Forget about the cutesy animals and Disney characters, Lavish Lamb baby bedding from Winnipeg creates a stylish nursery as sophisticated as your living room. With a great mix of graphics and prints, you can choose to layer in a coordinating blanket with crib bedding or make a statement with a contrasting print. Either way, this makes it easy to shop local.

Meet my brand-new, 2-day-old nephew! I have scooted to Edmonton to meet this little guy and help his tired mom and dad settle him into his new home. I’ll be cozying up the nursery and getting the last few things on the new baby checklist.

I have to admit that baby decor is new to me but, in trying to influence some decor decisions, I’ve found there are so many chic, cute and organic options out there I have no idea how sleep-deprived parents can choose! Over the next few days in Edmonton I’ll be showing you some choices from our excursions to feather the nest.

As you can imagine, even when I go out for dinner I check out my surroundings and get totally distracted by great interiors. It was no exception when we went to Colborne Lane for my boyfriend’s birthday a little while ago. It was hard to be distracted from the great food, not to mention rare, attentive service, but I was in love with the dark alchemy of this space. The walls are primarily black but the strong accents of aged wood and mad-scientist-inspired glass fixtures keep it from feeling somber. A tufted banquette along the outside walls of the dining room tie all the tones together in a veriagated striped upholstery.

That’s the great thing about restaurants and hotels – you can get inspired by different styles and see what turns you on without picking up a paint brush or hiring a designer. It may even be cheaper than making a mistake at home……unless you’re paying for dinner.

How many times have you been inspired by a colour and wished you could translate it into a paint colour? Or better yet, you bring a sample of your new favourite colour to a matching machine, only to find out the technology can’t read the fabric/surface/swatch. This has happened to me many (too many) times. But, Benjamin Moore has just jumped on the iPhone “App” revolution to put an end to my colour-matching madness: the ben Colour Capture App allows you to point your sleek iPhone (read: life-altering device) to a colour, where it will translate it to the corresponding Benjamin Moore colour and direct you to the closest retailer near you to buy the paint.

Now if only the iPhone could do the painting for us.

Back in April Jian (I’ll pretend we’re on a first name basis…) interviewed contractor and installation artist Reece Terris on his new project at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Ought Apartment. Terris was proposing the evolution of decor through an apartment complex. He explored the aesthetic style of different decades in a human-sized, 6-story building. I didn’t make it to the exhibit, but his interview with Jian provided some interesting food for thought: As a contractor Terris found himself constantly surrounded by an excess of “stuff”, and began to see the excessive waste in the renos he was doing. He said that he couldn’t get rid of  cast-off materials and, hoarding things as a pack rat, items started to group themselves together into time periods. Using recycled materials from his job as a contractor, he transformed remnants back into the objects and materials that defined various eras.

Thankfully, you can still catch the interview online in the Q archives and the exhibit runs at the Vancouver Art Gallery until September 20. I think I’ll have to revisit the podcast to give myself the gumption to purge some more.