Gifts, feasts, family: All are words that spark up excitement for the holiday season.
Rearranging, stress, mess: these are the words that prove to be daunting, yet oft-times necessary, components of throwing a successful holiday gathering. However, the words that pop into David Bakken’s head when it comes to interior decorating for the holiday season are the ones everyone wants to hear: quick, easy and effective.
Bakken, co-owner of A Place Called Home has the credentials to put hopeful home decorators at ease. His furnishings shop won the gold medal for “Best Interior Designer” in our “Best of the Best” reader survey in June. Bakken himself has countless clients that hire him each year to decorate their house for the holidays, not counting the slew of customers that come into his shop daily to purchase furnishing items and get design advice.
This month, Bakken offered to share (some of) his secrets on how to get a house prepped for the holiday season—minus the headache. In addition, we’ve tracked down some feature items and accessories (all from local shops) to highlight along the way.
Dining Room Dazzle
There’s nothing more important during the holidays than bringing family and friends together to share a meal. Assuming the main component—dinner table—is already present, Bakken says three other items are crucial to bringing the dining room together: dinnerware, a centerpiece and takeaway.
When it comes to dinnerware, there’s no law that says you have to break out the same old china to match each holiday feast. If you want to journey from the norm, Anthropologie has just the equipment to wake your dinner table up from years of hibernating through tradition. (Warning: This isn’t your grandmother’s dinnerware.) The store specializes in mixing and matching different patterns, colors and shapes to make for a creative and fun, yet attractive, setting.
For a look that’s conducive to all holidays, Anthropologie store manager Brittany Roe recommends you start with a Red Curlicue Etched Stoneware Collection dinner plate, which ranges from $12 to $14. To spice it up a bit, add the Gold Detailed Dessert Plate collection (available in various colors) for $14. A white coffee plate from the Fleur de Lys Dinnerware collection, which ranges from $10 to $16, adds a nice ivory tone to mix with the red dinner plate. Add a white Monogrammed Mug, available in all letters, for just $6. For drinks, use a $12 Horta water glasses with ornately etched flowers, and there’s no better way to toast the holidays than through an $18 amber colored Backyard Champaign Flute.
A takeaway item, or a small gift, at each place setting is also a good way to decorate the table while at the same time showing that you appreciate your guests. To serve this purpose, Bakken says he often uses Boca Bons one piece-truffle boxes wrapped in ribbon.
Now that the place settings are taken care of, the table needs a focal point. The centerpiece can be set up in one piece (a bowl of fruit in the middle of the table) or two pieces (tall glass Hurricane vases rising above the table’s center). Bakken likes an oil-rubbed bronze-finish metal bowl with scroll design and copper accents, sold exclusively at A Place Called Home for $169, or pillars of Tortoise smoked glass with a metal base, caramel and brown in color, for $49 each.
While many people think they have to keep adding objects to freshen up their holiday décor, Bakken says the key to the dining room is simplicity. “People have a lot on their plate,” he says. “Think simple, concise ideas,” and leave it at that.
Readying the Rest
When it comes to primping the other rooms of the house for the holidays, Bakken recommends touching areas such as the great room coffee/sofa table, the kitchen center island, a foyer table or fireplace mantel. “When decorating, look for … what you see first,” Bakken says. “Pick your stops with impact.”
Accessories such as trays, bottles and jars are “must haves,” Bakken says; A Place Called Home sells metal, rubbed and glass trays ranging from $29 to $99, but customers often fill up their own trays with items such as fall pumpkins, gourds, leaves, candles or ornaments. “They are perfect for center islands and kitchen tables,” he says of the trays. “They’re easy to move when needed.”
To decorate coffee tables, Bakken suggests using something other than a vase, such as A Place Called Home’s vintage-inspired bottles ($20-79) or jars ($59-79) that can be layered with artichokes, acorns, leaves and potpourri. But if you have a vase you’re looking to fill somewhere in the house, pick up the ever-popular LED branch lights at Goodthings (inside the Shoppes at Arbor Lakes); 36-inch stems range from $42.95 to $49.95, and 14-inch stems cost between $26.95 and $29.95. Tyler Conrad, owner of Goodthings, says the branches, which come with between 30 and 80 lights, constituted Maple Grove’s biggest decorating trend heading into the fall. (He recommends placing the stems in a vase with faux flowers or greens for an “instant glowing flower arrangement.”)
Other quick and easy additions, such as pine garlands for your staircase or something as simple as ginger-scented hand soap for the bathroom, can make the extra holiday impact you’re looking for. “I think the average person could cover all those zones (including the dining room) within two hours,” Bakken says. “These are just quick things that you can do to trim your house.”
Art of the Tree
Nothing can light up a house like a Christmas tree. But the trick is preparing and decorating it the “right way,” something David Bakken is called upon to do for 10 to 12 local families each year. “There’s an art to it,” he says. “But it’s very basic. It’s really not hard to do.”
Bakken recommends the following steps when setting up an artificial tree (the only kind he sells at his shop):
- Light it Up: Plug in the lights, and keep them plugged in while wrapping them around your tree to ensure all are working. Starting from the bottom and working to the top, wrap each branch with lights. “Most people just wrap [lights] around, but to get your maximum lighting you actually have to light up [each branch from] the inside of the tree so it flows to the outside,” Bakken says. “Most people try to put their lights only on the outside,” but they really need to be close to the trunk, too.
- Decoration Time: Organize all your ornaments by size, large, medium and small. Place your ribbon and tree-topper first. Then start with the large ornaments, layering them towards the inside of the tree. Place the medium ornaments towards the middle of the tree, and the small ornaments towards the outer edges. If you have several small ornaments, cluster them on one hook to create impact. When hanging the ornaments, they should be layered in a triangle shape around all sections of your tree: top, middle and bottom. (So it’s helpful to purchase ornaments in odd numbers.)
- Finishing Touches: Add some texture and volume to your evergreen with botanical stems. Mixing in some artificial pine picks will add fullness and create a mixed-tree look
