hello welcome to a new edition of design for the times i'm your host richard quest to persecute terry i've been in the design and your story for twenty one years now with maven hell designs working on all sorts of projects and doing a lot of different things but one of the things that i'm most proud proudest of doing is some mentoring and i'm very happy to have in studio with me two of my interns that are with me this summer and then to my direct left is carly as and she's from penn state and then next to her is conor duffy he's at the college and i think one of the best things that energize me in my business is to have new blood new ideas new energy and dare i say the word valente all so today show is going to be a bout that exactly relating my design business or the design business in general how it's perceived by the millennial how you guys view things and getting an idea of millennial style we also do a show every wednesday besides the program here in princeton in flemington new jersey and w h c r d b and our topic today was all about color combinations and what millennialists are looking for today we're going to talk about millennial style and i'll start by saying when i started twenty one years ago it was sort of the polar opposite of what it is now with design everything was very carvings there was all sorts of stuff happening with that chandelier is where brass shiny brass in your face they were shades and all the chandelier draperies were expansive i had an a so on and that was the beginning of my foray into design now twenty one years later the new generation the millennial seem to embrace a simpler profile seem to embrace technology and i think because we're in the technological age the look reflects more of a industrial kind of theme so my start with you carly and talk about sort of design in general things that you find attractive maybe things that that appeal to you i would say with people of your generation minimalist is something that i see a lot i would say twenty years ago i couldn't get enough stuff right the more stuff you had the richer you were the safer you felt i kind of think when you guys are starting to set up house now and doing things that is sort of the opposite it's clean and spare yeah i like the minimalist look but i want to look like homey and still lived in i don't want to sure like can't touch anything so it has to be warm right at the same time and then what about you conor what do you think about sort of your own personal style i think similar to that i like a lot of the  think is probably one of the best things to sort of create warmth in the space i think in modern times would adding wood to a space back in the one nine hundred seventy s everything was wood and even up to the early one nine hundred eighty s when somebody bought a new house when they would put their trim when they would do their molding or shoe molding their baseboard molding and if they had crown molding it was never painted it was stained and the look of wood was in the seventy's and that's so many years later  the look of wood has returned but in other ways people are putting wood on the walls again and i think the standard now is a wood floor people were covering them for years with less carpets but it's gone the other way when you think about using either of you about carpets are good even if you have hardwood floors as we do here in studio just to absorb sound if you have a more contemporary loft type space with high ceilings you do want to absorb sound has the interview been in a restaurant and the restaurant is so loud you cannot communicate  some of that has to do with having hard surfaces on the floor and then the high spaces in the caring with what about you as far as connor as far as would surfaces both on the floor but also as a decorative element on the wall actually really love would i think that it looks really nice on floors obviously but the same time using it for decoration for example like wooden bookshelves think are a great way to make a room seem more homey more lived in warmer and then on top of like having the wood bookshelf also the books and celebration of the room and write none of the color but they're also texture right definitely so let's talk about the different types of wood when i first started the industry most people had floors and was sort of the look back in time and the boards were kind of narrow two and a half to three and a half inches they were oak and there were often sort of a bow on color because the previous generation had very dark floors so they were they were the thing to do that was no then the boards got a little bit bigger four and a half so on and the colors went darker and they went from an oak which had a lot of green into more of a maple so maple became a little bit more popular we went from sort of a bomb to sort of like sort of like almost orangey sort of a flesh color or a darker would still still not dark but a wider board then the wide boards came and they're really wide boards  rustic hand scraped if you remember that hand scrape with members a little before your time but a rustic very wide book board and then dark and then really dark came and jack a bean and really dark dark wood floors came in and then after that there was sort of like what should you do with your floor because you saw everything when the great trend caught on which we are still very much in in grey floors kind of took on a like a grayish brownish lock on our floor in studio which are what it is can see here a sort of like sort of a nice brown tone but do you know what i mean when you talk about hard to floors now that have gray in them have you both seen that you go to the wonderful store fronts or restaurants and i know you work at a restaurant as well there's sort of a great look to a floor and i'll ask you guys because i've told you how floors huge the colors change so quickly when you think about investing in a floor now that has sort of great tones to it either one of you can answer that i like a more classic start for dark and do you think people your generation if they're going to say they want to dark wood floor the do they do they want like sort of a dark stain dark stain and then if you think about the floor would faded out not drawn as much attention and and it beat the purpose and then and maybe not age so