It's All In The Trimming

BONNIE SERACKA'S condo high over Belltown is an eclectic hunter-gatherer's paradise. A black lingerie chest in the living room. An angel-white duvet cover of antique linens and big mother-of-pearl buttons in the bedroom. Dining-room chairs done up in linen seat covers with velvet polka dots in red and mustard.

These things please her, and so they are in. And it's not easy to make the cut at Seracka's. There are no vacancies in any corner of her 1,060-square-foot cosmopolitan nest that — except for the Space Needle out one window and Puget Sound out another — you would swear is really a sky-high Paris bistro of creams, reds, gold and antiqued black. Nothing little about this place. Seracka likes her colors and her furniture to be big and sturdy and, most of all, grinning with whimsy.

So, how does Christmas fit into all of this?

Perfectly.

"This is not the Christmas I had when I had a big house, where you could move things around and had lots of storage," says Seracka, elegant in all black with big silver-ball earrings. "This Christmas needed to fit the house."

That means tall and narrow — trim trimmings balanced with coordinating color.

Her prelit tree is a skinny number made more commanding with great big ornaments. To give the tree a "Hey! Over here!" look, Seracka deviates from the condo's color scheme with plain, frosted ornaments in orange, blue, turquoise, magenta, purple and chartreuse, her favorite color. The tree and its happy bubbles float on a cloud of white feather boas wrapped at its base — a tree skirt to you and me.

"I'm not a department-store shopper," says Seracka. "If everybody has it, I don't want it."

While the tree does much of the heavy holiday lifting, it gets an assist from a chubby, ruddy earthen Italian pot packed with paperwhites planted on the dining table and a heavy white pot loaded with red poinsettias. (A dinner party calls for ousting the big bloomers for a tidy arrangement of red roses.) From there, though, you really have to look around to notice that the rest of the holiday doings do not permanently belong in Seracka's condo.

"Everything has to function, because there's no room," she says.

Waterford candlesticks bearing white tapers stand on the beveled-glass coffee table. Mixed among them are narrow contemporary cone trees in chartreuse and red decorated with pearls, beads, glitter, gold cording and little mirrors. Light from the flickering candles catches in the bevels and mirrors.

Her desk, with a wide-screen view of tankers waiting to deliver their goods, is clean and neat. But off to the left is a little Christmas, again in polka dots and stripes.

Seracka shops carefully, finding things here and there, one at a time.

"You have to become more selective," she says. "If something comes in, something has to go out. There's lots in storage for my kids."

But as a manufacturer's rep for Penny Harrison and Co. at the Seattle Gift Center, Seracka is a pro in the home décor, gift and garden departments. It also helps when one of your dear friends is Kelly McCombs, an interior designer who shares her taste. McCombs took charge in Seracka's bedroom, and the result is "total peace": white on white on white. Elegant French linens, antiqued night stand and custom tufted linen headboard.

The secret to making the most out of her compact condo year 'round is to encourage movement, Seracka says. Rounded walls off the foyer and kitchen soften barriers and encourage flow. She also has created rooms within a room. Five distinct seating areas easily accommodate 25 friends from Seracka's wine group.

We close with a holiday safety tip from her home to yours: Beware the smell of burning fur. Sydney, Seracka's black-and-white longhair cat, brushed against a Christmas votive one morning and some of his fur is no longer quite so long.

Rebecca Teagarden is assistant editor of Pacific Northwest magazine. Barry Wong is a freelance photographer. He can be reached at barrywongphoto@earthlink.net.