Dining/ Office two ways

Folks, I am in one of those "something's got to give" moments, and clearly it's the blog that is taking the hit.

My volunteer commitments are out of control at the moment, and my family is making their discontent known.  This weekend my five year old delivered an envelope (addressed, by the way, to Hethr, not "mommy") with a wrapped drawing inside and a note that read as follows: "Dear Mommy, I think we should do more things together."

It will be so.

Right now I am very lucky to be working on one space in an amazing 1970s home, filled with light from enormous windows and all sorts of quirky layouts and interesting features.  The room is technically a formal dining room, but used as a homework space for the kids and sometime-office when mom works from home.

We talked about looking at options for a round table with 6 chairs or a rectangle table set up like a desk, with one big comfy "executive" chair facing a pair of more kid-friendly chairs.

Here's what my client did not choose:

Similar palette, similar vibe, different layout and all different pieces.  Both honor the home's vintage while still feeling current.

What would you choose?  Hopefully I will share my client's choice, if I get the a-okay.

Oh, and did you miss me?

Say yes!

An Office Transformation

I have just been kicking myself lately.  I never seem to remember to take the oh-so-important "before" shots.  I'm usually so excited to start a job, I sort of just dive right in.

Let's just say that this office looked like this before.

White walls, fluorescent lighting, commercial carpet, aluminum blinds.  Okay, the actual office is a little less NYC, a little more suburban midwestern office park, but you get the idea.

And now:

Welcome!

This is the office of a small family foundation, and it needed to feel comfortable, elegant, and classy, and to reflect the family in general and the foundation namesake in particular.  In my inspiration, I found myself thinking of Nate Berkus: masculine, traveled, neutrals and textures--only with a little less modern edge.  The photo above is the view from the front door.  When you come in, there is this seating area to the right.

The mix of antique walnut, leather, velvet, mohair, antiqued mirror, gold, and blue and white pottery feels collected and a little old money to me.

That small angled wall is actually an interior floor to ceiling window with that chicken wire glass and terrible aluminum blinds.  The blinds are NEVER opened, so instead of turning the angle into a feature, we decided to make it "disappear" into the wall, and softened it up with a pleated flat roman shade in a Schumacher silk the same color as the walls.

One of the fun things about this project was using the art that the foundation had collected one way or another over the years.  These Native american watercolors are beautiful, and helped set the color palette.

In the seating area, we swapped out the big fluorescents for recessed halogen floodlights, and supplemented them with wall sconces and table lamps.

I blogged the frame transofrmation (above) here, and the massive gallery wall here (and here.)

I'll be back with a few more details and ideas on accessorizing an office space.  And someday I will learn to not only take "before" shots, but to take a decent "after" shot as well!

Office Options

Over the summer, I've been working on a long-distance project with some small business owners in NYC.  After figuring out the optimum layout for their 600sf of raw NY loft-y space, I put together a couple of looks for the lounge area.

Two conference/dining rooms

(Table and chairs, light fixture, wall treatment)

Or 4 different looks for a seating area.  (Each group reads form top: Light fixture, couch, coffee table, chairs, wall treatment)

1.

2.

3.

4.

To be clear, this is an either/or, not a both/and.

I honestly can't pick a favorite.  Love the masculine vibe and the mix of modern/industrial/funky elements.  Very fun to put together!

Office Progress

Oh, boy.  I'm about to show you something slightly horrifying (okay, at least embarrassing), and it is only Monday.

I gave you a peek at my office a while back, and mentioned plans to double the desk space to accommodate two work stations.  When we bought this house, little did we know we'd need two stations as we started two businesses and had two grown ups working from home.  Thankfully, this office is huge and right off the living room, an unusual scenario to say the least.

This was the workspace scenario before:

And here it is after:

I'm sort of covering my eyes with my fingers to look at this.  I'd like to claim that we JUST put the second desk in and we are still getting settled, but that would be a bald faced lie:  it has been weeks.  And weeks.

We filched the additional grey filing cabinet from my childhood bedroom (after I cleaned out the files, which included the program from every play I ever saw, among other long-lost "treasures".  Yikes!).  We bought a pine board from Home Depot and applied three coats of varnish, with some light sanding in between.  We put the board on the filing cabinets.  This is a project with a very low "difficulty" rating.

I like to think it kind of looks like the office of a small (and poor) but up and coming architect.  Clearly we have some organizing to do, but here's the real problem:  that Ghost chair, while lovely and stylish, is horribly uncomfortable for sitting and blogging and sourcing fine finds for my clients all the livelong day (and night).  Ideally, I would get another chair just like the one in there, not so much because I need everything in pairs (though that is certainly an affliction), more because there's already a lot going on in there.

