Explore southwestern decorating ideas through climate-responsive architecture, plaster, timber, clay, leather, wool, and desert color. Use substantial furniture, textiles, art, and craft to shape a contemporary room.
Explore different types of art mediums, from drawing and painting to photography, digital art, sculpture, and sound. Learn what material or process defines each, with examples of mixed-media work.
The Greek column styles most commonly identified in classical architecture are Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. You can usually distinguish them by starting at the bottom: check whether the shaft has a base, how slender it is, and how its fluting is shaped. Then inspect the capital and the entablature above it.
The three types of Greek columns overlap in later buildings, so a capital alone can mislead. A plain capital is not automatically Doric, and a leafy capital is not necessarily an original Greek Corinthian example. Use several visible features together, especially when examining Roman copies, neoclassical buildings, or mixed designs.
Begin at the column’s lowest visible point. In the canonical Greek orders, a Doric column generally rises directly from the stylobate, or stepped platform, without a separate base. Ionic and Corinthian columns normally stand on a molded base made from rounded and sometimes square-edged profiles. Later architects sometimes gave Doric columns bases, so this is a strong clue rather than an absolute rule.
Next, compare height with width. Doric shafts look comparatively sturdy and carry a strong visual weight. Ionic shafts are taller and more slender, while Corinthian shafts are usually at least as slender as Ionic ones. Look also at the fluting: vertical grooves make the shaft appear lighter, but their number and profile can vary between periods and buildings.
Also scan above the capital. Doric entablatures commonly show alternating triglyphs and metopes in the frieze. Ionic entablatures more often use a continuous sculpted or plain frieze. Corinthian entablatures generally follow Ionic patterns, although later versions may be much more elaborate.
Doric columns are the most visually weighty of the three principal Greek orders. Their shafts taper subtly toward the top and usually have broad, sharply cut flutes separated by narrow arrises. The shaft typically meets the stylobate without a distinct base, creating a direct, grounded appearance.
The Doric capital has two main visible parts. The lower echinus is a rounded, cushion-like molding; above it sits the square abacus, which supports the entablature. From a distance, the capital may look plain, but its curved echinus and squared abacus are important identifying details. It is not simply an undecorated block.
Above the capital, the frieze is often the clearest supporting clue. Triglyphs are vertically grooved blocks, usually placed between sculpted or plain metopes. If a column has a sturdy shaft, no obvious base, an echinus-and-abacus capital, and a triglyph-and-metope frieze, Doric is the strongest match.
Ionic columns are recognized most quickly by their volutes: paired spiral scrolls that project from the capital. Viewed from the front, the volutes resemble coiled disks; viewed from the side, the capital may appear narrow. This directional quality matters because an Ionic capital can look different from different angles.
The shaft normally stands on a distinct molded base and is more slender than a Doric shaft. Its fluting is usually numerous and finely spaced, often with rounded strips between the grooves. The shaft may taper gently, and the overall effect is lighter and more elegant than the Doric order.
Do not rely on volutes alone. Some later interpretations simplify or enlarge them, while a damaged capital may lose its scrolls. Confirm the diagnosis with the base, slender proportions, and entablature. A continuous frieze, rather than a regular sequence of triglyphs and metopes, often supports an Ionic identification.
Corinthian columns have the most elaborate capital among the three Greek column styles. Instead of a simple echinus or prominent volutes, the capital rises through several tiers of carved acanthus leaves. The leaves curl outward and may support small volutes or corner ornaments near the top.
The shaft is generally slender and stands on a molded base, much like an Ionic column. It is commonly fluted, and the transition from shaft to capital is deeper and more decorative. In a clear photograph, the dense foliage is usually the fastest way to identify Corinthian.
Even here, context matters. Later Roman and neoclassical builders frequently enlarged, stylized, or rearranged the acanthus decoration. A capital with leaves may also belong to a later hybrid or a decorative variation rather than a canonical Greek Corinthian building. Check for the base, shaft proportions, and the form of the entablature before treating the foliage as decisive.
When only the capital is visible, record the result as a likely identification rather than a certainty. The most reliable reading comes from the combination of base presence, shaft slenderness, fluting, capital design, and entablature.
Greek column types are easiest to identify as complete systems of base, shaft, capital, and entablature. Learn the classical orders. Compare Doric and Ionic with Corinthian forms.
Learn how Spanish-style homes combine stucco, tile roofs, courtyards, arches, timber, ironwork, and patterned tile—and how to adapt their climate-responsive character indoors.
Prairie architecture is an early-20th-century American style defined by horizontal form, broad roof overhangs, open interiors, and a close relationship between house and site. Rather than treating rooms, furniture, windows, and ornament as separate elements, its designers composed them as one continuous environment.
Frank Lloyd Wright made the language internationally influential, but the style emerged from a wider Midwestern movement. Its strongest examples combine a low, landscape-oriented exterior with an interior sequence that unfolds around a central hearth.
The Prairie School was a loosely connected group of architects working primarily in and around Chicago from the late 1890s through the 1910s. Its members included Wright, Marion Mahony Griffin, Walter Burley Griffin, George Washington Maher, and others who sought an American alternative to imported historical styles.
The flat or gently rolling Midwestern landscape helped shape their approach. Instead of emphasizing vertical towers, formal symmetry, or European classical details, Prairie architects developed buildings that seemed to grow out of the ground. The movement also drew from the Arts and Crafts ideal of honest materials and from Louis Sullivan’s belief that a building’s design should follow its purpose.
