We visited Casa Del Bianco in NYC and had a wonderful working lunch with them as they talked all-things linens. Learn about the different types of fabrics, including blends, and what pros and cons there are to the various fabrics so you can find the best balance for your bed sheets and linens. Visit Casa Del Bianco for more information on custom Italian linens.

Fabrizio Biasiolo, Casa Del Bianco's vice president in charge (in our opinion) of Wonderfulness, would like to share these tips with you on buying fine linens.

• Trust your hand more than the thread count. How does the fabric feel to the touch? Soft or too stiff, like a tablecloth?

• The whole idea of thread count has become overblown in consumers' minds. The notion that the higher the number of threads per square inch, the better the product, is just not true. There are more important factors in determining the quality of linens and the level of comfort and pleasure they can deliver to their users.
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• Sheets have to be light in weight and have to "breathe" to avoid excessive and highly uncomfortable perspiration.

• To test softness, caress the linens with the back of your hand. The sheets have to be smooth and soft to the touch.

• For durability, sheets must be able to maintain their light weight and softness after many washes.

• Most luxury hotels choose 100 percent Egyptian cotton in a percale construction, normally a 200 thread count for bed linens. Consumers, however, veer towards 300-plus thread counts in a sateen construction. Sateen sheets are more expensive than percale, hence the perception that sateen is better quality than percale. Sateen sheets have the tendency to retain humidity and be more delicate than percale sheets.

• Sateen construction sheets don't wrinkle as much as percale. It's their only advantage.

• The more threads there are in a square inch of bed linen, the heavier the product will be. NOT the softer! The balance between the thread count and the weight is most important. There are plenty of people sleeping on 1,000-count sheets, and they're unaware that they're really sleeping on tablecloths.

• When dealing with natural fibers, the more you wash the linens, the better they feel.

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!

The value of travel abroad is that it opens us up to new ideas in architecture and design - even if what we're experiencing is hundreds of years old. Appreciating the old is part of learning to look at details, and those details will positively influence your home design and decorating. The rich history of Italy is exemplified in the various building styles we found in Mantova (Mantua), Italy, and we shot a video to show you some of our favorite architecture. The charm of the city itself is not to be believed. We sat in deserted squares, saw no tourists, and enjoyed fine food and inspiring sites. The Palazzo Te is richly decorated inside with jaw-droppingly cool paintings, many erotic and far ahead of the times (we wish we could have filmed inside, but an outside view was all we could get permission to film). 

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!

The Dubai architectural scene exploded like a red-hot rocket a few years ago, and only the global economic meltdown has brought it back to a bit more sanity. Yet the housing and building fever continues still as witnessed by the ambitious, yet very-Dubai-like scale of The World, a series of offshore islands that can be privately colonized for private get-aways, resorts, high-density housing, retail, and other imaginative uses. Isla Moda is an entire fashion-oriented enclave being planned within The World complex, with the world's fashion designers (like Karl Lagerfeld, pictured below) designing elements of this development. 

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!

We don't like the saying "The devil is in the details." When it comes to interior design and house planning, we prefer to say "angels are in the details" because heavenly details in your overall design can make your home projects timeless. Our resident interior designer Irwin Weiner ASID went to Milan during fashion week and we shot him with some of his favorite details. He found this entry hall and uses it to make his point that whether you're creating the architecture for your home, the building details for a room, or the furnishings and home goods that bring a space to life, it's going to be those special details that add up to give the most impact.

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!

It's important where you position your bed - from a few perspectives. Logic and interior design practice tells you that placing your bed against a window will block your view and put you in a drafty spot. The Asian practice of feng shui systematizes where beds should be placed and links good bed placement to good health, good relationships, and prosperity. Join us as we visit the bedroom in a new construction home and do a bit of feng shui troubleshooting on bed placement. Sweet dreams.

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!

Ekaterinburg, Russia designer Olga Kalugina believes that there is a better way to design a home. Her Bloom Living Module is a futuristic, clean, product-design-driven way to meet our housing needs. Solar-powered, sleek, and beautifully designed, Bloom is a mobile concept that some think can benefit disaster victims; its fast portability makes it appealing as a way to set up an instant community. We think it's important to keep pushing the home design envelope. It's certainly a breath of fresh air and makes us entirely forget the McMansion.

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!