well oh yeah time definitely well there is great wood that's actual grey but there's also would tell that has a little bit of grey and almost like the walls or grays which is beige you sort of see that in the floors and they look very current or very attractive but i always wonder for the long term if you're going to make an investment if they should stick to something a little like we see in studio which is a slightly wider board but not too wide so it's trendy and stick in the brown tones i think that's probably your safest bet and i would say for both of you guys styles now are a little bit severe and they run from being kind of calm and to being a little bit sharper edged the the years we're in now where they're a little bit sharp edged you do take the chance of having their lifespan be shorter when i do decorated my home thirteen years ago i tried to make it very traditional because traditionally usually lasts a little bit longer but i will tell you th irteen years into it even traditional gets dated styles change colors change so you have to constantly be manipulating things the sort of a pink color something we talk about a lot and we've had t design for the times we're going to have the people from benjamin moore here but you guys think about paint and paint colors and what do you think about paint in general carley i like paint and red you pay and i really would stick to more neutral because it's safer and you can always change it what different accents definitely just in general not for pink colors what is your favorite do you have a favorite color it's pink thanks wow that's great what so you know i should stop and talk about that because i see a trend towards pink returning and a very modern way and i'm so old that my first apartment at hardwood floors and i covered it with a new plush carpeted pad that was called blush and blush was not a pink it was sort of the new modern kind of neutral color and all these years later i was in west elm which is a like a pottery barn brand a little bit younger and more help and i saw lots of like shag rugs and pillows and they were all this sort of this fleshy pink color but very very modern peered with gray when you think about that i love that yeah that's a great sharp and it doesn't look dated does an eighty's it looks sort of reinvent but it's not like show on the radio show and i read they say that it was always an article for christmas time for decorating with nontraditional colors and what was trending last year for christmas was millennium pink people would do a vintage white tree where they would do a classic tree and they would do it millennial pink white and silver and that was one of the things that was trending last year which is kind of funny that you say that everything seems to be cyclical it comes back again but not exactly in the same way but you guys think about polished concrete floors i was watching a program last night and the west coast and west coast seems to be a little bit more modern than the east coast and they were looking at a townhouse and the entire house had polished concrete floors how do you carry the same color they're more it's a mixture of dark green and very light mostly from green ok that's an unusual color for a floor yeah it is unusual however it works really well it's a very dark restaurant with a lot of dark wood and very rich colors it's a strange mix of what i think you see in fashion but it is in that transition period when things started to move less towards those very twice i've done polish concrete and what's interesting about working with polish conscript concrete is very dust real easy to clean but when you stain concrete concrete is what it's porous so you don't get it always you get sort of a variation of color which could be attractive sometimes but sometimes it's like someone calling their hair it could be a disaster because the perasso they can be different depends on what time of year what chemicals these and so on so i think it does have its place and maybe a loft space if we warmed colors right and so if you were to have if you got the keys for three months carly to new york city apartment he won the lottery and you have three months and you could be a terrific space what color would just sort of paint the space you think i think i might do gray but i'm kind of thing pops of like apple green really one of my favorite combinations are green green about you you do an exchange with somebody for an internship and you get a keys to their apartment maybe simon had maybe some long island city maybe we're his silver cup studios right and there's an apartment brand new apartment and long island city or condo and you can do what you want with it style or very neutral grazes and you need some contrast and depth there so for your conor what would your pop color be in your new your new place in long island city so my favorite color is see them green so kindly go with  millennia old have embraced the pop colors and those colors have to be really strong so one of the colors that we talked about was a color they used oh my god nine nonstop between i guess ninety nine and two thousand and five  follow but the yellow back then was more of a soft a buttery yellow with white trim the yellow they use now it's kind of like a caution like you know like a not a bus with a bus could be arms of it are really strong top of yellow and i' become to really love it that gray and yellow combination with black and gray and white there's kind of sharp is that sort of the millennium kind of combination i like it yeah no i think off there the times but i i just can't get to dark rich navy like blues or some really hot don't you think if i would say in your generation other than grays what what color is the most popular what would you what would you both  geometric print was in but now i'm seeing it shift a little bit more towards teal right teal's another eighty's color that has sort of resurfaced this time period with grey and teal is probably the the hottest pop color that i can think of right now we've been seeing a lot of to market umbrellas for outside front doors we talked about the trend in front doors being a color but just a lot of blues and grey all blues in general but sort of that that  is very popular i was telling you guys and i'm working on a project right now in hundreds