Today’s the day! The final reveal of my One Room Challenge space! Our bedroom has an adjoining room that we’re using as a family den, separated by a set of French doors. Two rooms, but I’ve been working on them together as one larger space because they are so open to each other.
Shall we?
A little different from the starting point, eh?
So much orange-toned fir. I don’t miss that unpainted wood at all! Again, a huge thank you to Paintzen for taking on the paint job. I can’t wait for the day I can make the rest of the second floor match these two rooms with white trim and black doors throughout. And no holes in the walls! Oh, smooth walls and unblemished ceilings, how I long for you.
All right, let’s dive in and see these two rooms from every little angle. The bedroom is painted in White Blush, and the den, Everard Blue. Simply White is the trim color, and the doors are Black Beauty, all Benjamin Moore colors.
I worked with a lot of the existing furniture in the bedroom, like the black cannonball Quincy bed, an antique Empire dresser, a jewelry armoire, and a vintage wooden dresser provided by MegMade, painted white. Some of the accessories and other elements were already here too, like the pink linen duvet cover and Wink Wink pillows.
The dresser is standing in for a bedside table on Brandon’s side. (His stack of books is usually precariously high, so I edited it down to the just a couple and we’re going to pretend that it always looks like this.) I hung a huge new mirror from Bellacor above it on the room’s longest wall. It has antiqued glass (which is more noticeable in these photos than it seems to me in person), so it bounces light around and fills the space nicely without being a perfect reflection. The mirror is 43″ in diameter and weighs 38 pounds — kind of a beast to put up, but it’s nice and secure hanging from our room’s picture rail.
Our turquoise lamps are from Lamps Plus. I like the simplicity of their column silhouette, and those brass details paired with that blue are perfection. They can be pretty bright, but we’ve long used a little trick to dim our bedside lights and make it easier to turn them off before going to sleep. Ta da! Put those lamps on dimmer cords, people. No more going through all that effort of sitting up and reaching to turn off the light like some sort of animal.
The dresser is his and his alone (the man has as many clothes as I do), but I decorated the far end as I pleased with this cute trio. I added a succulent instead of flowers, so you know. Manly. The polka dots on the bud vase have blue centers that match the cachepot, and I’m digging the hand painted stripes of the ginger jar.
On the other side of the bed, I have a round forged iron table with an antiqued mirror top that echoes the mirror on the wall. It’s 34″ in diameter, giving me a pretty nice sized surface to clutter up, but I cleared it off before I took these photos. Books, books, books everywhere in this house. Magazines, too. Let’s just pretend that’s not the case and that I always have a fresh flowers there, deal? (I think the pillow is in on the charade. Wink.)
Opposite the bed, between the closet and the door to the room, is my dresser. I know the red of the lamp is out of nowhere and I’m breaking the design rule of repetition (repeat a color/shape/whatever 3/5/x times), and I don’t care. It’s like wearing red lipstick. You don’t need red nail polish and red shoes too, it can be its own thing. Look how happy Mr. Muttonchops is to be in close proximity to such a fabulous lamp!
I found a pair of vintage slipper chairs at Divine Consign, a local furniture consignment store. I only needed one here, but I’m hanging on to its mate in case we ever want to move them to a different room. They’d look amazing reupholstered in pink velvet or a killer print, but I like the way the blue bridges the space between the bedroom and the den. (These are similar, if you’re looking for one of your own.)
The tall dresser that looks like a printer’s cabinet is a holding my scarves, jewelry, glasses and sunglasses, what have you. Above it is a painting by Jenny Vorwaller and a Junk in the Trunk ceramic tree stump that I’m using as a vase (a gift from Brandon a few years back). And a beetle! Little silver beetle, you’re so cute. We’ll get to your larger brethren shortly.
I added a tufted bench from Joss & Main to the foot of the bed. It’s a nice place to sit, sure, but it’s also a very handy laundry basket holder. Multitasker! The natural linen color will always work with our bedding, even as we change it and mix and match over the years. Adding to what we already had, the bed is dressed in black and white dashed sheets and a boyfriend matelassé coverlet from Pine Cone Hill. I’ve missed having a blanket to layer on the bed since giving them all away when we upgraded to our king-sized bed last fall, and this one is so soft! There’s a matching throw blanket in the den. We also have matching shams and I was going to add my Moroccan pom pom blanket to the bed, but it was all a bit too much at once.
I changed out the ceiling fan that came with the house for this one that looks (and works) a whole lot better. There’s a remote! Like we live in the future! May we never lose it, for it will not work without it!
The Nyla rug from Loloi that’s in the bedroom is also in the den. There’s a lot of dimension and subtle color in the pattern, and it feels so good on bare feet. It’s made of viscose (an alternative to pricier silk rugs), so it wouldn’t be the best choice for a high traffic area, but it should be fine here. Matching the design between the two rooms adds cohesion.
Keeping the window treatments consistent between the two rooms helps with cohesion, too. Tonic Living turned their pale pink linen into lined pinch-pleat curtains for me. They were great to work with, taking the dimensions of my windows and creating panels in the right sizes (the ones hanging on the double window in the bedroom are wider to ensure that yes, we can fully close them). I hung the curtains from the brass rods in an antique brass finish and glass finials that I bought shortly after we moved in to this house. I’d hung two in the den before the ORC makeover, but it’s very nice to finally put all four to good use.
Moving on to the den, what’s that on the far wall? Questionable DIY art!
Just what this room needed: illustrations from the 1700s of insects, blown up to be six feet long. In 3D, no less!
