H O M E

I am off to the country to see my dear Mom and the rest of my family. I will be back in two weeks! Hope you are enjoying the spring weather in your part of the world. I'm looking forward to apple blossoms and lilacs and sleeping in at *home*...

Photo: Wakehurst Mansion

Painted Bliss: Before & After

I no longer wish to recall the horror of my green living room and dining room before I decided to paint it a classically beautiful shade of ivory (Benjamin Moore Soft Chamois OC-13).
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I'll start with the AFTER photos first (because they are prettier!) The rooms aren't put together yet darlings...the process is just beginning. We will install new drapes and hardware, a new light fixture in the dining room, and I have lofty plans for a new coffee table and a pretty collection of art for the walls.

What do you think? A soft and tranquil start, I think, and just the effect I wanted.

AFTER:

And a couple of BEFORE photos, with those green walls that I once thought I liked, and the draperies I detest and can't wait to replace!

BEFORE:

Decorating gives birth to more decorating...

I’m very happy with the new paint colour on our main floor. Although the colour is much lighter than I’d hoped, it’s a truly lovely shade of off-white and I’m delighted with how airy the room looks. The light walls pick up the light tones in the living room rug, which suddenly seems luminous. Our sage green furniture really stands out and its colour seems softer and prettier than before, when it competed with dark green walls.

We’ve just started putting the rooms back together. We were away this weekend and I’ve been sick with a sinus infection, so I’ll post photos of the "new" space soon. I've taken some of the window coverings down in the living room (for now) and love the extra light. But the living and dining room are still rather bare, and I've hung nothing on the walls, so don't expect much!

Seeing the living room emptied out with its classic light walls makes me want to keep it spare! My old coffee table is hideous and I hate to put it back in the room. We truly need a new one that's lighter and prettier. I’m considering glass (which isn't my first choice for practicality), but it's elegant and classic and lets so much light into a small room (and doesn’t hide the rug!). I adore this one...

Ferguson Copeland Bombe' Cocktail Table, Pompeiian Silver

I’d also like to replace the mirror in our front hall with a more sophisticated one. I'd love a proper antique mirror, but they cost a small fortune! The front hall is narrow, so I’m also considering one of those wall-shelf console thingies, to place under the mirror. The ones I've seen are too ornate for my tastes, but I shall keep looking...

I love the curves of this Chippendale horn mirror, by J.F. Chen

An ornate wall console, from Antiques on Old Plank Road

Deliciously ornate Louis XV mirror from 1st Dibs

We also need to replace the dining room light fixture. I have several ideas in mind, all of which are rather airy and simple. I think I want everything silver-coloured, so I'll have to be careful when I buy the coffee table, mirrors and such to coordinate my metals as best as I can. We eventually need to replace all the kitchen knobs too!

Nickel chandelier, from Circa Lighting

And the walls are crying for art! I have several botanical prints I want to frame, and a number of bird prints and sketches. I find frame shopping rather poor in Calgary, and may have to make or customize (paint) some frames.

We also have two armchairs (one a pink tub-sorta chair, and the other an old grey armchair I inherited) that need replacing/slipcovering and re-upholstering, respectively. I haven’t even started to think about chair options, but when we do buy, I'd like a classic, like a French bergere.
A pair of antique French bergeres, from 1st Dibs

And did I mention the sofa needs pillows too?

The list goes on and on, and we still need to get our home office organized this summer! I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or bad, but this decorating business really never ends.

Photos of the (still bare) living room to come...

Painting: In Progress

Our painters arrived this morning and have started working their special kind of magic. They seem very professional and efficient, but we ran into a slight problem. Once they started a couple of walls in my chosen colour, I realized that the colour was way too light. In fact, the walls look basically white (while the sample board I painted looks much more beige). I know the colour will darken a little as it dries and the remaining coats are applied, but I quickly realized I'm running into the same Benjamin Moore issue I had when I painted my master bedroom. For that, the colour came out much whiter than the sample card and the big chip I brought home.

I don't know why the Benjamin Moore off-whites look so much whiter on the walls than on the cards. It probably has to do with reflection and stuff, but the reality is, I wanted a much more pale beige colour.