in county where i had a room that was sort of just basically square and it was great in the furniture was great i knew in that case i had to create a pop color because that's sort of the trend so for me i also like wallpaper which will talk about the money and wallpaper so i found a true grass paper which is you know a natural fiber this was really thick almost like a wood blind and it was the most was the darkest heeled green e tail you'd ever possibly imagine now wallpaper you need to use sparingly and we use wallpaper these days sparingly and i just did it on a fireplace wall and there was a whole fireplace and i mantle and white bookshelves on either side so it's just a little amount where we had our pop culture we had that pop we can pass along to our pillows the rug and all of the artwork and now we have grease with the pop finish and that sort of has that industrial feel does that appeal to either one of them i think the problem with that is if you have a loft space is that in the loft space the ceilings are so high it's a way to bring it down a little that but if you have an eight or nine foot ceiling maybe not so much now here in studio it looks like there may be great sure off white what would you think if that was black now we give you a very different feel wouldn't yeah traditional you see this half is where the the core doesn't massey architecture so i came in two years ago and sort of grade everything did new tile and all shades of sort of grays and gracious and then pick a cop pop color and my client said my favorite color is our engine so we started with the charcoal gray outside which is really cool we made a garage door that was kind of linear and we stained it sort of an orange a kind of stain and the new front door that was painted bright orange now aren't you the color you want to use what probably sparingly right just little pops of color how does the molecules perceive sort of orange as a pop color i think orange is great but i think it's still under rated yeah i don't know the people i don't know that people have fully embraced orange but those that do it's great now conor it's also a good restaurant color because because orange is are supposed to invoke appetite and orange is a great popular color also if you're going to do the industrial kind of luck with the grays and then he had some wood to that orange and would have a natural synergy together definitely let's talk about  i think is technology because i think millennial decorate with technology in mind let's talk about lighting because you know what you could make a room look as beautiful as possible but if you don't really see it in the right light is it beautiful or is it not to the with you guys about lighting that you see that you like i think there's so much new about lighting and lighting i think for your generation is becoming much more of a statement whereas i think when i was starting out people had a chandelier right that's what you did or you had maybe recessed lights maybe six inch cans of recessed lights or a flash mount fixture but nothing really to be didn't style now i think lighting fixtures themselves are becoming their own style because everything just unobtrusive and then flush but sometimes in addition to that you need to create some warm light and so on now i know you have definite definite ideas about lighting tell me some of the things that maybe inspire you i think that natural lighting is really really big part of any room or at least it should be if it has windows if you have access to it like in my room it's a navy blue and i don't have very good lighting in my room so my wooden blinds are always open and sure and it really just laid up the entire room  and i also know you're saying like you need lights to sometimes warm up the room i feel like in the same vein where we've kind of moved away from a lot of the warmer  painkillers like walk colors lights are also starting to move a little bit away from warmth and getting more white lights are more popular now literally among younger crowd what i would say is one the l e d lights first came out they were very different they were very blue yes and you could see christmas lights in the beginning remember you could have sets of white lights that were incandescent and they always had a gold white color to them and then you get a new strand of white light and they looked blue right especially in the beginning your dorm room are setting up stuff using street lights i think string lights have become popular not just with the millennialist but with the masses and one of the things that i like a lot is those new i call them italian patio lights and what they are those strings of lights kind of like christmas lights but they're thicker they have a black sort of wire to them and then the bulb itself is clear it's around the bulb kind of like this very modern or millennia style with the filament exposed and that's sort of the look in the film it has sort of an almost orange glow to it or the other one looks like a plum to me though what about you guys and think about using that i love those i thought some how about using them in si e i think they're definitely more suited to outdoor use but i see a lot of string light use inside a session dorm rooms i learned pool i mean the lighting dorms are awful are off often awful so bringing in string lights is a great way to lighting up the room and also it just looks really cool what about we've got a minute and a half left what about what you guys think about schalke board i see chalkboard being used in commercial spaces and sometimes in homes more than ever what do you guys think about chalk paint and the look of chalk maybe maybe a wall in the dining room like a part of a wall or framed with a rustic what do you think about the look of chalkboard i know it carley you help me and my maple think of the look of chalk it's funny that you actually mentioned using a dining room because my friend of mine recently moved into a new house and when i say i knew i mean a brand new house and in the kitchen they actually do ha to run out of time i thank you both carly and connor for giving your take on millennial style which i think is quite interesting and quite now i thank you for your insight i thank you to be in for design for the times we have wonderful shows coming thank you have