Gang:

The Madcap Cottage gents believe that good design should be available to all, whether you have access to an interior designer or not. Hence, the Demystifying Design blog is all about bringing good, accessible—and yet always-aspirational—design home and thinking outside of the box to craft interiors magic. If you want to look like your neighbors’ home, go read another blog. But if you want to create bespoke interiors that overflow with personality (not ours, but yours!) and pizzazz, then you’ve come to the right place.

Today, we are taking you down a short path to a few fun tweaks that can quickly and easily transform your home and take that “nice” and make it a knockout.

1. Layer, layer, layer! Use antiques and vintage pieces to bring your home’s storyline to life. Rooms that feature all-new furnishings and accessories look like showrooms, and who wants that? In the former Madcap Cottage front hall in Brooklyn, an antique English hall tree mixes with vintage and contemporary art. The ottomans tucked under the faux bamboo table offered the perfect occasional seating at the frequent dinner parties.
2. Add a game table. Why always sit in your dining room at dinner parties? And the kitchen can become such a mess with cooking and whatnot, so you might want to always pull up to the kitchen island. Our suggestion is to find a vintage game table that you can place in a cozy corner of the living room where you can segue from cocktails to dinner, board games to more cocktails. Here, the Madcap gents’ House of Bedlam living room with a vintage chinoiserie game table that we painted to give it new life.
3. Use wallpaper to hide a room’s architectural flaws. For example, here’s a 1950s-era bathroom that the Madcaps are designing in Sarasota, Florida. We kept the original pink tile and added a fun tropical wallpaper not only to play up the tile—but also to mask the soffit that runs along the ceiling. The wallpaper tricks the eye into not noticing the soffit thanks to the profusion of traveler’s palm leaves.
4. In the same Sarasota, Florida design project, we used a jauntygreen-and-white cabana stripe paper from York Wallcoverings to lend visual interest to a long hallway that had anything but pizzazz. Thanks to the paper, the hallway now has architectural élan and seems much larger than it truly is. Some artwork upon the walls, and the space will be complete.
5. The Madcaps are huge fans of catalogues and big-box stores: Good design resides everywhere. Here, we took the Naples

   Rattan Chair from Grandin Road and custom upholstered it in the Mill Reef pattern from the Madcap Cottage for Robert Allen @Home collection. A rich blue contrast welt adds the perfect punctuation mark to the seat. Lesson to be learned: Take the “store bought” and tweak it to make it your own.