So....I took one of the half-used gallons and the unused gallons back to the Benjamine Moore store, and after two trips, we've boosted the pigment by 50% to give a slightly darker colour. To be honest, the walls still look white to me and not nearly as beige as the sample card I painted. Even the painters agree, but the Benjamin Moore guy claimed that it would better match my sample board now. So we shall see. It's amazing how little colour there is in these Off-Whites. Basically it is a gallon of white paint with about 6 drops, a few ounces, of colour in it. So it's really easy to see how the walls read white if there is any light falling on them at all. How frustrating!

I've decided that unless I want to switch to a whole new colour (a browner beige), I'm stuck with this since we have 5 gal of paint already mixed. So I'll be patient and wait to see how it turns out once it dries and additional coats are applied.

Even if the colour isn't as beige as I wanted, the space looks amazingly bright and fresh already!

I'm so happy that green is gone. I'll try to post more update photos later this week, but my internet is going down for 2 days while I switch my phone to a new provider, and we're going away this weekend, so it may be next week before you see the final product.

Neutral It Is!

Inspiration rooms on my way to finding a "perfect" neutral wall colour:

After months of serious deliberation, I’ve finally decided on a paint colour for our main floor. And I better be sure because we have painters arriving on Monday! It might seem like I'm playing it safe because I've chosen a milky beige called Soft Chamois OC-13 from Benjamin Moore. But it was an all-consuming internal debate and the choice was anything but obvious!

I've been on the fence about a colour for our main floor. We live in a 35-year old four-level split where the main floor living and dining rooms are one continuous space, together with the kitchen (which is all cupboards and has almost no wall space). Because of the layout, the front foyer and two stairwells (to the upstairs bedrooms and downstairs rooms) would look best painted the same colour (instead of having an ugly and obvious colour change on a corner). The upstairs and downstairs hallways would ideally be the same colour too!

In other words, I needed to find The Perfect Colour. In the beginning, I was insanely smitten with a heavenly stormy blue from Farrow & Ball called Skylight. This is a next-to-perfect blue in my opinion, but blue just won’t cut it.

First of all, it’s a huge space to paint blue and I'm afraid I’ll tire of it. I love blue, but do I want a whole blue house, considering that my office is already blue, we have a blue-grey powder room and various green rooms already?

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And our living room furniture is sage green, so the blue wasn't an obvious complement. The dining room rug is rose (which looks gorgeous with blue!), and our living room rug is a multi-colored blend of cream and sage and rose and blue (which looked good too). But as much as I coaxed myself to think it might work, the reality was that blue walls introduce yet another pure colour to an already cacophonous mix of shades. Besides, our dining room chairs have blue and pink stripes, the kitchen counters are olive green, a downstairs floor is brown, and the kitchen valance is burgundy! I want tranquility, not chaos!

So I started to think about green. I really wanted a “colour” on the walls, if you know what I mean, since I love the way white lampshades and table linens and white accessories look against a coloured wall. Plus, I love white things. The walls are currently a chartreuse (yellowish) green that isn't so bad, but each alternative green I considered seemed wrong. Pale sages work the best, and look lovely, but the fact is, I'm no longer crazy about my sage green furniture, and the room is sage overload with both furniture and walls in the same colour!

So I settled on a neutral palette. It feels like a cop-out going neutral, especially since it felt that with all my decorating knowledge acquired over the past year, I should be able to pull off a complex palette. But the truth is, I want a calm and collected palette. And a pale, creamy colour seems like the only choice to pull the disparate elements together.

In the past weeks, I’ve painted endless sheets of Bristol board with various Farrow & Ball and Benjamin Moore shades. I've taped these samples to the walls, moved them countless times as the light changed, and stared at them each for hours on end, trying to find the colour equivalent to *Mr.Right*. In fact, I think finding a man is much, much easier than choosing paint colours!

Since greys are all the rage, I looked at a number of grey and greige shades, but they all seemed rather cold to me, even in my south-facing room. So I kept coming back to the warm pale beiges, especially in the evenings when the light fades and the greys become rather dismal and chilly.

