Living Room Makeover
Stage one: mood-boarding
The living and dining room of our house where the first two rooms we decorated when we first moved in exactly 7 years ago. The Cath Kidston Birds & Roses wallpaper, and what was left of it, moved with us and we used it straight away for the two rooms as it was what we had at our previous home. I matched all the colours like Slipper Satin on the walls, Pale Powder on the bookcases and all the furniture from our previous home. But our previous home was north facing and this home is south facing where the Slipper Satin is too yellow for my liking, the wallpaper and fabrics are too Yvestown 2015 and it’s all just too frilly and traditional to my liking.
We needed to move fast when we first moved in as we couldn’t live with all the black and unfinished decorating the previous owners left us. So we build a bookcase wall, a fake fireplace and we updated and added a lot of crown moulding and architraves around the doors and windows.
After 15 years I’m done with the Cath Kidston Birds & Roses print, don’t know why as I still love to look at it but I don’t want it to dominate my home any longer. So after a lot of sleepless nights, as I have finally reached menopauze, making moodboards on Pinterest and on the Jane Clayton website I came with a new plan.
I took my little desk in the dining room for inspiration, also the beautiful shelves at The Hambledon in Winchester packed with the most gorgeous botanical prints and checks. I also love the Keecie colour palette I use for all my personal accessories. Mixing all that up, I will replace the wallpaper with Sandberg’s Karolina in green. As we have a lot of floral wallpaper in our home I thought I go for just leaves in these two rooms and green because I love pink and green together. The sofa slipcover will be replaced by a powder pink one from Soferia. The wall colour I don’t know yet as I’ve just ordered the wallpaper and will match the background colour of the wallpaper, same counts for the bookcase colour. Will I change all this in one go? No, I will do it whenever it suits my schedule and my bank balance.
All the portraits are painted by Boris and he takes commissions.
Love, Yvonne xxx