Mantova, Italy is a beautiful small city with a rich history and stunning architecture. As Manhattan decorator Irwin Weiner ASID notes in the following video of some of his favorite house facades, some city scenes seem to be straight out of Barber of Seville. While you may not want to turn your own home into an Italian palazzo, his point is to add interesting materials, good craftsmanship, and unexpected architectural details to give your home an enduring quality. And who knows - maybe one day in the future a film crew will want to stop in front of your home and comment on its design!

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!

Hanging drapes isn't like putting a curtain rod flush on top of a windowsill, hanging a few panels, and calling it a day. There are ways to "cheat" the look of a wall and play it up, even when your windows may be undesirable, from too small to spaced oddly apart. Professional interior designers can add extra height to a room, make a wall look dressier and more theatrical, and hide flaws and make the windowscape blend in beautifully with the rest of the decor. Manhattan decorator Irwin Weiner ASID shows you a few drapery tips from his room in the beautiful 5-star Grand Hotel de la Ville in Parma, Italy.

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!

Finding One of the secrets of good interior design is to add a mix of workmanlike furniture with a few pieces of high interest. What makes for high interest? Sometimes it's the unusual, the outrageous, or the unexpected, like the striking use of aluminum and fiberglass in Marc Newson's Lockheed Lounge chair, pictured above. But most often, high-interest pieces - what adds zip and juice to any space - consists of furnishings or lighting that is highly sculptural. Look at the beautiful shapes of objects and see how they tie in with the curves, straight lines, colors, and mood of a room. Start a conversation, wake up a sleepy space, and "go sculptural." Designer Irwin Weiner ASID shows you a few examples from a Milan store in the following video.

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!

Finding out more about how your house and each room  orients according to the principles of feng shui - that's something that wouldn't be on the radar of some homeowners, but there are others who swear by the ancient Chinese practice. In this video, we show you how to locate the main areas of any room or of your house in order to optimize the chi or energy within and maximize your family's health and prosperity. Click here for some feng shui basics to help you get started. 

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!

Our Design2Share decorating expert Irwin Weiner ASID showed us one of his favorite ceiling treatments - a clever seventies-inspired tiled entryway ceiling in beautiful Milan, Italy. His point is simple: don't forget to include ceilings in your decorating plans. Too often we ignore them altogether or paint them a default white color when the walls are a stronger shade. Of the latter, Irwin notes that "it looks like a white Tupperware lid slapped on top of your room." The room in the photo above, however, has a strong reflective high-gloss sheen that reflects the rest of the room and gives endless height to the space (see apartment therapy's article How to: Make Your Ceiling Seem Higher).

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!



Our Design2Share decorating expert Irwin Weiner ASID invited us to see one of his outdoor projects, a beautiful ipe (Brazilian Walnut) deck. Ipe wood is tougher and stronger than cedar or other traditional hardwoods and when treated with deck oil, lasts 100 years. In this video are several outdoor furnishings, and here is a handy resource guide for you to find out more information from the manufacturers:

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!



If you have a backyard, you know that gardening is a lot of work, but it gives back lots of joy. Manhattan interior designer Irwin Weiner ASID shows you an outdoor wall in Milan, Italy and gives you some fast decorating tips for getting a great look. The vines tip can easily apply to fences, as in the beautiful wisteria in the photo above.

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!





The fastest way to freshen up any room in your house is to give the walls a new coat of paint. A great way to ride the wave of hot, trendy colors is to see what fashion designers in Milan, Paris, New York, Deli, Tokyo, London, and other top cities are showing on the runway. In Milan this year, we discovered the hot Italian colors. Select something current and eye-catching. Remember that the fashion industry sets the demand for colors in all manufacturing sectors, so if you do some color matching for your walls, you'll probably find good coordinating linens, upholstery, and accessories in the same year. 

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!





The classic Italian look is alive and well with now-venerable Versace Home. Our interior design expert Irwin Weiner ASID visited Milan during Fashion Week and gave us this video take on some of the pieces in the new Versace Home collection, with the overall advice to fall into the "Italian Look" movement and use bold colors and patterns - and lots of purple - in your decorating. 

Look for furniture, gifts, and accessories for your home at Design2Share's Home Goods Store on OpenSky. Unusual, creative, and useful items are what we offer, each one handpicked to give you options that differ from the usual fare you'll find in stores. Click here to go shopping!