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My final choices came down to (1) Farrow & Ball’s Slipper Satin, a creamy pale beige that seems to glow (2) Benjamin Moore’s White Down CC-50 (an antique white/ivory which I have in my bedroom and adore), (3) Benjamin Moore’s Seapearl OC-19 (a grey-toned oyster beige, pale), and (4) Benjamin Moore’s Soft Chamois OC-13 (a pale milky beige with warm-tones).

Then yesterday, I decided (or so I thought). I chose the Farrow & Ball Slipper Satin and excitedly checked with my painting contractor to see if he minded using it. He was amenable to the idea, so I phoned our (only) local F&B supplier to see if they had enough product on hand. To my dismay, they only had 2 gallons in store ($69.50 per gallon, FYI) and I’d have to wait a couple of weeks until the next shipment arrived!!

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Since I’m going on vacation in 3 weeks, already have painters booked, and find myself utterly fed up with paint chips, I decided to switch to Benjamin Moore's Soft Chamois just to get this over with! Soft Chamois OC-13 is a nice, soft, quiet beige that I can best describe as “milky beige”. It will look lovely with the sage furniture, the olive countertops, and our dark wood furniture. It'll work especially well with both rugs, which was my main concern since they add the most colour to the rooms.

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Just for information, I noticed that the actual Soft Chamois paint (from the sample pot) seems darker on the wall than on the paint chip, whereas the White Down I used in my bedroom is much whiter on the wall than on the chip (where it's rather beigey). So I really hope the colour works out once it's on all the walls because these sample chips seem so unreliable with darker colours looking lighter on the chip and vice versa!

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I feel like the consummate bore doing a beige room - but being unable to start from scratch and having to tie everything together – gave me little choice in the end. Eventually we want to replace the furniture with something more elegant and lighter coloured (like the sofa below) and then I can consider changing to my coveted blue walls! But until then, this is my transition colour to make sense of all the bits we’ve already got.

This summer I intend to replace the drapes in the living and dining rooms (I have some favorite sample fabrics, in linen) and eventually I'll replace my student-days coffee table with something more elegant. I have a cool grey leather armchair that needs re-upholstering and another I want to slipcover, but those are eventually. For now, getting these walls painted thrills me!

Once the painting is done next week, I'll post some before and after photos to show the progress...

More inspirational neutral rooms:

All Photos House to Home

An Update (and pretty photos...scroll down!)

I've had a great start to the week, except for the fact that I just realized the next three weeks will be utterly insane. I'm leaving to visit my parents in just 3.5 weeks and today it occurred to me that I don't have much time left to get everything that needs done, well, done!

I have to go through files tonight and pull all my tax documents and start doing my taxes some night this week. You'd think that since I'm getting a refund I would have done it long ago, but I am a procrastinator extraordinaire when it comes to sitting in front of tax software in the evening. My day job is tedious enough!

And I need to find a birthday gift for my sister-in-law, whose birthday we're celebrating next weekend at David's mum's house (which means 2 days out of town). We set a $50 gift limit on birthdays which sounds like a sensible idea but I often find it hard to buy really nice gifts (in Calgary anyway) for under $50. I always find some over-budget thing I love....

And in the next three weeks I have a hair appointment, a dermatologist appointment, a massage booked, a harried work schedule, and an appointment with a really renowned physiotherapist that I've been waiting for 6 months to see. Oh, and I have a dental appointment. And I haven't bought any spring clothes yet. I desparately need shoes and tops. Oh, and to lose 10 pounds before summer. Damn, and it's already April 21st!

And to top it off, I have a painter coming tonight to give me a quote on painting my dining/living rooms since it's a huge job and David hates to paint, and with my migraines and bad back, it seems a little too much! I love to paint, but one room is plenty. Not a huge room and foyer and stairwells. I'd need to take at least 2 days off work too. Not happening...

So, in lieu of a proper post, here are some romantic and inspirational photos from a UK retailer called Graham & Green. I have no idea of their reputation, but their rooms are awfully pretty!

Enjoy! I love these whimsical hooks:

And this lamp is glorious. I would change it to a dusty pink shade:This tufted headboard is so Renaissance:The chair was called a "nursing" chair. Suddenly I feel all maternal...Fake fleurs are still pretty and good for those of us in northern climes with late springs!:

Gosh, I am not a femme fatale enough for this dressing table:

A lovely vignette:

Pretty outdoor pillows:
A Lucite chair and more pink! Isn't the wallpaper so old-world and lady-like?
Pretty etched glass for madame's toilette:

A mirror to die for:
And the piece de resistance, a chair I adore:

Happy Week!