Prairie Style is therefore more specific than “a low house with a wide roof.” Its characteristic combination includes horizontal composition, carefully controlled geometry, integrated art glass, natural materials, and a planned experience from the site through the interior.
Start by reading a Prairie house from the ground up. Its massing is usually low and elongated, with strong horizontal lines in brick courses, trim, terraces, and retaining walls. Roofs are often shallow-pitched and hipped, making the building appear broader than it is tall. Deep, overhanging eaves extend those lines outward and create sheltered edges between house and landscape.
Windows reinforce the same direction. Groups of casements may form continuous bands beneath the eaves, while leaded or art-glass windows use geometric patterns rather than picturesque scenes. The windows admit light without breaking the building into unrelated openings. Their muntins, colors, and proportions often echo interior woodwork, rugs, light fixtures, or furniture.
Prairie exteriors commonly use brick, stucco, wood, and stone in restrained combinations. The materials are not merely applied surfaces: masonry can continue into garden walls, terraces, or interior piers. This continuity makes the house feel anchored to its site rather than placed on a neutral platform.
Inside, Prairie planning replaces a string of isolated formal rooms with a connected sequence. The living room, dining room, and entry may remain visually distinct, but partial-height walls, built-in bookcases, ceiling changes, and changes in floor level guide movement between them. The plan is open without being an undifferentiated loft.
A central fireplace or hearth usually acts as the organizing point. It provides physical warmth, but it also gives the plan a symbolic and visual center. Rooms may open toward it, turn around it, or frame it from a nearby passage. Wright frequently compressed entries and corridors before releasing occupants into larger living spaces, making arrival part of the architecture.
Integrated design extends to built-in seating, cabinets, light fixtures, decorative screens, rugs, and furniture. These elements establish a consistent scale and rhythm. The result is an interior that cannot be fully understood by looking at the exterior alone: the house’s horizontal lines continue through sightlines, ceiling planes, wood bands, and carefully positioned openings.
Wright’s major contribution was to turn Prairie principles into a spatial system rather than a collection of visual traits. He arranged rooms along axes, layered views across the plan, and used compression and expansion to control how occupants experienced the house. A low roof might signal horizontality outside, while an elevated ceiling over the living room created a contrasting sense of release within.
His version of frank lloyd wright prairie style also depended on coordination. Art glass filtered daylight, masonry anchored the hearth, and furnishings extended the geometry of the architecture. Wright’s houses could be highly individualized, but they shared an ambition: architecture should shape daily life as a unified work of art.
These Frank Lloyd Wright prairie houses show how the language changed from one commission to another:
Baroque church architecture uses curved plans, layered facades, domes, controlled light, illusionistic ceilings, sculpture, and rich materials to turn worship into a dramatic experience across Europe.
Different mediums of art: define medium, material, technique, format, and genre, and compare drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, digital art, sculpture, performance, sound, and mixed media.
Build nature colors by recording relationships, not by copying every visible color. Start with the scene’s largest color mass, add supporting colors from nearby areas, reserve the strongest contrast for an accent, and use a neutral to control the result. This produces a usable nature palette for interiors, branding, illustration, or digital design.
Sunsets make the method easy to see because they often combine intense warm light with cool atmospheric shadows. The goal is not to preserve every orange, pink, blue, and purple in the image. It is to decide which colors should occupy the most space, which should create structure, and which should attract attention.
Observe the scene at a distance before choosing swatches. Squint, blur the image, or reduce it to a small thumbnail. Details disappear and the dominant value masses become clear: perhaps a dark foreground, a luminous middle sky, and a narrow band of bright light near the horizon.
Sample from representative areas rather than isolated highlights. A tiny sun reflection may be almost white, but treating it as a major palette color will make the finished scheme harsh. Five considered colors are generally more useful than fifteen unweighted samples.
Assign each chosen color a job. These roles describe how colors behave in the scene and how much visual space they should occupy in a design. The percentages below refer to visual area, not the number of objects or swatches.
These roles can overlap in hue but differ in value or saturation. For example, a sunset palette might use pale peach as the dominant, dusty rose as support, vivid tangerine as the accent, and deep blue-gray as the neutral. The neutral does not need to be gray; it only needs to be quiet enough to balance the brighter colors.
Hue tells you whether a color is orange, blue, green, or violet, but hue alone does not create coherence. Compare every sample by value, temperature, and saturation before finalizing the palette.
A practical check is to view the palette in grayscale. If all the swatches merge, adjust their values before changing their hues. Then view them together at full color and mute any supporting color that competes with the accent. Preserve one or two colors close to neutral so the eye has somewhere to rest.
Use these structures as starting points rather than fixed swatches. Each one describes a different relationship among light, shadow, warmth, and neutral space.
Test the selected structure in a simple composition or space before committing. Create three small layouts: one with the dominant color as the background, one with the neutral as the background, and one with the dark anchor behind the accent. Check text readability, focal order, and whether the accent still feels special. If the design looks loud, reduce saturation or increase neutral area; if it looks flat, strengthen the value difference between the dominant and supporting colors.
What’s my decorating style quiz? Score your choices for form, material, color, pattern, age, and visual density, then turn your strongest signals into a flexible palette, furniture, and object plan.