Chihuly, Dale
A glassblower whose huge, brightly colored, Christmas-ornament-like sculptures give any Modernist home cred. Top points for owning a light made of Chihuly sculptures clustered together, or, in one deliciously excessive case, a ceiling made of hanging Chihuly sculptures. You'll see at least one example of Chihuly's work in every upper-crust urban design mag. Why? Because it's expensive. Pretty, yes, sometimes even striking, but above all else, expensive. (see Eames chair)

Dado
The point on the wall where the lower-wall decoration gives way to the upper-wall decoration. Tends to be between waist and chest height.

Dado rail, chair rail
A line of molding running around the room about a third of the way up the wall.

Eames chair
A brand of molded chair made in the 60's. There were hundreds of knockoffs, so having a real Eames chair gets you design fag points. If someone in a design shoot has one, it will be shot and it will be talked about in the article. If they have any street cred at all, they'll also tell how they managed to buy it before the fashion world discovered Eames chairs. Bonus points for refinishing it themselves.

When all's said and done, though, it's a curvy, bland chair. (see Chihuly, Dale)

Epergne
A huge Victorian ornament meant to hold flowers, sweets, or fruits. They tended to go in the center of very, very large tables. If you see something that looks like an engraved silver sex-toy holder, that's an empty epergne.

Fabulous
Glamorous, over-the-top. One of the grand old dames of interior design buzzwords.

Fun
Not starkly practical. Applies to everything from pink paint to a vaguely curvy chair to a light fixture with artificial crackle-glaze patina. A word of last resort that designers use the way frilly fussy nicey-nice women use "cute."

Good design
Ideally, this means "designed to be sturdy, long-lasting, and able to fulfill its essential functions perfectly, without features that get in one's way." In the real world, it's usually shorthand for "severely minimalist with lots of cool curves."

Graphic
Bold design without much detail.

Interior decoration
Decorating the surfaces of a room without making substantial changes to the room's bones.

Interior design
Creating an interior from top to bottom, including building and removing walls, putting in staircases, cutting windows, etc. Interior designers also handle the interior decoration of their projects. Design requires architectural knowledge and a degree or a certificate; decoration has no official requirements.

Kitchen triangle
A triangle whose points are the stove, the sink, and the refrigerator. If any of these points are too far away from the other two, or if there's an obstruction (like a table, a badly placed kitchen island, or, in New England, the pantry wall), the kitchen is noticeably harder to cook in.

Lizard-brain appeal
The lizard brain is the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain. This part of the mind is direct and uncomplicated. It likes bright clear colors, sparkly things, flashing things, soft surfaces, sugary and salty foods, and sex. It doesn't fart arse around with this season's chic-est colors or the stern, restrained lines of a contemporary sofa or beige anything. Becoming sophisticated involves training oneself out of one's desire for things that appeal to the lizard brain: Bright colors are trashy, sparkly things are fit only for children, only rave rats like flashing things, soft surfaces are undisciplined, sugar and salt are bad for you, and it's not "sex," it's "sexuality," and it involves hours of talking and possibly some workbook exercises.

Things that appeal to the lizard brain are universal crowd-pleasers.

Pot metal
The mystery meat of metals. It's a mixture of cheap, flimsy metals that's usually shaped into a tube and bent into what's supposed to be wrought iron. Sometimes it's so bad that it's not even black; it's painted black. Kitsch interiors can take any amount of pot metal accessories, but all other schemes should avoid them.

Skirting board
A line of molding running around the bottom of the wall. Back in the day when paint and wallpaper weren't washable, the skirting board protected the wall's finish from brooms and mops. Don't ask me what the skirting board was covered with.

Space
Room. Less pretentious designers use it to refer to rooms that are large, multilevel, or strangely shaped, or that in some other way stretch the definition of the word "room"—concert halls, airport lounges, multifunctional lofts. More pretentious designers use it to mean "bedroom" or "kitchen" or, occasionally, "closet."

Warm
Normally, this refers to colors toward the red end of the spectrum. Warm is in right now, so some designers stretch its definition a bit to mean "a fashionable color, or at least not an unfashionable color." ("Let's warm this corner up with some beige.")