The busy cowhide.  The bright colors in the art wall.  The orange chair itself and the bright yellow lamp.  And I love it all.  (Except the clutter, but that's not staying!)  What else could you really throw in there but another Eames office chair without things going off the rails?

Well, here's the problem:  our chair is fiberglass, like the vintage ones.  It is from Modernica, the owners of the original Eames mold, and we bought it through Modlivin, an AWESOME store in Denver.  Shortly after we bought it, the mold BROKE.  And while Modernica does seem to have a bunch of them still on hand, there do not appear to be any orange shells left.  And while the molded plastic ones that everyone sells have their place, yes, they really just aren't quite my thing.  Which means I am about to sign over hours of my life to obsessive ebay searching for a vintage orange fiberglass Eames shell armchair.  How's the for a list of keywords?  (Or maybe I'll call Modernica in the morning during business hours and see if they can hook me up.)

I'm sure I'll break down and come up with another solution, but for now, this is my plan, and I'm sticking to it.

Well: the Indigo shell is nice, too.

So, tell me: is your office just as messy?  Please tell me it is.

Loving Graphic Wall Treatments

So, you may have noticed that stencils are kind of a trend.  Probably because wallpaper is "back in a big way" but not super affordable.  (I'm not quoting anyone directly there, by the way, it just feels like I've heard or read that phrase a gazillion times in the past year.)

I have two big walls that offer up molto opportunities for some creative stenciling--the laundry room upstairs and the back wall of the office--and I'm just now discovering a trend in the designs I'm drawn to.  Okay, sort of two trends.

It kind of all started with this image, seen in a sneak peek on design sponge and ohdeedoh (which came first?  Who can say).

[here and here]

I love the effect of the overall triangle pattern, which the homeowner drew and painted by hand.  And I found myself having the urge to do something similar with a hexagon shape, like the bigger, more colorful cousin of the backsplash we added to our kitchen.  Kind of like a painted version of this.

[here]

I love the more limited color palette in this one, and the way it is so hand made yet almost feels digital in the color gradients.  I also like that the pattern does not go all the way to the edges.  Cool, right?

This next one uses simple squares, but ramps up the interest by using gradient colors.

[here]

So pretty.  This is from Dwell Studio, and I am remembering a similar wall treatment in a loft that, I believe, belongs to Christiane Lemieux, though I could be wrong.  I can picture the living space perfectly--maybe it was in Elle Decor?  Anyone?  (But I digress.)  Also, I wish I could be okay with this bed being nowhere near centered on the wall treatment, but I'm not.  Call me rigid.  I won't argue.

Anyway.  Then I saw this one on Apartment Therapy last week, in a house tour.

[here]

Which feels really hand made, and also does the work of a wallpaper while celebrating its stencil-ness by stopping short of the edges of the wall.  Here's a detail.

[here]

And then today on Apartment Therapy I saw this fabric stencil project, which similarly shows its hand.  I would love this on a wall.

[here]

And just to throw something vintage in there, because you know I love to look on back to the good old days, I found this.

[here]

This treatment is made from wood, which is awesome, but I can also see painting a tone on tone pattern to create a similar optical illusion.  I love the geometry of this, but the overall effect is kind of quiet.  Which might be a good thing.

Or, how about doing the opposite, and going kind of loud?

[here]

Did you ever play that drawing game where you create a shape, draw a point in the corner of the paper, then draw lines from every corner of your shape to the point, to create a 3-d object?  No?  It's fun.  This painting kind of reminds me of that.

So it appears that I need to tackle the office and/or the laundry room with a large-scale, overall graphic pattern that feels hand-made, whether hand painted, stenciled, or block-printed, and that it should perhaps use gradient or tone on tone color.  Sound good?

So that narrows it down.  Guess I'll get designing!

Oh, but there was that other trend emerging in my inspiration files.  Come on back tomorrow and I'll round it up.

Caution: Art Wall in Progress

To be honest, I was feeling a little reluctant to create a second full-scale art wall in the house. This one is already a major statement in the office (more on that here)


but the truth is we have lots of little pieces and lots of BIG blank walls, so you do the math. Typically, if someone insisted on two (or more) gallery walls in one house, I would recommend two different styles. Probably one more free form like my office and one sort of regimented, a big grid of matching frames. But I don't have the pieces for that. So I suppose I'll have to settle on one wildy colorful and one mostly black and white.

Anyhoo.

I got things all mocked up in the master bedroom, and asked my husband to approve the layout before I got to putting all those nails in the walls.

(I decided to incorporate the floor lamp, and keep things high enough to accommodate a possible future occasional table between the chairs.)

You know what he said? He likes it just like this. Brown paper, blue tape.

He is more avant garde than I.

I can see from these photos that I need to adjust the spacing just a bit. Probably just as well: I try to hold off on hammering while the kids are asleep.