As home design magazines founder in a flagging economy, design buffs and remodelers are turning to the Web for inspiration.

Blogs, Web sites and online furnishings stores are filling the void left by the recent demise of many shelter magazines, including House & Garden, Domino, O at Home and Western Interiors & Design magazines.

According to 2006 U.S. census figures, there are at least 1.6 million designers, architects and design professionals who purchase home furnishings for themselves or their clients. Add homeowners who shop at retail stores, and, together, they spend nearly $400 billion annually.

But Web sites vying for that pot of gold have discovered it’s not enough to bombard viewers with eye candy. So smart new sites are luring visitors the same way traditional magazines do – with targeted content.

“A strong stylistic point of view rather than something for everyone is important,” says design blogger Julie Carlson of Marin.

Daily Candy, Apartment Therapy and Brooklyn’s Design Sponge are among the sites setting the kind of editorial standard that new sites strive to achieve. The three following sites are gaining traction with various demographics and raising the bar in unique ways:

Remodelista (remodelista.com)

Details: “Sourcebook for the considered home” run by self-described serial remodelers.

Best features: Edited collection of home products, plus design clips for interior inspiration.

Who’s clicking: 100,000 users, ages 35-50, each month seeking uncluttered, timeless decor.

Started as a design blog in 2007, Remodelista is now morphing into a Web site where visitors can interact and also buy merchandise.

“My idea was to create a space where friends who had done their own remodels could share design ideas and pointers,” says Carlson, a former style editor for Focus magazine (now San Francisco magazine).

Contributors on the site include Carlson’s partners and fellow editors Janet Hall, a former lawyer who lives in San Francisco; Sarah Lonsdale, a former TV producer from the United Kingdom; and Francesca Connolly, a textile designer in Brooklyn.

“We came together over our experiences in remodeling and our common design aesthetic,” Hall said.

They began to blog, going from three posts to six a day. Products, inspirational rooms and architectural projects accompanied their musings on design along with links to articles they liked on the Web.

Recently, Carlson’s husband, Josh Groves, joined the site as business manager and encouraged money-making innovations.

“We noticed two years ago that print publications were losing traffic to Web sites that offered more utility. You could read about something, click on it and in 48 hours have it delivered to your doorstep,” Groves said.

“Since last fall, traffic on our blog has increased over 25 percent a month,” Hall said.

Remodelista “is a combination of high and low, new and old,” Carlson says. “We wanted to inspire remodelers to purchase and use products that are enduring. The idea of redoing your house frequently is not sustainable or economical.”

“Right now, 30 percent of our readers are professionals, architects and designers; 40 percent are undergoing remodels; and the rest are design junkies, like us,” Hall said.

Designer Pages (designerpages.com)

Details: Supplier-generated catalog of home furnishings and building materials combined with a social network.

Best features: Materials library that never goes out of date; it can be saved and shared virtually.

Who’s clicking: 135,000 visitors each month, including 23,500 registered professionals and their clients.

What 25-year-old friends Jacob Slevin, a former hedge fund computer programmer, and Avi Flombaum, an architect, lack in home design experience, they make up for in technological savvy, which they bring to their Web venture, Designer Pages. It is a virtual work space for the trade.

Slevin’s first job in an architecture firm was sourcing products for the firm’s designers. They were using Excel spreadsheets with information from old catalogs; suppliers listed in them were often no longer in business. That was the industry norm.

“We realized that we could have a supplier-generated catalog,” Slevin said.

“It was an information-management problem,” Flombaum said. He quit the hedge fund industry in April 2007 to engineer Designer Pages with Slevin in Manhattan. Adam Tihany and other prominent design professionals joined their advisory board. Well-known furniture brands such as B&B Italia and Gunlocke and Big Ass Fans were early adopters. Registered users can access the site’s data-saving features.

“We want to be the company that brings social tools to the design industry and one that provides the best resource catalog for designers,” says Flombaum.

Users of their site are primarily suppliers uploading their latest products and designers or homeowners who want to buy them. For suppliers, designers and homeowners, the site is free.

But, not unlike print magazines, Flombaum and Slevin want to highlight their own choices and post reviews of good products to find more advertisers willing to pay to be showcased alongside the editorial content they create.

“We simply created an interactive platform in a community that needed it,” Flombaum said.

One Kings Lane (onekingslane.com)

Details: Tony sample sales of home furnishings for those seeking affordable luxury.

Best features: Curated collection of high-end home-decor brands at exclusive prices.

Who’s clicking: More than 50,000 members seeking deeply discounted design.

The ebbing economy has hit the home furnishings industry hard, and high-end merchandise is moving at a particularly glacial pace. That inspired San Francisco’s Alison Gelb Pincus and Susan Feldman to create an exclusive clearinghouse for brand-name home furnishings and accessories.

Pincus, 35, is a former marketer for NBC.com and Disney, and Feldman, 53, is a former fashion sales executive for Warnaco, Polo and Perry Ellis in Los Angeles.

In March, Pincus, a first-time entrepreneur, relied on Feldman’s experience in the fashion industry to launch One Kings Lane, a members-only Web site that posts sample sales featuring a well-known brand Mondays through Fridays. Once posted, the goods are only available for 72 hours.

