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With the global economy now at 7 o'clock of a hangover morning, this is the time for orange juice and quiet voices, not bright chatter about renovations and pricey home decor.

That's okay: Interior design is all about limitations — financial, structural, electrical — and designing a home on a budget means knowing where to splash out and where to rein in. Luckily, most designers have a few tricks for creating a professional look without breaking the bank. Here are a few I can share with you.

Deck the walls

The first trick is the most obvious one: paint. Changing the colour of your walls is cathartic and fresh paint breathes new life into your home. Don't restrict your work to the wall proper: cleaning up your trim, baseboards and repainting the doors will complete the job and the look. Warm greys, soft linens, and cool ivories are among my favourite colours these days.

Keep in mind that the "designer" paints, prettily marketed and packaged though they are, cost up to 40 per cent more than the brands professional painters use every day — General Paint or ICI, say. It's not an extra expense that will impress a visitor to your home. Besides, if you're in love with one of the designer colours, you can ask a technician to colour-match it in less expensive paint — just be sure to buy extra for touch-ups and the all-important second coat.

Be a dummy

Designers know that draperies add instant polish and sophistication to a room, especially spaces that tend toward the classical and traditional. But custom drapes for your average living room window require as much as 24 yards of fabric, plus the lining, labour and hardware. Using decent mid-market linen, for example, will cost you about $4,000. It's an investment.

Alas, in your living room, it's not a crucial one. Unless your pastimes are illicit or you're an amateur projectionist, there isn't any need for your living room drapes to block out all the light. You just need them to look pretty. And that's where dummy panels come in.

Dummy panels, for the uninitiated, are drapes that don't close. They flank either side of the window and, although they're often only a few inches wide, they're an excellent way to create a mood.

On the average window, dummy panels need one-third of the fabric that functioning drapes do. (Tip: Request a flannel layer between the decorative fabric and the lining; it'll make the dummy panel look full and luxurious.) As for material, silk, linen and cotton velvet are all well-priced and come in a multitude of colours. When the budget is tight, I go straight to the plain raw silk and choose a neutral colour that can stand the test of time. Using this fabric, panels for an average window run about $1,200.

Don't blow your budget on drapery hardware. Select a simple metal rod that is no less than one inch in diameter. Anything smaller looks chintzy and spindly. Keep the finials (those end-of-rod balls) simple — crystals and fleurs-de-lis are not in the budget, and, hopefully, not in the look.

Forgo bed for board

When the Dow is again riding high and we've weathered the "worst economic crisis since the Great Depression," the timing for a deluxe bedroom will be better. At that time, I'll counsel you to get French linens, a custom chaise, and, best of all, a mahogany four-poster bed. In the meantime, you can update your sleeping area with a sophisticated though much less expensive option: an upholstered headboard.

You can have a headboard made at any upholstery shop; most dealers can show you a number of styles. I stick to pared-down shapes — squares or soft curves, sometimes with brass tacking. The key is to request a style that attaches to the wall and allows your mattress and bed frame to rest easily against it.

An upholstered headboard requires little fabric (three to five yards), so choose a bold pattern or bright colour to infuse vitality into a bedroom.

Get artfully cheap

Art and images give a home personality, and a savvy designer will never let the walls go bare. It's ideal to have original artwork in the home, but there are tasteful and attractive alternatives to juicy new oil paintings on every wall.

On a recent project, we went to the city archives and purchased digital files of photographs taken in the 1900s ($11 a photo). We had them printed and framed in simple black frames with big ivory mattes (finished dimensions were 48 by 52 inches). The resulting pieces hung in the entrance of the home, looking elegant and substantial. They fill the space with local history and cost us a tenth of what a series of paintings would have.

Another inexpensive and poignant solution we recently effected involved an old Winnie-the-Pooh book we found in an antique market. It was seven bucks. We had our 12 favourite pages framed in a delicate gold on an archival matte, and installed them in a little girl's room, six on each wall.

Having a comfortable home isn't a matter of throwing money at everything. While for some things, there's no two ways about it — to have the sumptuousness and elegance you want, you have to shell out.

But for other things, money isn't the highest good — a sense of style is better, and so are some crafty tricks. It isn't how much you've got, after all, it's what you do with it.

Kelly Deck is the director of Kelly Deck Design, based in Vancouver, and the host of Take it Outside on HGTV.