I looked through three volumes of these illustrations by Rösel Von Rosenhof to find my favorites. The images are in the public domain (and this project is for personal use anyway), so I downloaded the PDF files I needed, lassoed the bugs in Photoshop, and scaled them up. I sent the files to a local printer to be printed on matte paper, then I cut the insects out with an X-acto knife, mounted them with spray glue onto black foam core boards, and cut them out again with an X-acto chisel blade. I attached picture hanging hardware to the backs (two per bug), added extra blocks of foam core to lift them away from the wall, and hung them with fishing line from the picture rail. I painted simple clouds on the 4’x5′ canvas behind them using leftover interior paint (the pale pink from the bedroom and a medium pink from another project).
I could have just bought a bunch of these (which I love), but after a good 12-15 hours of work, I got something nobody else will have. Perhaps for good reason, but no matter. We’re goin’ buggy.
I had been considering picking up a new slipcover for our IKEA Kivik sofa, but as the room came together, I still liked the one that we had best (Isunda Brown). There was one that I preferred the look of when I saw it online (Tullinge Gray-Brown), but not in person. I did pick up a table to go behind the sofa while I was out there though: the Bestå TV unit without legs lines up perfectly with the back of the couch. It gives us a place to prop up the brass task lamps that used to be beside the bed and adds some storage space.
We have overhead lighting and table lamps too, but these lights are nice for reading without having to make the whole room bright — helpful if someone else wants to watch TV, or when one of us are sleeping in the bedroom.
You can see that they play a supporting role in the larger picture. The Galileo chandelier from Crystorama kind of steals the show in the lighting department. I needed something dark with some edge to it. Something masculine. Something that says ‘my husband likes to tell me how the plot differs between the George R. R. Martin books and the HBO series.’
Speaking of television, this is where we watch it. We do have another (smaller hand-me-down) TV tucked away downstairs, but we don’t use it often — it’s not even plugged in right now. The kids can stream shows on a tablet anywhere in the house and we try to limit their screen time, so we haven’t had any issues with our TV being in the room off of our bedroom. Our solar shades from Lowe’s just arrived, so it will be helpful to have those up on the windows to cut the glare, in addition to the curtains.
More flowers! I brought my vases to Moss, my favorite florist, and they did their thing. Pink ranunculus, lotus pods, big garden roses, and all kind of pretty greenery that I’ve already forgotten the name of.
As I was leaving Moss, I walked by Jeanine Guncheon’s shop, Gallery Etcetera, and noticed that they had a pillow in the fabric I’ve been obsessed with. Sold! It stands on its own, and on the other side of the sofa is a pillow from Arianna Belle in one of my favorite fabrics, Les Touches, in front of a blue linen pillow with fringe from Pine Cone Hill.
You can see the other pair of lamps that I ordered from Lamps Plus below. The classic gourd shape is lovely, and I’m glad I went with the light blue color — I think the creamy white I was considering would have been too blah, and the peacock blue too bright.
And how about that ottoman! It actually worked out well, but I was worried that the room wouldn’t come together as I’d hoped when I learned that the turquoise velvet ottoman I’d ordered had been pushed back for delivery yet again. I had grabbed a wooden coffee table from the consignment shop as a backup, but the scale was all wrong. I kept looking, and luckily I came across Annie Selke’s rug ottomans! They come in a whole bunch of colors, but I picked a platinum rugby stripe that would play off of the chair color, while bringing in a little black for more contrast. Since it’s upholstered in a cotton rug rather than velvet, it’s going to be way more practical with the kids and pets, and I like the way the stripes play with all of the other patterns and textures in the room. The tray on top helps it function as a table.
There’s a blue and white striped dog bed from Fresh American that arrived too late to be in the photographs, but it goes where Murray’s old dog bed was, between the bookshelf and the sofa. I’ll try to get a shot of Murray sleeping on it and put it up on Instagram.
The Rose chairs from Interior Define arrived on Friday. Our sofa is fine, but these chairs are way nicer. More comfortable, more stylish, and better made. I chose a neutral upholstery color (“stone basketweave”) and added a pink throw pillow to both.
Phew, we made it to the end! Thank you so much for following along, and thank you to Linda at Calling it Home for organizing the One Room Challenge and inviting me to participate. I’m honored to have taken part and I loved the experience. Two rooms in six weeks felt a little like a whirlwind at times, but now that they’re finished, I can sit back and do a little happy dance!
I would love to hear your thoughts on the space, and don’t forget to check out all of the other amazing rooms that have been made over in this round of the One Room Challenge. So much inspiration to be had.
Follow along with the One Room Challenge participants!
• Claire Brody • The Curated House • Design Manifest • Driven by Decor • Honey We’re Home • Hunted Interior • The Makerista • Making it Lovely • My Sweet Savannah • Pencil and Paper Co. • The Pink Clutch • Savvy Home • Simplified Bee • Sketch 42 • Jill Sorensen • Orlando Soria • Thou Swell • The Vault Files • Waiting on Martha • The Zhush • Media Partner House Beautiful • TM by CIH
My One Room Challenge Sponsors
Thank you to the following sponsors for generously providing product.
• Annie Selke • Arianna Belle • Bellacor • Crystorama • Fresh American • Interior Define • Joss & Main • Lamps Plus • Loloi • Lowe’s • MegMade • Paintzen • Pine Cone Hill • Tonic Living
My One Room Challenge Posts
Follow along from the beginning!
• Week 1: The Before Shots • Week 2: The Design Plan • Week 3: All That Painted Woodwork • Week 4: Rugs, Curtains, Bedding, and Other Fabrics • Week 5: The Lighting • Week 6: The Bedroom and Den Final Reveal
Thank you for the great response to my new approach to these Making it Yours posts! I love sharing a bit more about the thought process behind the designs.
