Design Reveal: Family Home for Life to Happen

Well hello there! It is such a treat to get to share this home with you today - I got to work with the sweetest of friends and realized very quickly how kindred we are. After nearly a decade in their home, they came to the decision to stay put and continue investing in the roots they’ve sewn in their neighborhood and community. It’s a very similar story to what led Matt and I to add on to our home last year after 13 years in our house. Life is beautiful when we open ourselves up to the possibilities God has for us; I can think of no greater adventure!

My first reaction during the initial walk through was how heavy the home felt. The dark neutrals with very little contrast just made their main floor feel weighty. They desired something lighter, airier, and more conducive for their love of gathering friends and family.

Family Room

When all the elements in a home are of similar color and saturation, everything melds together and can look heavy. One of the biggest things we did was paint! Getting the walls a fresh, clean white allowed the colors we used throughout to really stand out!

Not the first fireplace I’ve re-imagined without a total overhaul. The ornate mantle was removed and replaced with gorgeous wood, and the ‘fluted’ sides were covered with a quarter strip of drywall and painted.

These clients gravitated toward a somewhat coastal color palette, specifically teal, coral, blush, mustard. To anchor this palette, the area rug makes for a vibrant element in the room that allows a lot of flexibility in branching off with surrounding textile colors.

I’ve really never gravitated to heavily filled mantles, but do enjoy using interesting pieces and balancing the visual weight!

While this family room really feels light and airy, using a variety of textures, materials and wood tones makes it feel so warm and inviting! Mixing pieces lends to such a casual vibe and I love the contrast among the main players in here.

Ready to see the pink dining room peeking around the corner?

Dining Room

The paint alone completely transformed this space. I mean, I feel that way with the entire home, but in here it’s incredible the difference! I chose the paint color first, fully recognizing what a massive risk it might be to recommend pink. But it totally works! It’s definitely unexpected and fun. We’re not taking ourselves too seriously here, which I just love.

Living Room

In this space I essentially wanted to swap the color on the wall for color in the furnishing! As you see this room right off the front entrance, using a stunning, but neutral wallpaper, with a vibrant teal velvet sofa and rich leather ottoman couldn’t be a better mix to draw you deeper into this home!

That’s a wrap! I always feel sentimental when a project is completely finished, but my motto over the years has become ‘a finished room is a new beginning’. My part is done, and now these rooms are ready for life to happen in all its wild and beautiful forms. Thank you so very much for coming by to check this project out! I’m grateful for you.

Design Reveal: Full of Surprises Master Suite

Make a boring room less boring
Play with fresh colors
Mix styles
Find unique pieces
Make surprising design choices
Experience someones joy when they really love their home

These are a few of my favorite things!

Most of my work revolves around main living spaces - living rooms and dining rooms. Then comes entryways and kitchens. But bedrooms might be my most favorite room, for no other reason than this is truly the retreat space. No one is worrying about flexible seating or kid friendly pieces as much. Its an opportunity to strum a different tune in your home, if you so wish. It’s your space; truly yours. This master suite is particularly interesting in that it has an adjoining sitting room and a nook, so I wanted to create something really cohesive without making it all feel too matched. It’s a really large space and I felt like things would get lost if it was too much the same throughout.

Sitting Room

Beige on beige on beige! A quaint pass-through room like this is easy to forget about. Used for lounging with a book in it’s fantastic natural light, it truly didn’t need much. But this is the room you walk through to get from the main hallway to the master bedroom, and I just didn’t want it to feel overlooked.

In this adjoining sitting room we just had fun! I wanted the walls painted Cavern Clay by SW as we had used the color in the clients dining room and LOVED it. So we brought it up here, too!

Denim blue + clay just felt right in here. It’s so fun but also feels really organic to me…like colors you’d see just looking outside! A few winks of black peppered in through the hanging bells and vintage rug just create a striking contrast - something I always enjoy incorporating! A touch of black in any space goes a long way - many people I work with think it will make things feel too dark, but it’s the use of contrast that actually makes things feel lighter and brighter!

Vintage rugs and kilim pillows are a staple in much of my work. I just love the hunt for the perfect pattern and colors that will bring a space to life!

Bedroom

The first order of business in here was getting the walls right. This is a really large room and the former beige made it feel incredibly heavy. So we went white on the walls and used a light putty beige color for the window trim. Next, I found the rug. I knew there would be several rugs within steps of one another throughout this space and I wanted them to reflect each other in subtle ways. What I loved about this rug was the spice color along the edge. It echos the Cavern Clay on the walls in the sitting room and ties the spaces together without being obvious.

My beef with the former sitting room was all the beige - but I’m not anti-beige! I like it as a soft contrasting element. Three colors of beige were incorporated here - the window trim, curtains and upholstered bed. The trick is not using the exact same color; subtleties in saturation (some lighter, some darker), help break things up and create depth. If you scroll up and see the original dark curtains with dark headboard, it kind of looks like one dark area without any movement. Layering lighter with darker tones is a great way to prevent an abrupt and heavy visual presence in a space.

It’s a lot of green but gosh I love this color for the duvet! It’s got a lot of gold which is what caught my eye.