“The concept is to move this inventory in a quiet, elegant way,” Pincus said. What speaks loudest is the price tag on most merchandise: less than half of retail.

“The company was Susan’s idea, but I came up with the name,” Pincus said. “I wanted to go with something that was like an address and Kings Road is my favorite street in Los Angeles. I used to live there.”

The virtual address One Kings Lane sounds appropriately global: Pincus works in San Francisco with a team of people; Feldman runs the Los Angeles office with two others; buyers shop in New York where many of their favorite brands are located; the warehouse is in San Luis Obispo.

In two months, Pincus says, the company is already profitable.

Although, like all sample sales, much of the merchandise is from limited overstock or has been discontinued, its brand-name cachet makes it perennial. Recent examples include Aga John carpets, Chelsea Textiles and Dwell bedding.

“Unlike fashion that is trend oriented, a lot of home products are beautiful whenever you buy them, and we are working with the best brands,” Pincus said.

Alongside images and descriptions of the merchandise they post each week, they feature a designer they admire in their Get Inspired section. Last week, it was interior designer Benjamin Dhong of San Francisco.

“Content is an interesting component. There is an important link between commerce and that helpful tidbit from an expert,” Pincus said.

If you think incorporating nature into your home decor is synonymous with mounted deer heads and twig furniture, think again.

In these days, when more and more people are nesting and needing their homes to be their refuge, bringing nature inside, through the use of large windows, colors, accessories and furniture, is, well, natural.

“I think that nature is really the most basic blueprint of beauty on the planet,” says Brendan Flanigan, an interior designer with Brendan Flanigan Design in Saratoga Springs. “When we bring [nature] inside, it really opens up options. It brings some life to an inside space that otherwise doesn’t have it.”

Flanigan, for instance, likes to use natural textures such as stone tile, glass and water when a client expresses an interest in nature. “While you don’t find glass in the outside environment necessarily, it has many of the properties of water, and also [a similar] look and feel,” he says. Michael DeSantis, a visual display manager for Stickley, Audi & Co in Albany, also likes layers of texture to create that natural feel. “You need the softness of pillows, the hardness of wood – I’m a big fan of putting wicker furniture in the home,” he says. “Don’t be limited as to what’s supposed to be outside or inside. Ironwork is fantastic hanging in a room: old gates and iron doorways and arches, whatever you can find. Salvaged pieces are fantastic. Even just an old piece of wood with chipped paint could be artwork in a room.”

One obvious way to incorporate nature in decor is by using Mother Nature’s colors for inspiration, anything from the deep greens found in grass to the more neutral tones found in sand and earth. “There are those intense colors, and then there are those dramatic landscapes, so I think a way to do it is to use a mix of colors that range from neutral and earth tones to more saturated and stronger [colors],” says Flanigan. DeSantis looks to boldly colored vegetables for inspiration. “With all of the natural colors – eggplants and tomatoes and all of those really beautiful colors that you find right in nature – if you paint your walls those colors, it might [seem like it will look] too shocking, but it will actually feel very natural,” he says.

Incorporating the organic world through windows and window treatments can also help create fluidity between the outdoors and indoors. Flanigan is a fan of covering windows with natural fibers. “[They provide] a nice way to cover your window, but they also allow some light to come through, which people really like because they need privacy,” he says. Another option is adding a layer of 3M film. “In our building, which is historic, we kept the original windows and we treated them with a dark film,” says Dominic Carota, president of Blairhouse Interiors Group in Loudonville. “If you’re inside looking out you don’t notice it, but if you’re in the outside looking in you notice a bit of filming,” says Carota. He also recommends the film for skylights, sunrooms and solariums (perhaps the best ways for melding the outside with the inside).

When it comes to accessories, choosing objects that are important to you, whether it’s something with sentimental meaning or simply something you like, should be the main criteria. “I think [that with] natural elements, like seashells, you can’t go wrong if they’re used tastefully,” says Flanigan, adding he works with his clients to help them express themselves and “truly identify what they like and don’t like. I use my skills to help them bring the story out, to tell that story in their space,” he says. “If someone loves seashells, they should have seashells in their house, absolutely, and there are different ways that they can be displayed.”

Placing items asymmetrically also echoes nature. “In nature, things don’t grow symmetrically, and you can do that in lots of different ways,” says Flanigan. Pictures, for instance, can be clustered rather than placed in a straight line. Vases can be slightly staggered to one side on a mantel. “The way you arrange things is a really nice way to bring the outside inside,” he says.

Carota believes a critical part of bringing the outdoors inside means appealing to all the senses. “You have to do it as an experience. You have to hit all the senses, if you will, and the first to me is sound,” says Carota. “If you were to bring a fountain into the space, water sounds can be some of the most soothing in nature, and bringing in an appropriately sized fountain for a space is really a wonderful way to create that kind of soothing ambiance.”

Notes Flanigan, “Real beauty never goes out of style. Natural beauty that exists in nature, and those design consistencies that exist in nature, are things that never go out of style.” All you have to do for inspiration is look out your window.

Image courtesy Four Seasons Hotels

Image courtesy Luna Bazaar