~ The Pretty Room ~

Nothing beats a pretty room to make my heart skip a beat and feel suddenly at home.

There are all sorts of "pretty" rooms, from simple to sophisticated, but by my definition they all have tranquil pastel palettes that soothe the eye and the soul! Soft pinks and blues and lavender, complemented with lots of white, can't help but make a room look oh-so-pretty.

Curvy furniture in feminine colours looks pretty and nurturing, and lots of softly-textured pillows in magical fabrics are inviting and enveloping. Small elements like a bouquet of flowers, a "curlicue" sconce, a delicate lamp, or a canvas of floral wallpaper are often the only flourishes needed to soften and make a simple room go from plain to pretty.

The photos shown are some pretty rooms I've found in the last few months and saved to a "Pretty" folder for a rainy day. I wanted to post more photos, but just didn't have time to go back and dig out even more images from all the country magazines I love (that are often the cat's pyjamas of romantic pretty!).

All the rooms shown have elements I find pretty, some more subtle than others. They share soft colours, feminine motifs, pretty (sometimes country or elegantly curvy) furniture, bouquets of lovely flowers, and a certain feminine je ne sais quoi. They all make me want to redecorate for spring!

What do you find especially pretty? A certain colour? A certain flower? A particular style of furniture? A romantic pattern?

Sometimes I think I want a genteel, slightly worldly and academic house, but then I see these exquisite, relaxed, pretty rooms and I just want to forget sound and sensible and go wild with curvy, romantic, pastel loveliness!

Luckily that look can be mimicked in many rooms by bringing in some flowers, adding some pretty pillows or bringing in a few candles and a new pastel accessory or two for spring. We just bought a celedon green glass vase for our living room, at an art sale, and it's eye-catchingly pretty for spring! Happy Dreaming!
All photos Domino, except for mint green bedroom (10th photo) and elegant lavender living room (2nd photo) from Traditional Home. First photo is from Country Home.

The Masters: Mariette Himes Gomez

Recently I've developed an obsession with those gigantic coffee table books, especially those by the great interior decorators of the world.

One of the first big celebrity designer books I lugged home from the library a few months back was American designer Mariette Himes Gomez's lovely 2003 book, entitled "Rooms." Interior Designer Mariette Himes Gomez

In case you didn't know, Gomez was named one of Architectural Digest's top 100 interior designers and architects on their famous AD100 list. In other words, greater design minds than mine have blessed her with the keys to AD's inner sanctum and she now has job security for life (had that been a concern). Which it wouldn't be because she's a decorating goddess, a master decorator (if there were such a title), one of the reigning grand dames of classic design, in my humble opinion. Gomez is the Emily Post of good design etiquette, patiently following the rules with impeccable good taste and restraint.

I loved "Rooms" because it presented a lovely set of essays on various decor subjects to help you get your head around various issues. She divulges tons of great decorating tips and rules, if you will, that are less rules and more just hard-won learnings from years of practice and finally learning what works!

Gomez is old-school and believes in knowing the rules before you can break them. Gomez has a very particular point of view, even if her rooms seem familiar in their unerring and somewhat traditional perfection. She calls herself a minimalist, but looking at her rooms I think she means that she restrains within herself a desire to over-decorate. I don't consider her rooms minimal at all, but looking closely you do see evidence of restraint, that only perfectly chosen things find their way into her rooms. There is never too much...just enough in every room. Each element is painstakingly studied and worked-out. For a woman who is a master of decoration and a lover of art and furniture, I imagine that chosing the few key elements for a room would require such immense restraint that she probably does feel like a minimalist, even if her rooms aren't exactly spare!

Gomez is also an advocate of the white or off-white room (after my own heart, she is!). I think practically every room I've seen attributed to her is white or off-white (with the odd blue room for good measure). By the way, her favorite paint colour is Donald Kaufman #5, which she calls essentially a perfect white. White rooms are her canvas because her furniture and art selection are impeccable and take center stage.

