Last week, I told you about the guest room/office makeover happening at my house right now. I thought I would show you some before photos and the best part, the progress photos. There has been quite a change in that room these past weeks!
The palette of the space was inspired by the hallway in author Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, her gorgeous home and gardens in Lenox, Massachusetts. You can read more about this here.
This photo has been stuck in my head since I visited there five years ago with my husband.
When I am trying to visualize a space and come up with a design, I sit in it and stare. I wish I drew more, and I do dabble in it, but I do better if I just look at the space – to get a feel for it…dare I say…to let it talk to me a little bit?
Our guest room/office has the most natural light in the house – two full walls of windows. Since we moved here three years ago, this room has been the guest room/nursery, and then when I moved the girls to the same room, the catch all for other rooms that have been under construction. I would say it has been full of castoffs from other spaces a good year.
In this before photo, you can see the previous striped walls.
I wanted the walls to be smooth, and they had a bit of an orange peel texture to them, so I thought a little sanding would take care of that problem. But I was so so wrong. A bit of sanding occurred before the terrible realization that the previous owners of our home had textured OVER wallpaper. Noooooooooooooooooooo. (even though it is cool to see the original 1920 wallpaper – polka dots and flowers, anyone?)
I mentioned it on Instagram, and I’m going to go ahead and say it here again. For the love of humanity, PLEASE DO NOT TEXTURE OVER WALLPAPER!!! It is a nightmare to make this right, and after removing all of the texture and wallpaper we could, the walls were mudded and smoothed. It. was. a. mess.
Another challenge we faced in this project was the attic entrance. When we were renovating our master bathroom, the best place to move the attic entrance (yes, it was in the bathroom, so weird) was this room. But it really stuck out like a sore thumb. (besides the paint color, ha! also, you can see I still have my experiment up from when I was trying to deduce if gold contact paper would stick to a ceiling – it works by the way, all of the info is here)
One of the things that makes Edith Wharton’s inspiration space so beautiful (besides the soothing color scheme) is the trim work.
After sketching out several options, we eventually landed on a pattern that would work in the space, AND help conceal the attic entrance.
The walls were smoothed and painted one of my new favorite off-white paint colors, Benjamin Moore’s Capitol White from their beautiful Williamsburg line.
And because I only needed a gallon of paint for the trim work, I decided to use Farrow & Ball for the trim paint. I have used it in numerous client homes over the years, but never in my own. The pigment and finish is simply perfection, and I absolutely love it. The color I chose, Teresa’s Green, looks so much like Wharton’s paint trim, I can hardly believe it! In the below photo, Teresa’s Green is on the left.
And now, the walls are smooth, primed, and painted. It is lovely.
When you walk in the room, you don’t even notice the attic door, but I’ll point it out to you here.
Now that we are done with the shell of the space, we can do the more fun part like picking out fabrics, arranging furniture, and pulling everything together. I’m going to use the roman shades I had in here before (they used to be at West Elm but are now discontinued), and for the privacy curtains, I’m using a classic chintz. I will have an inspiration board up soon so you can see all of the finishes I’m dreaming of.
So it is all coming together, and I am in major work mode to get it all done before a special friend arrives to help me organize everything! Can’t wait to share. : )