‘Offbeat' decor

By Erica Geller / The Citizen

Friday, January 5, 2007 10:07 AM EST

Jesse Kline and Greg Munno's home on Van Anden Street, known to many as “The Hotel-No-Tell” for decades of vibrant social life, will soon tell all on the Home and Garden Television Network show “Offbeat America.”
Hotel No-Tell is Kline's childhood home, so-named in the late 1980s when she was in high school. Kline recalls that she and her father started the joke because she hosted so many parties as a teenager. The social tradition stuck and so did the festive home's name.

Kline's segment will begin the first “Offbeat America” episode of the fifth season. The home is described as “a house with unlimited color and design with murals and paintings galore.” Included in the segment will be a glass-covered house located above the San Francisco Bay area, a Masachusetts house built to look like a train, a home of metal creations and a home with vintage 1950s-style furniture and interior decorations.

Kline attributes her sense of the fantastic to her parents, who were hippies and open to using bright colors and patterns throughout their home. Kline and Munno's living room colors are similar to what they had been back in the 1970s - taxi-cab yellow walls with royal blue trim. Kline comes by her tastes through nature as well as nurturing, as her mother is also an artist. Kline's mother's artistic friends adorned the home with their work, inadvertently influencing the future designer.

Kline's fearless use of bright, decorative colors also comes from several trips to Mexico, where the color palette is less conservative than that of the East Coast.

“Traveling has always been a sure way to get the creative juices flowing,” Kline said.

Instead of coloring on the walls as a child, Kline decorated her room in a nature theme with a grass-green floor and sky-blue walls.

“My intent was to feel like you were outside. I even had pet caterpillars,” Kline said.

As a teenager, her room morphed into a collection of Asian kites with dragons and insects hanging from the ceiling. She collected vintage toys, odd art work, lawn ornaments and old signs. This is the time when she discovered her talent to be able to display items without them being in the way.

At present, Kline is refabricating retro furniture with paper products, including wallpaper and wrapping paper. She then “tarts them up” with 3-D objects like glass beads. Her other love, mosaic tile, is prominently on the kitchen walls, bathroom backsplashes and staircase risers.

Kline does not keep her designing secrets to herself. She freely shares her ideas and resources, in her words, “since I'm desperately trying to make the world a more attractive place, there's no advantage to keeping good things to yourself!”

The CD holder she is currently using as a window treatment in the living room was purchased at a flea market in Amsterdam. HGTV honed in on the piece because of its uniqueness. They choreographed a scene that featured Kline taking a CD from the holder and placing it in the stereo, then dancing around the room to the music.

The brightly colored murals embracing the walls feature the talents of several local artists, including Peter Maciulewicz, Amy Chamberlain and Alan Alger. Those very murals are part of what attracted HGTV producers, who did not shy away from the fact that Kline is a decorator. According to Kline, producers focused on the artistry of the home.

Kline said she works first as artist, second as a decorator. With a master's degree in art history and museum studies, she approaches projects in a way that focuses on the interesting objects. Additionally, Kline says that what is interesting about their home is that much of the artwork isn't framed, or traditional, it was created right on the walls and ceilings.

Kline's current projects in the home involve “upgrading” the office. She has wallpapered the walls with two different patterns, stripes and squares, in the same colors. She plans to Venetian plaster over the ceiling tiles and install beams capped by old Victorian wooden brackets. On the floor, she plans to use the new Armstrong line of decorative vinyl tiles, which she declares to be “like pieces of artwork.”

Finally, in Kline's grandmother's memory, Kline is redoing her old 1930s sideboard, using different kinds of papers, including an Asian print that her grandmother had on one of the walls in her house.

More nostalgia comes for Kline in the use of contact paper. She has decoupaged the front and sides of the home's refrigerator and stove to tie them into the pattern and color of the rest of the room. Her grandmother scouted out contact paper at sales and passed many rolls along to Kline. Among them is a vintage, stained-glass contact paper she placed on the oven door so it glows when the oven light is on. The light glowing through reminds Kline that her grandmother had the same pattern on her front door window, keeping her grandmother's memory alive in the family home forever.

On TV

What: “Offbeat America”

When: 6 p.m. Sunday

Channel: HGTV

The Citizens' Say

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There are 1 comment(s)

Overstimulated wrote on Jan 8, 2007 12:43 PM:

" I'm confused. Why does this story (dated Monday, 1/8) detail Kline's HGTV appearance in the future tense, when the episode already aired on Sunday, 1/7? "

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