She's also an advocate of getting your "shell" (i.e. the bones of the room) straightened out before decorating. Sort out and improve (or remove) mouldings and trim, re-plaster if you must, and clean up the architectural elements first. Once this is done, the canvas is ready for decorating!

Draperies and furniture placement can be used to balance "not so perfect" spaces. For example, she notes that two identical chairs used in a room, placed side by side, can add a note of structure to an otherwise plain or off-balance room. Drapes and valances can be used to help line up off-kilter windows. She's a fan of symmetry, but mentions that too much (more than 3 pairs of anything in a room) can be, well, too much!

Gomez, besides being an advocate of impeccable arcitecture and a perfect white shell, is an art afficionado. She recommends buying the best art you can afford, things you love, that speak of your character, to fill your home.

I could write more, but unfortunately I inadvertently returned the library book "Rooms" with all my Post-Its still inside and can't give you all the quotes I'd intended! That same day, I picked up her new (2007) book entitled "Houses", where she talks about all the elements of a great house. I haven't studied this book the way I have "Rooms" (which is on my Christmas list), but I will pore over it in the next few weeks.

Gomez's writing is enjoyable and approachable. She's a lovely writer and is frank in her point of view, but also quietly acknowledges that the reader might not be quite as well-heeled as some of her clients. She mentions places where you can save money (lamps, for example) but where a little extra expense is well worth it (down pillows!). She talks about buying great art but also loves the whimsical little objects and grassroots artifacts of bygone years that are precious to us, if no one else. So despite her sucess, Gomez seems to be utterly grounded.

Here is a quote from her book "Houses" that I like:

"I need to have my things around me. They speak to me in their own tongues. They have become the fabric of my life, as do yours. You put them in the house, and the house becomes a vessel, an anthology of tales."

I encourage you to read more about her and to look at her work and her lovely books carefully. This is a woman with a lot to teach us about great design. Her style is classic and restrained and somewhat formal to many, but I think she has a great philosophy to share about loving our homes, even if you don't love her style. And on that, we can all agree!

Wild House: Inspiration

I love the serene energy in this shabby chic weathered Georgian home. This looks like a rustic country house buried in brambles and bushes, but it's located in busy London! What a charming, gentle house. I love the worn, lived-in look, the pale palette, and the historical features. The stairwell banister, the living room ceiling medallion, and window hardware make me swoon with delight...the cozy, comfy decor hits the spot too!

All Photos: Shoot Factory

Decor Planning: My Living & Dining Rooms

The last couple of weeks I've spent every free hour poring over decorating magazines trying, once and for all, to coordinate a colour scheme for my living and dining room. It isn't an easy process as I have existing furniture and rugs to use, and also some prints and accessories I want to incorporate. I've pulled so many inspiration boards together with different palettes, but think I've finally settled on a colour scheme (which I'll explain later, with photos!).
Fabric and paint colours are taking up so much time! I've brought home countless sample pots from Farrow & Ball and Benjamin Moore and can't count how many big sheets of bristol board I've painted. Evenings and weekends have been spent moving these big chips around the room at various times of the day to catch the light and see how the colours read.

I've also been hunting for fabrics for new drapery panels. I've finally settled on linen as my fabric of choice because there seems to be a solid selection and some very pretty colours at the shop I chose to sew my projects. I will have them make panels and a new valance for my dining room.

I've been meaning to post photos of the room and ask for your help. But instead, I became obsessed with doing it myself. It seemed too hard to try to photograph all the disparate elements of the room and explain everything. Eventually I'll re-upholster a chair, slip-cover another, re-frame some prints, and so on and it seemed too tedious to explain it all to you! In the end, there were the choices my heart wanted and then the sensible choices that worked best for the room. Decorating is a balancing act when you can't do a whole room from scratch!

This week, I'll do some measurements and hopefully have the shop start sewing my items (unless I change my mind). I haven't settled on an exact paint colour yet, but at least I picked a palette and have some front-runners lined up!

Besides that I've been voraciously reading design books and have fallen in love with Michael S. Smith's gorgeous book "Elements of Style" which is just what the doctor ordered this week for some serious aesthetic inspiration!

Hope your week is wonderful! I'll share some photos of my ideas soon.

Photos: House of Linnea