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Fun Friday Find: Mod Green Pod

By Whitney Filed in Fun Friday Finds, Interior Design, Natural Area Rugs, Sustainability Tagged with March 26th, 2010 @ 12:02 pm

Hi, I’m Whitney, the online marketing specialist here at Merida Home.  As the online marketing specialist, part of my job entails searching the web to find like-minded businesses that share our passion for design and sustainability.  We hope to connect with and support these companies and we hope they connect with and support us too.  In my searching I’ve come across some really great sites that I want to share with you, so I am starting a “Fun Friday Find” that will feature the most interesting site of the week. Without further ado, this week’s first-ever Fun Friday Find is the Mod Green Pod website.

I have known about Mod Green Pod for a while since I had the pleasure of working alongside Lisa in her Boston studio space a few years ago.  I love the fun whimsical fabric and wallpaper prints, but am really inspired by Mod Green Pod’s emphasis on sustainability and dedication to creating local jobs here in the US.  After seeing Mod Green Pod featured in the Urban Sherp newsletter, I decided to check out their site and see what Lisa and the gals have been up to.  That’s when I found their Room Creator…..

The Room Creator features a traditional living room set-up with basic white chairs, a couch, a lamp and curtains.  The room looks pretty drab – but here comes the fun part!  You can drag Mod Green Pod’s wallpaper prints onto the walls and use their fabric to upholster the furniture.  Watch the room come together and get inspired to take some design risks with your own décor!  Don’t like what you create?  Refresh the page and try again.

Hint, you can even decorate the family cat…

Living Room Before Transformation

Living Room Before Transformation

Living Room After Transformation

Living Room After Transformation

Now all this room needs is a matching Merida Home Pavo Thrive Lagoon wool area rug to tie the flooring into the lovely blue color scheme…..

Think you can design a better room?  Send us a screen shot of your favorite design!

Vintage Travel Posters

By Cameron Filed in Interior Design Tagged with , March 25th, 2010 @ 11:09 am

My apartment is a constant work in process. I just moved in October, and while my roommate and I have the kitchen and living room pretty well set, there is one room that needs some serious work: my room. I have all of the furniture I need, but the walls are still completely blank. I still have all of my silly trite wall posters that I had in college, but I’m ready to move on from my Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe portraits. I want to do something a little more grown up, but still fun.

I do, however, have one wall poster that I absolutely love: a vintage travel poster. I love the colorful bold graphics of these types of posters and I have decided to look for a couple more to get framed for my room.


There are hundreds and hundreds of these posters that can be easily found and ordered online. http://www.art.com, http://www.allposters.com, and http://www.zazzle.com, have particularly large selections of vintage travel posters. That way you can pick and choose posters by color theme, location, or artist. Since my room is already a potpourri of colors, I’m choosing posters based on the location they are advertising and am picking only places that I’ve been (not necessarily the ones pictured in this article).

The original prints are more rare and expensive because they are collectors’ items and considered authentic and beautiful works of art. Originals can be found in high art museums such as the Louvre, the Met, and even the Library of Congress.

As always, when considering colors for your own rooms you can use Merida Home’s Area Rug by Color Search!

Paint: The Good and the Bad

By Cameron Filed in Interior Design, Sustainability Tagged with March 25th, 2010 @ 10:59 am

At this point most of us know that some paints can give off harmful chemicals, and you may know that you should look for interior paints with Low-VOCs or No VOCs. But what exactly are VOCs and what potential harm do they pose?

VOC stands for Volatile Organic Compound. VOCs can include a variety of chemicals that are emitted as gases from either a solid or a liquid. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, exposure to VOCs can cause headaches, nose and throat irritation, skin allergies, dizziness, fatigue, nausea, and some VOCs are potentially carcinogenic. Yikes!

VOCs are a large contributing factor to indoor air pollution, which in turn, is a hazard to human health.

The scary thing about VOCs is that they are emitted from a variety of common household items like paint, lacquer. paint strippers, wood preservatives, household cleansers and disinfectants, and even dry-cleaned clothing.

Levels of VOCs are usually 2 – 5 times higher indoors than outdoors.  When painting, the level can be as high as 1000 x higher than outdoor air. Even when dry, interior paint can emit VOCs for years after it is applied! This means that you are possibly being exposed in almost any building interior.

However, these days there are many low or no VOC paint options on the market so it is much safer to paint the interior of your home. Another benefit of these new paints are that they are almost orderless- which makes do-it-yourself remodeling much more pleasant!

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