This wall hanging adds depth and expansion and is a great substitute for a headboard.

ost people would be hard-pressed to say anything nice about their dishwasher. We load them, turn them on, complain about the lousy job they do and put the dishes away. It could hardly be considered the focal point of the room.

Enter Charleston artist Janie Atkinson. A former kitchen designer, she viewed the ubiquitous dishwasher in a whole new light. To her artist's eye, the appliance's plain face was crying out to be transformed into a canvas, where a work of art could find a home and serve as a great conversation piece as well.

And so Door Décor, offering a line of decorative dishwasher door panels, was born. "I knew from my experience in kitchen designs that all dishwashers come in industry standard sizes and I thought this would be a way to bring art, color and design into an area of the home where you'd least expect it," she says.

All the panels are faithful reproductions from original oil paintings created by Atkinson in the whimsical "Tromp L'Oeil" technique of fooling the eye. The assortment of panels includes "The Aquarium," "Wine Cooler, "Herb Garden" and other items one might expect to see on or in a dishwasher. Because that's what Tromp L'Oeil is all about. "It's not just a painting, but has a sense of realism in a whimsical sort of way," she says.

The decorative dishwasher art is made from flexible, "soft mat" magnetic panels which adhere to the surface, or a low-tack adhesive backing may be used. Atkinson is no stranger to painting on unusual surfaces.

In addition to Door Décor, she is commissioned for residential and commercial murals and has done extensive decorative design in a number of Charleston's upper scale restaurants and historic residences.

Her work can be found throughout the Southeast and in Charleston at Beaumont's and in Mt. Pleasant at the Backstage Deli, Wild Wing Café and Clarence Fosters.

She is also working on a line of decorative panels for refrigerators that are screen printed on styrene material and can be attached with a trim kit.

"These items are new products that are filing a niche that hasn't been addressed yet." Atkinson has a patent pending on the decorative dishwasher panels.