Beautiful Bedrooms

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Design by Miles Redd

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Design by Charlotte Moss 

Design by Bunny Williams

Design by M. Elle Design

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Design by Jeffrey Bilhuber

Inspired by Miles Redd

So, some of you may have seen in the upper right hand corner of the blog, my instagram snapshot of the bedroom, complete with new bamboo framed Chinoiserie wallpaper panels. If you didn't ... here it is:

It is quite the departure from my bedroom in the last apartment:

I'm still not quite finished with the room, but it is coming together. The biggest change, apart from white walls over black walls, has been the new bed. Gone is the linen upholstered headboard in favor of a simple shaker four poster bed, painted black. The red and white duvet has been replaced with a blue and white duvet, and the lamps and furniture are gone.

I knew that I wanted to dress up the bed with fabric, but also knew that would require raising the canopy. I grew weary of projects and decided to skip it, until, I saw this bedroom by Miles Redd:

I think the room is stunning, but I could never afford that wallpaper, let alone anything else. I had already bought this fabric to treat the bed:

I knew I wanted blue, and I knew that I wanted the headboard and footboard slipcovered. So, I picked up this fabric and that should all be done VERY soon! Last night, after finding inspiration in the Miles Redd bedroom, I text my seamstress Michelle a photo and asked if I had enough fabric to create a canopy similar to the one in the bedroom done by Miles. She said yes, so I said do it!

I still have to figure out I'm going to raise the canopy on the bed about 13", because right now it is FAR too low. After that, I have to find a coordinating fabric for draping behind the bed and new bedside tables since this bed is MUCH taller than my last.

I'm off to find solutions! Wish me luck! 

Bedroom Goals

Design by Phoebe Howard

Evolution of a Room - Part One

Have you ever seen a room and thought: That! That's it! That is what I want my room to look like! And then you set out to recreate the room, as closely as you can, because rarely will you ever have a room that is EXACTLY the same size as the one you're coveting. So you paint the walls, and move the furniture, and buy things - you maybe build a canopy, and spend $750 on premade curtains at Pottery Barn, and then you put it all together and realize - it's not going to work? Yeah, that was me on Saturday night.

You see, the room looked like this when I first saw it:

It's small, much smaller than the inspiration room. But I wasn't about to let that deter me. No, I was inspired, so after they had finished installing the carpet - I went in and started painting.

Now, let me clear up some questions here. The apartment complex does allow you to paint the walls of your apartment, BUT, you do have to paint them back to white before you go. I figured, why make it harder for myself. So I left the section behind the bed unpainted since I had intended for the fabric from the canopy to cover all of that space.

You're also probably wondering about my wonky paint line. Well, that got covered up with inexpensive lattice trim ...

This stuff is a God send! It's less than 75 cents per linear foot, and it goes up with tacks. No glue, no big holes! When it's time to go this will come right down and be repurposed somewhere else. I went around the whole room and painted it white.

So there it was - the black room I had always wanted. And though he doesn't read the blog, I have to give a big thank you to my friend Michael who helped me paint. You can see in the photo above the start of the canopy. Real sophisticated operation I had going working on the new carpet with a hand saw and a miter box. Anyway ... I got that all done, and tested it with the curtains I was using in the old bedroom.

It was coming together - but it didn't feel quite right. I assumed that it was just the curtains, and so I went ahead and painted the canopy black and found lined white linen curtains at Pottery Barn to make it easy. Got them home, got them up, slept under it one night - and realized that I really didn't like it.

Now, the lighting in these photos is pretty bad - forgive me, I'm still unpacking and my cameras are in a box somewhere (I hope) and the iphone was all I could manage to take photos with. This was just wrong. Somewhere along the line ... maybe it was the size of the room, or the height of the canopy, but I felt claustrophobic in the room. And woke up thinking that this must be what coffins look like from the inside. So ... what did I do?

Yep ... I tore it all apart. Threw the canopy I created in the trash, and probably pissed a lot of people off at Pottery Barn when I brought back 16 curtain panels, folded in the very best way I could - but not nearly as nice as the machine had done the first time. What was I going to do!? Here I had this big white space on the back wall - I knew a canopy wouldn't work, and I really didn't want to have to paint. Then it hit me:

 

The Samarkand Suzani I had been using at the foot of the bed, typically kicked off onto the floor every night, and never fully unfolded to be appreciated would make the PERFECT backdrop to the headboard against the black wall. So I hung the curtain rod, grabbed the box of drapery rings (why do I have that?) and went to town. When I stepped back from it I thought - wow! This room feels so much bigger! WELL DUH! So I moved on to the other side of the room.

