Interior Design

When Barbara Lombard purchased her first home, a narrow Federal Hill row house, she faced a triple-threat problem: a tight budget, long bowling-alley rooms and little square footage. Her ambition was to update and renovate the entire house for less than $10,000.She asked designer Susan Palmer of Louis Mazor Inc. for help with space planning and overall interior design. With Ms. Palmer's advice in hand, Ms. Lombard acted as her own general contractor to save money. In this capacity, she hired and coordinated subcontractors for a myriad of jobs that included deck-building, installing Sheetrock and updating the home's mechanical systems.

Patricia C. Berlin, a retired interior decorator and artist, died of respiratory failure Friday at Edenwald retirement community in Towson. She was 83. Born Patricia Cleary in Chicago, she was raised in Santa Monica, Calif., where she graduated from high school. She earned her bachelor's degree in interior design from the University of Michigan in 1944. She was married that year to Dr. Theodore H. Berlin, a Johns Hopkins University physics professor. In 1961, the couple moved from Towson to Scarsdale, N.Y., when her husband was appointed to the faculty of Rockefeller University in New York.

Q: Some of the books you mention in your column sound interesting, but I'm having trouble finding them. The bookstores in my small oceanfront town have very limited offerings.Should I write to the publishers and ask about price and availability? Also, do you know of a book that provides advice on decorating a beach house?A: Almost every book I refer to in this column can be bought off the shelf in a major city or, in smaller communities, can easily be ordered. You needn't contact the publisher yourself.

New positionsL* Bozzuto Development Co. named John B. Slidell president.* Commerce Printing Co. Inc. named Bruzz Jory an account executive.* Goucher College named Cami Colarossi manager of media relations and special events.Johnson/Berman, an architecture, interior design, historic restoration, landscape design and graphic design firm, named Barbara A. Halsted associate.Lehman, Smith, Wiseman & Associates, a Washington-based full-service architectural and interior design firm, announced the following appointments: James B. McLeish III, partner in charge of project management and technical services; Teresa Wilson, senior associate; and Robert Cox, associate.

Unusual uses for items that aren'tForget the expensive supermarket cleaners and such. The Old Farmer's Almanac "1996 Homeowner's Companion" has unexpected uses for everyday household items. Among them:Salt and buttermilk will make mildew spots disappear. (Dry the item in the sun.)To remove stuck-on chewing gum, rub it with full-strength vinegar.Bugs and tar can be removed from cars without damaging the paint if you use a light baking-soda paste on a damp cloth. Let the paste sit for a few minutes, then wipe and rinse.

Smith/Hawken opens store in BaltimoreJust in time for high gardening season, the area's first Smith & Hawken has opened in Mount Washington at 1340 Smith Ave. Located in a renovated cotton mill, the upscale garden resource and lifestyle store carries teak indoor/outdoor furniture, clothes, gardening tools and unusual plants in its nursery.Baltimoreans have oohed and aahed over the California-based retailer's handsome catalog for years; now we can go directly to the showroom.Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday.

I'm puzzled about how to decide on a color scheme for the family room in our new home. Someone told me to start by choosing a work of art for the room and to base the color scheme on that. Is that a good idea? Do you have other suggestions for how I can move in the right direction? I'm familiar with the pick-a-picture approach to color scheme selection, and my advice is to forget it. Especially in today's family room, there's likely to be little wall space available for an important work of art, what with the flat-screen TV and the bookcases, mirrors and cabinets typically deployed in these spaces.

Salary: $80,000 Age: 46 Years on the job: 22 How he got started: Appel graduated from Frostburg State University with a degree in fine arts, marketing and public relations. His first job out of college was in advertising sales for a Washington, D.C., agency. In 1986, he and two childhood friends decided to open a store selling trendy gifts at Savage Mill and named it Nouveau Contemporary Goods. Within a year, they moved the store to Charles Street in Baltimore. They found that the props they used to display the gift items were in demand, and the store began concentrating on furniture and home accessories.

As the world gets steadily smaller, cultural cross-influences grow ever greater in the field of design. In fact, it's fair to say that most U.S. interior design today is visibly influenced by traditions other than our own.While the rise of globalism has to be seen as a positive development, since it can lead to better understanding among peoples, there are some aesthetic purists who lament all this mixing and mingling out of fear that it will lead to...

Davis Allen, 82, a prolific designer of modern business interiors and furniture, died May 13 at Broward General Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.During his career, he was responsible for the interior design of the Istanbul Hilton, the Inland Steel Co. headquarters in Chicago, the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel in Hawaii and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.Maeve Slavin, a writer on design, said in her book "Davis Allen: 40 Years of Interior Design at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill" (1990)