The leather bench is one of my absolute favorite elements, (as leather often is). The footboard by itself felt too flat; like the whole bed was stopping short. Adding the bench strongly compliments this amazing bed and pulls the whole space together beautifully.

This curly-Q light is just a dream! It’s an interesting but simple design, which is great for this room which is holding quite a lot!

This whole project was nothing if not a work of moments. There were so many moments to create! The trick is balancing stronger moments with softer ones, like this ‘his’ dresser. Even the art, by my friend Holly Young Art, is subtle.

Nook

The windows in here inspired the putty colored trim - I’ve used this color trim before but not often! It really highlights these beautiful windows and anchors this area so well. I had them bring the putty color all the way down to the built-ins to pull the whole wall together.

And when was the last time you saw a papasan chair?! It’s super comfy and defines the purpose of this area all by itself. It’s the perfect place to curl up and read (the tv angles toward the bed, which is a better distance for it)

A closer view of the bedroom rug

Bathroom

We replaced a lot in this space, but a big drop in the salvage bucket was having the vanity painted. We kept the counter and floor tile, as well as the tub and shower. Everything else was updated with reasonably priced finds, including this gorgeous vintage rug!

Kitchens and bathrooms are such utilitarian rooms with a lot of hard surface, I really love incorporating softer, natural elements and textures wherever I can that makes sense in the space. This seagrass stool and vintage multi-colored rug are useful, but intentional selections for this room.

This is the last design reveal for this year and it’s truly been an exhilarating year of design. We got to do some wildly different projects and use all kinds of creativity! Thank you so much for your encouragement and excitement around these jobs - it’s such a pleasure to get to share them with you!

Chelsea

Design Reveal: Color, But Make It Sophisticated

It’s a design reveal day! These are among my very favorite days of the year. The precious day when I get to share the fruit of many months, sometimes over a year, of work! I don’t share all of my work - 10% of it, in fact! So these projects that make it are truly special to me and I feel so humbled to get to share them with you friends.

Speaking of friends, the amazing client who owns this home has been an acquaintance for many, many years! Her older sister, Lori, was my Young Life leader in high school! In fact, it was Lori who suggested this effort together in the first place. Sure enough, Jenny and I hit it off right away and now is a sweet friend!

When we first connected, she wanted to completely transform her main floor, which includes a family room, dining room, den and kitchen. She had been saving up for this and was ready to hit the ground running! The main objective was to fill her home with color but make it feel grown up - whimsical yet sophisticated. Jenny realized she had gotten about as far as she could with the assortment of hand-me-downs and random pieces she’d found here and there, but (like many), the more she added to her home, the further she got from her vision.

Family Room

It may seem counterintuitive to get your walls white when you love color so much, but this was a move I really encouraged from the beginning. But not without a vision of what would come next:

I don’t think white walls are the answer for every single project, but I knew that it would be the game changer for this home; the defining factor that would enhance all the colors we were about to explode. Now, this home glows like a sunset!

I mean, it absolutely GLOWS! And there was no laying out samples of patterns and fabrics together to come up with this. I stayed in the general family of jewel tones and then ran in every possible direction. Jenny wanted allthecolors so there was really no holding back. Of course, playing off the color well are very grounding elements like the black and white rug and the camel leather ottoman. It’s all about striking balance where it matters most!

Let’s shift to the dining room!

Dining Room

Since the dining room and family room are literally side by side, I wanted to carefully craft a TOTALLY separate space that felt as exciting as the family room, without making it feel like it was a completely different house. The objective here was more cohesion than matching. A playful but black and white pattern on the walls creates a balance to the family room, while the chairs and cabinet echo the jewel tones. Again, there was no matching or looking closely to be sure that the colors ‘went’, but it was staying in the jewel tone family that I knew would be enough.

There is not a dull line of sight from any point in this home!

Den/Kitchen

Like the other areas around this main floor, there was already quite a bit of color going on. Yet, the heavy wall color and the varying tones of color between the rug, chair and decor were all competing to make this room feel very heavy and dark. The strategy in here was the same as the other spaces - get the walls a nice clean white and then build up the color using jewel tones, balanced by beautiful uses of wood and leather.

Replacing the two lower floating wood shelves with a simple white cabinet decreased the visual weight of the space, providing a relaxed balance to the assortment of color used in the pillows and rug. I have never loved fuscia more in my life! I LOVE this rug in here!

The kitchen is still in a bit of progress until tile backsplash is installed, but painting all the lower cabinets and this accent wall in a saturated teal just creates the most incredible contrast to the freshly painted white uppers (with saturated teal knobs). And just look how rich the leather stools are against this color. Oh my word! It’s just stunning.

I absolutely delight in the work I get to do and feel so incredibly grateful to be trusted with peoples homes. To be given the opportunity to work on a project SO unique like this is just such a treat. If you’ve been a part of this community for any amount of time you know this is unlike any other project I’ve shared - and that’s what I’m feeling particularly proud of right at this moment. To go all out and deliver my best work in a style that is different from my own is what I love about design! Trying new things and having so much fun playing around! I don’t like feeling boxed in or delivering only what’s expected of me; rising to a challenge and even showing something surprising satisfies so much of who I am as a person.

Next week I get to go shoot my last project of the year! It’s another doozie, just a heads up :)

Thank you so much for coming by today!