 

That shiny black thing above the chair is a television! Yep, And I'm still looking for a piece of furniture for underneath it. The chair will stay in the room, as the velvet is incredibly similar to the color of the base velvet in the scalamandre le tigre pillows on the bed. But I really want a small table to put under the tv where I can then next the gorgeous plaster piece I used to have in the hallway. Look for that in Part Two. 

The curtains that I had before worked nicely in this room against the black too - especially with the current bedding. When I move to a different bedding, these may change, too. And of course, I used the bamboo roman shades to visually trick the eye into thinking that window was much taller than it actually is. If you scroll back up to the first time I saw the room - you'll see how much space is above that window! Eeeesh!

So that's it - for now. I'm sorry to have baited you with these wonderful floating canopy photos thinking that you'd have a post all about mine - but alas, it just didn't work in this space. The ceilings are too low, the room is too small, and I love Arlo and Louna too much to yell at them every day for getting their dirty paws all over my white canopy curtains.

All said and done, I think it's for the best. I love the suzani hanging behind the bed! And I look forward to finishing this room soon, including buying lamps for the nightstands, hanging artwork, (NOT what you see in these photos) and putting those special final touches and additional layers in the room that just make it feel more like "me". So we'll keep the door open on the evolution of this room, and we will see where part two of the story takes us!

Tomorrow - FABRIC WALLS! What the hell is he doing now? You'll see!

Copy Cat Tactics

Do you remember when HGTV had design shows? Like, real design shows? There was a relatively popular show that I remember watching religiously where a high end room was copied, literally copied, on a much smaller budget. Designers were given a room and a picture of a room - and they had to make the space as similar as they possibly could. It was very fun to watch. Most of the time the designer of the high end space, was also the designer of the low end space - so it was interesting to see just how similar the two spaces could be.

Different magazines do a high/low comparison, or at least, they used to. Before the first 160 pages of a 190 page magazine were advertisements for things you and I will never buy.

 

The Canadian design magazine, Style at Home still does the high low room comparison in their magazine. Again - it's fun to see how so many things can be really be copied on a budget, and after all, no matter how many zeros are in your figure, we almost all are on a budget! So, with that said - I have a room that I've wanted to copy, on a smaller budget, for years. It would have NEVER worked at CDLV, and the first apartment I moved to just wasn't conducive either. But the new place, well, it might be just the ticket for a little copy cat design of my own.

 

What room do I want to copy? 

 

Mark D. Sikes

 

I have been in love with this bedroom in Mark's house since I first saw it a few years ago in House Beautiful. The room has changed a lot since his HB cover feature, but this room always stuck with me. That glorious canopy, the sharp black walls, the modern art and layers - it just screamed COPY ME ARTIE, COPY ME! So, I did what all good copy cats do - and I started to look for every possible inch of this room in photos so that I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. Are you ready? I found a lot! Here they are:

 

 

 Absolutely gorgeous, right? Now, here's my difficulties in copying this room:

• I don't have the same amount of space, likely not even 2/3 of the size of this room
• I have to use my existing headboard
• The room has wall-to-wall pile carpeting that I cannot change in favor of the seagrass
• I can not afford 1/2 of the stuff in these pictures ... let's just be clear!

However, I'm a firm believer that you can do anything you set your mind to - and since I've wanted a black bedroom since I first saw this room ... that I knew I could accomplish!

 

 

Just like in Mark's room, I didn't go to the ceiling. Mark's ceiling actually coves, mine does not. But I could create the look visually by opting to put a very inexpensive piece of lattice trim 1' from the actual ceiling line. I think that this helps to visually raise the height of the ceiling and the black has done wonders to visual extend the barriers of those corners!

 

In addition to his black walls, Mark had black doors in his room, and while I would love to copy this look too, and in fact did in my old apartment, these doors are 1960's metal - everyone gasp, or yawn, because yes - they're boring! They've been beaten up quite a bit over the last 55 years, and painting them back is likely just going to end up accentuating the damage, AND making more work for me, as they'd chip every time I closed the door.

 

This, unfortunately, is as far as I've gotten, but it's coming together. The canopy is in the process of being made, and the bed is in place. Some touch up paint is needed, but I've jumped this far in, I figure I might as well keep going, right? Wish me luck!