The Good Ole' Days

If you found yourself part of the HGTV sensation RatemySpace, you might now be finding yourself a little upset at what it has become. Not only is the server so slow you have to wait hours to see the amount of rooms you used to peruse in mere minutes, but in an attempt to safeguard against the false voting habits of those at-home-designers who so desperately wanted to be on the front page, it has (in my opinion) lost its focus = inspiration.

In the midst of looking for my camera, which I have still yet to find, I found myself browsing for bedroom inspiration images online. Something about digging through piles of laundry and under beds will do that to you. RatemySpace, or RMS as the group affectionately referred it, used to be a stop in that search, and more often than not would provide me with a plethora of images that inspired, taught, gave thought to new ideas, and wowed. Take for instance these pictures I had saved in my file of RMS Inspiration pictures nearly 2-years ago:

This room, posted by chgosouthpaw is one of many rooms the RMS'er contributed to the (at the time) fantastic RMS site. Not only was this room inspirational beyond compare, but all of the rooms in this homeowners set were knock-out! I particularly loved the painting in this room. The thought of hanging something with such large scale, eating the entire space between headboard and crown moulding was, at the time, such an exciting and inspiring practice. This room, to date, is still one of, if not the most inspirational bedroom photo I've ever "clipped".

In another bedroom in the chgosouthpaw home, we again find the use of rich paint with great depth. Colors like this look one way in the morning, another mid afternoon, and a complete different color at night. They open up such a wealth of ability in the design and decorating process. Here again, like the room above, and in so many of the rooms in the chgosouthpaw home, they've used the valance/curtain combo that might feel a little dated if not in the contemporary way seen here. The neutral solids, the simple pleat, the banding to pull in the separation of color ... this is gorgeous. And, and there are a lot of ands to this room, the persimmon accents: the banding on the jute rug, the ottoman, the toss pillows - heaven.

Now these rooms are large - and the camera person here is not a novice with a canon point and click, nor is the designer just learning to style impeccably, it's the work of a professional. And that was one of the questionable aspects of RMS. Was it really the person's home? Was it really their work? This started a sparring of the "curious detectives" against the "protective poster": "I see a open house flag ... this is a showhouse!" Reply: NO! That's an AMERICAN flag! SHUT UP! You're just jealous! Quickly, posts came up, and went down. Different posters would have the same images, as if the two exact rooms could exist in different houses, worlds apart. And you could always tell the curious detectives of the bunch, with their no-fail question: "What color is the paint?" I was always curious, would you really know if I told you? And how many different paint colors can you collect in a day? How many walls do you have to paint, really? No matter - chgosouthpaw in particular was one of those questionable posters. Was it the homeowner? The designer? Was it from a local magazine, like Houston House and Home, or Washington Spaces? And no matter how many questions, compliments, or critiques chgosouthpaw received, they stayed very quiet. The tale-tell sign of a false-poster, so they say. But whether this room was "fake" to the poster had no real consequence to its beauty. It was and is inspirational, so I clipped it.

Here in the hallway to the master bedroom, you get a better sense of the truly designer touches in this home. The perfect juxtapose of the frames, the hanging, the art. It's magazine worthy ...

And the bathroom; well, lets just say - gorgeous and be done with it. Now, back to the RMS of today. Rooms like this one aren't so easy to come by, and if you can, they're at the bottom of the list, ranked 3.3/5.0 because someone with a room decorated ala (insert cliche store here) voted them a 1.0/5.0 with their many many screen names all beginning with the number 9, because they were so consumed with being ranked #1.

And as I sit here, still a little stirred from the week of distress, I look fondly to these pictures of the RMS of the "Good Ole' Days" and thank my lucky stars that I was led to the blogging world by RMS poster Gollum of Designs by Gollum, so that I could find truly inspirational images in the pages of all the blogs I visit daily. As far as I know, chgosouthpaw doesn't have a blog - and these images (so far) haven't surfaced as a "fake", and I hope they don't. I'm content to believe that inspirational rooms like this do exist in homes across the world - homes that haven't been manipulated by design magazines, or fame hungry designers; just simply beautiful rooms with inspiration on every wall. I hope you all have an inspiring weekend.