Brian Patrick Flynn is a decorator on fire, which is why his alter-ego Decor Demon fits him like a glove. Brian designs sexy rooms, rooms with personality that make you feel like you know the owner from just looking at them over the screen. It doesn't hurt that he writes rocking posts for his blog, as well as for HGTV's blog and Houzz Ideabooks. That (and the fact that he's a sweetheart) is the reason I was so delighted when he agreed to share his outfit with a past with us. Enjoy.
After my first job working on home makeover shows circa 2003, I learned a ton about color from the designer I assisted. Before joining the crew, I detested both brown and orange---even more than Erin hates Olivia on The City. If a project didn't stick within my olive green, blood red, taupe, black and blue-grey spectrum, I had no connection to it. Which was a problem since my boss was both pumpkin and chocolate obsessed. When season one wrapped, a season packed with refurbishing vintage furniture, I hit up tons of second-hand stores for wardrobe pieces with a past. To force myself out of my color-snobby comfort zone, I decided to try out both brown AND orange with my clothes, then see if I could make the plunge to using it with interiors. Nowadays, it's pretty much a sure thing that any project I'm working has some element of brown and/or orange. Beige, notsomuch.
After the job ended, I started to get calls for freelance decorating and design work. Determined to show up looking like a better version of my usually sloppy self, I found that high collars worked exceptionally well on me. In other words, they magically shrunk my enormous, Tyrannosaurus Rex-sized noggin down to human size. The collars' height also seemed to add some element of tailoring to my otherwise uber-casual, boyish, borderline lazy look. This Boy Scout-ish jacket embodied everything I'd hoped to bring to my design style: youthfulness, tailored elements, classic lines and moments of bold, colorful happiness.
Once I mastered the art of color and dressing myself like a big boy, I taught myself how to add pattern to walls with paint. Above all, stripes are what I excelled at most. Each time I wear this jacket, it takes me back to my horizontally-striped, 323-square-foot studio apartment and the broke feeling of just starting out in a big city. I wore the jacket as I drove to Home Depot to pick up my pea green and brown-grey paint, came home and striped the entire room standing on a free, broken chair I found in the dumpster out back---shelling out $60 for a ladder seemed like a major luxury back then.
I have a system of measuring how much I like a piece of clothing based on how much paint is on it. Luckily, these cargo shorts I've had since 2003 not only still fit but continue to tell a paint-splattered story---one project at a time. Another fun little note, in a Picasso-ish manner, one can figure out my color period based on what shorts or jeans I'm wearing: blue-grey and fire engine red, charcoal and red-orange or ultra-white and hot pink.
As more and more of my work gets published, budgets grow larger and TV shows are green-lit or canceled, my flipflops keep me both humble and grounded. On any given, non-winter day, you'll find me in flippies: from the halls of the Atlanta Decorative Arts Center gathering Schumacher fabric, to 2-day-long client installations to TV episodes that only shoot me from the waist up. Do I ever commit a major fashion crime by wearing socks WITH the flippies? Only my mailman, neighbors and local grocery store cashiers can answer that.
{photography: Sarah Dorio}
This image shows how that outfit translated into a room I designed for CNN anchor, Rob Marciano.
