Interior designers' greatest gift is giving clients the confidence to choose from the heart. When room design comes from the heart it becomes a true reflection of the "fabric" of a household. Selections from the Jaima Brown Home designer collections illustrate some of the versatile possibilities inherent in the use of fabric.

To give an informal sitting room a taste of the tropics, we coordinated exotic "island girls" wallpaper from the Sarong collection with "Key West palm" and "arbor" patterns from the same collection. The former is used for cushions on the bamboo furniture, which is accented with a throw pillow in arbor's lattice design, outlined with fun fringe.

A tent of the same arbor pattern turns this room's fifth wall -- the ceiling, into a designer's dream addition. It brings an unusually high ceiling down to appropriate scale for this space while also softening the room with graceful folds of fabric overhead.

Uncommon elegance can come from the generous use of a dominant pattern. Walls, cushioned and upholstered in an Oriental document design from Sarong, make a stunning backdrop for a handsome, intricately carved mahogany bed and also guard the room from intrusive sound. Cushioned, fabric-clad walls provide excellent sound-absorption in apartments and in today's media rooms.

Ribbon covers the fabric seams on the wall, adding the interest of an occasional stripe. The duvet cover and European pillow shams are of the same fabric, and the fringe on the pillows matches the seams on the wall. Even the family pooch, clad in a cape of matching fabric and fringe, takes on an air of elegance. If that's a little "too, too" for your pet's taste, use the fabric for a “pawsitively” glamorous puppy pillow or bed.

The ultimate fun with fabrics comes from mixing and matching pattern in unexpected places. Walls of sailboat-patterned fabric from the Sheridan Road collection create a nautical motif for a den. We upholstered only the back and seat of an old, beloved chair with the same fabric, then made it a singular success with a mix of three other fabric patterns. Mitering the stripes on a pillow, allowing the same stripes to peek from the underside of a red and white checkered skirt, and tying all the patterns together with piping of the checkered skirt pattern, achieves one-of-a-kind designer detailing.