The advice that some of you may have received from your mothers - and in some cases, your grandmothers - to dress completely, and then remove one piece of jewelry, is still timely and accurate. Everyone knows when they see a well dressed person coming down the street; and poorly dressed people are all too much in evidence these days. The question then, isn't how do we recognize good taste, but how do we achieve it for ourselves?

The same advice applies to dressing your home. A well appointed room is evident. A cluttered room, obvious; and much of the magic is in the accessories...your home's jewelry.

Here are some of the "good-taste tricks" that I use. I trust you'll find them helpful.

Change it:
Place your accessories in a box. Walk around the room and find a new "home" for half of the items, anywhere except where they were placed before. Put the rest away.

Hang it:
Install a "picture rail" around the top of your rooms. Hang all your art from the rail with "picture rods." Now you have the freedom to move your paintings or photographs to any room in the house, try out different placement and heights; and not leave any holes in the walls!

Multiply it:
Group accessories by theme. Put everything with polka-dots, or with flowers, in one area of a room...or all over one room.

Rotate it:
Refresh your home seasonally by changing curtains, slipcovers and rugs.

Supersize it:
Don't buy anything smaller than a breadbox! Buy the largest items you can find - within reason (and scale) of course - and do one or two groupings, say, one grouping in an empty corner and one or two groupings on tables; and leave every other surface bare.

Transform it:
Find creative ways to re-interpret small items. Take that collectible spoon collection you just can't part with, and turn them into ornaments for a small, table-top spoon tree at Christmas. Hang that collection of boyhood model planes in the stairwell of your bachelor-pad. Take old mullioned window frames, back them with mirror, and line one wall of a long hallway with them from floor to cieling.

Un-expect it:
Have a towering, tangled mass of branches or flowers spilling out of a vase from a niche in a wall. Hang a "real" painting in the kitchen on an otherwise "dead" wall. Play with lighting. Put can lights behind furniture to highlight a particular piece.


And once you've achieved your tasteful room? Remove one more item!

NOTE: This idea is from Mr. Kent Brasloff. More of his work can be seen at http://bestdecoratingideas.com/kentbrasloff