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De-toxing Your Home, Dornbush Design Studio
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: 2018/07 - July
With a twinkle in her eye, Barbara Dornbush, president of Dornbush Design Studio in Highlands, said, “There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned midlife crisis to get yourself motivated.”
Her crisis, more of an epiphany really, came along in 2000 when she was taking a break from teaching. She felt a compelling pull to her true passion, interior design. By 2004 she had her degree and immediately focused on the eco-friendly, sustainable, green approach to creating/re-creating a home’s interior environment.
You’d be surprised how many chemicals lurk in your home: paints, plastics, manufactured materials that exude vapors we can’t sense, yet their presence can be toxic. It may sound a little hookey-spookey, but Barbara made a study of these substances and was astounded by the lax regulation on their use.
To set her apart from the pack, she takes pride in her focus on safe interior products: VOC-free paints, fabrics and plastics that are baby-to-grown-up safe, flooring that is natural (like bamboo or reclaimed wood), etc. She’s not a fanatic, but she is well informed and will help you replace potentially hazardous products with safe ones when the time is right for you.
To show you how sneaky the chemical thing is, consider this: we’ve all been buying cotton sheets and clothing, thinking it’s natural and much better than man-made fibers, right? Wrong. Did you realize that over a pound of pesticides is used to grow the cotton in a single set of queen size sheets? A pound! Solution: buy organic cotton sheets.
How about vinyl flooring? I Googled it and came up with a dozen hits calling vinyl the poison plastic. Who knew? Luckily, Barbara does. The safe alternative to vinyl is linoleum, which is a natural, user-friendly material and has been proven safe for decades.
There’re scores more insights about safe interiors Barbara is eager to share. She knows her stuff and she knows what works in our region, having been here 24 years. To learn more, visit dornbushdesign.com and Facebook at dornbushdesign; email [email protected], or call (828) 526-0031.
