Hi! Thanks so much for being here! I’m thrilled to be participating as a Guest Participant in the One Room Challenge! The ORC is a biannual event where featured designers and guest designers transform a room in 6 weeks! So please follow along for the next five Thursday’s and see how I plan to transform my living room!
My living room today, shown in the above photo, is filled with collected furniture and inherited pieces from my parents. While I have been incredibly grateful for the items that came from my parents …(that area rug has been in our family for 40 years!) ….I have decided to practice what I preach….and create a room filled with colors that speak to me.
The current living room is a blend of muted oranges, greens and blues. Those were my ‘mother’s colors’. Throughout our life growing up in Hawaii, our home was always filled with variations of those three colors. I didn’t know it as a child, but those colors represented who my mom was…..
Orange signifies warmth and affection; green signifies nature and renewal and blue means calm and tranquility. Oh, how I miss my mom! She was an artist and a homemaker and she made our a home a place filled with love, beauty and serenity. I am very blessed.
When my parents died seven years ago, I wanted to hold on to all of those memories and live with the things that they had in their home. It was incredibly comforting to me. So, I had many of these things shipped to me, and recreated a bit of my childhood by incorporating some of their art collection; furnishings and decorative objects into the space. That was really a turning point for me, and that is when I began to see how color can affect your mood. Because of that, my interior design business evolved into helping my clients determine what colors bring them joy and comfort.
So now….back to the ORC! I am going to be keeping many of the elements in the room but I will be changing the colors to reflect who I am. The colors that I am drawn to are pink, blue, orange and green (on a more saturated level than what my mom was drawn to.) So yes, I am very much like my mom….but with the addition of pink. Pink is vivacious, nurturing, vibrant and full of love!
When designing a room, my inspiration most often comes from art, and my new living room is no exception. Earlier this year, I found an artist on Instagram whose work I fell in love with! Her name is Lanie Mann, and I contacted her and bought one of her pieces. It has all of the colors that I love - in juicy, saturated tones.
The colors in the art are integral to my design concept. So here is the plan!
I want to change the rug to be the groundwork for the design. (Don’t worry, I will save the current rug for one of my kids!). I have spent hours and hours trying to find the perfect rug and I’ve chosen this from Stark Carpet:
Luckily, it’s in stock and on it’s way! Yay! I know you were probably expecting something pink…..but my plan is to build the color by using vibrant accent pillows, art and other details! The rest of plan includes:
Selecting Fabrics
Reupholstering a few pieces of furniture
Selecting new seating furniture
New coffee table
New art and reframing existing (original art of course!)
Restyling the bookshelves
New lamps
Stay tuned for next week! For more inspiration, please check out the ORC Featured Designers as well as the other Guest Participants!
