The story of “Dress Your Home”:

During a recent vacation to Bahrain in March 2009, I met a versatile lady named Lata, a friend of my mother. I was stunned on seeing some of her creations:  glass paintings, a store-worth of  embroidered dresses for her daughter and all the little girls in the neighborhood, clay models, ceramic paintings, acrylic on canvas among other things. Every piece of her work was unique and in tune with the current trend. The dresses, in particular, that she stitches can give any designer a run for their money. A self-taught artist, Lata has an enviable collection of books on all kinds of art and crafts.

Having done two Tanjore paintings before and a desire to learn Worli and Glass painting, I started meeting her and spending a lot of time reading books on glass painting, fabric painting and so on. Her energy and enthusiasm is infectious. Before I realized, Apartment Therapy and decor8 were on my reading list as was Dose of Design. I made a huge list of home improvement projects that I wanted to get started on.

For a very long time, I’ve also been fascinated by beautiful homes and never miss a single episode of NDTV Profit’s Hot Property.

Have you ever walked into some one’s home at 7:00 a.m. or 10:00 p.m. and felt everything was where it was meant to be? Well-kept. Organized. Nice smell. A feel-good home. No strewn-around newspapers, clothes lying on the sofa, keys on the table, or rumpled sheets.
This blog is an attempt to create a feel-good home. A home you’d long to come back to after work. Rooms that reflect your personality. Organizing ideas even for the smallest of spaces that have room for everything. Choosing the right accessories that will give a spacious feeling.  Ideas to showcase your collectibles. Decorating walls with your child’s craft or your own creations.

My personal philosophy is that a designated place for everything leads to no clutter at home. No clutter leads to an organized way of living. Bright rooms complements that and leads to a happy living.

“Dress Your Home” blog will feature home improvement tips, house tours, DIY projects, and showcase tons of products to dress your home

Why the name “Dress Your Home“:

What’s the hardest thing in the world to name? A baby or a blog?

Zeroing in on a name for this blog took me about a week.  In retrospect, the only other thing/person that took me this long was a name for my son. Even 10 days after he was born, we were going back and forth between 3 names. So much so that I had all 3 options listed during his christening ceremony and settled on one much later after a lot of consensus, opinion poll and deliberation.

After deciding I wanted to start a blog on home decoration, a few words played on my mind:  home, decor, design, ideas, art, craft etc. It was challenging to NOT use any of these oft-repeated words in blogs on this theme and still come up with something relevant, catchy, and meaningful.

I am extremely influenced by zebra stripes.  Every home improvement design project I’ve executed over the last 2-3 months has variations of animal stripes in different colors. As a natural progression, I had imagined a zebra-striped background/header for this blog.  It didn’t take long to realize how flashy and distracting a lime green-striped header would have been.  But I still held on to the “stripes” obsession and wondered, if instead, I could buy a domain with the word “stripe” in it.

How was lemonstripes.com for starters ? Yes, sounded cool..I jumped at the idea and in one of my characteristic dramatic ways jumped off the bed at 11:00 p.m. to see if it was available . (I have an affinity for flashy colors like lemon green, orange, yellow).

Unfortunately, this was taken.  And so was orangestripes.com. In a way, it turned out good as I started raking my brains and wondered what was it that I really wanted to showcase in this blog. All I could visualize was happy people living in normal houses beautifully transformed - whose walls were decked up with complementing curtains, accessories, color play, planters, beautiful paintings and DIY art projects.

The choices were clear:

Dress Your Walls? Umm. No.

Dress My Home ? Maybe

dressmyhome.com was taken as was dressyourhome.com. But I felt very strongly about “Dress Your Home” and since a great deal of what will be written here will be on the Indian market, I settled happily for the domain dressyourhome.in.