That’s right, it’s the antepenultimate day of voting in the division brackets of the Apartment Therapy color contest.

It’s true, the man has painted stripes on his wall. Yes, he has some very lovely MCM furniture. But I ask you, dear readers, to vote for me anyway, because a) if I win, I’m going to buy a vegan sofa and you might get my beautiful chesterfield, b) my room was done – books, accessories, everything – for less than a thousand dollars, so I need the prize money more. Naturally, I’m being tongue-in-cheek here; these are completely irrelevant reasons and it really comes down to personal preference. But it was fun to be in it this far and get so many great comments, so thanks!

I want to make one thing clear: I am not getting married. But thanks to Apartment Therapy’s color contest this month, I’ve been thinking a lot about color and what it takes to create a successful color palette. And thanks to design*sponge, I was introduced to Once Wed, a stunningly lovely collection of wedding ideas, photography, and decorating porn. It borders on the obscene it’s so beautiful. There are a lot of photos of flowers and the outdoors, and I can spend entire afternoons going through the site and creating potential romantic room palettes based on them.

Taking the deep, muted green of the leaves and adding yellow, pink, and red, we get this, the most beautiful bedroom I have ever seen:

This is one of the most awesomest bedrooms I have ever seen. Farrow & Ball in Down Pipe is the color, though it looks greener here. Love.

Or, this:

Or even this:

Or from my *other* favorite color contest entry:

Check out Once Wed for some great color inspiration, and
vote tomorrow (!) for me and for Gidget (and for whomever else you like)!

I seem to have entered a contest. It happened late the other night, after agonizing over photos of my living room for three days, and at the urging of my boyfriend and a few glasses of wine, I entered the Apartment Therapy Room for Color contest. I meant to do it, of course, but now that it’s up and my very personal home choices are displayed for all to see, I’m feeling pretty self-conscious. Unfortunately, wine does not help one proofread, so I mostly just wish I had written out the answers beforehand and avoided embarrassing typographical errors. But, it happens.

Anyway, if you’re already a member of the AT community, or you’re not just signing up to vote for me, click here to vote (check out all the other entries and, while you’re there, sign up for the cure)! Leave a comment if you wish, but please remember two things: 1) if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, and 2) please refrain from signing your comment,¹ because it makes it look like I just hired some friends to vote for me. Which I’m totally doing². But no one else needs to know that.

xoxo

This is a far cry from the lemon lime disaster that plagued me on my first go round.

¹Unless you are Matte Stephens, then I encourage you to sign it, because I cite you as my color inspiration, so it’s appropriate. Thank you.
²Though I briefly considered it, this is not actually true … yet.

(I know, sounds like too much, doesn’t it?)

Painting my kitchen has made some of my previous bright, kitschy artwork obsolete:

Though they were cute, I’m selling my roosters, which don’t really go with the muted wall color anymore, and it’s time for someone else to enjoy them. That leaves a small space which I have unsuccessfully tried to fill, but I’m wanting something a little more – dare I say it – modern?

I love gocco because it has that feeling of being old in a new way, like pictures taken with a Holga. What is gocco? The savegocco.com website explains:

Print gocco, is a Japanese color screenprinting system developed in 1977 by Noboru Hayama. Resembling a toy, the compact and completely self-contained printer is clean, quick and easy to use. The system works using flash bulbs, a carbon-based image or photocopy and an emulsion-coated screen. When the bulbs are manually flashed the carbon burns the screen into a stencil. Several colors of Ink can then be applied at one time and multiples can be stamped out, as many as 100 before re-inking is needed. Fans of print gocco appreciate its size, cleanliness, relatively inexpensive cost, and the fact that several colors can be printed in one “pass.”

If this sounds too complicated and you lack a modicum of creative skills, there are a lot of very talented artists selling their gocco prints on etsy. Here are some contenders for my kitchen corner (or that I just think are cool):

Summer Song gocco print, $12

Forsythia branch gocco print, $6

tiny village gocco print, $20 from katep

hey hi banana print, $15 from sugarcookie

vintage lamps gocco print, $8 from cindytomczykart

Gold Series 3 by AmyMarcella, $20

pumpernickel flowers by wonting, $10

fish school gocco by kerrybeary, $12

Golden Fruit by pinkbathtub, $10

Double Camera gocco by leighwells, $18

occie orie 1.1 by birdsandswings, $14

Sacre Coeur by LizzyStewart, $25

Gocco Misprint/Fun print by e50e, just $5!

Raindrop gocco print by blancucha, $22

cluster leaf print by meganauman, $10

Shine by deebeale, $20

Doodle Gocco by nateduval, $15

I think I’m going to have to go with katep’s tiny village, but I have to buy e50e’s misprint because it’s awesome and only $5. I’ll find someplace to put it later.

It’s been two years since I moved into my adorable, odd little bungalow in Venice Beach. It’s hard to believe now that I ever considered subjecting it to this:

Yes, this was the original palette I picked for the house. Sigh.

or, in fact, to any of these. But, while I picked out stupid colors for walls, I believe my method was sound. I’d picked out a Matte Stephens painting and chosen colors based on it. Now, two years, a lot of study, a lot of living with bold colors, and a new Matte Stephens painting later, it’s evolved into this much more suitable palette:

This is the current color palette for my house.

According to the Apartment Therapy cure (and countless professional designers and sane people), a color palette in your home should be 80 percent neutral and 20 percent color. When I first read this, I sort of went on a defensive rant in my head (and here) about how stifling and anti-creative this is. I was also totally missing the point. I was interpreting “neutral” as white, cream, beige, and maybe gray. I wasn’t thinking brown, wood, or grayish greens and blues. But as soon as I painted my kitchen this lovely dark greenish gray, I realized that it was indeed a neutral, and it flowed from the living room without a jarring contrast.

After three failed attempts at choosing paint, I mixed them together and got this.

See, last week when I decided to repaint my kitchen – the only room in the house that hasn’t been repainted – I first chose a sunny yellow, then a creamy off-white. And they were both too light. Just because the white was a neutral didn’t mean it worked – it was too much contrast with the dark blue of the living room and the dark wood of the cabinets. It just didn’t make any sense. Frustrated, I mixed together the failed yellow and the blue from the living room, plus a little of the white, and came up with this dark gray green, which is perfect. And, dare I say, neutral? What do you think? Do these dark, desaturated hues count as neutral?

More pictures to come after the cleanup!

Alex is going to the paint store today to pick up the paint (duh) for the new house. Here’s the final palette for the place – the small wood rectangle in the living room is the color of our log cabin wall and door trim, and the dark wood strip is the floor and kitchen cabinets.

I can’t help thinking that nobody in their right mind would paint their walls these colors, but there’s something I can’t stand about “accent walls” – if you’re going to do it, just f*%#ing do it. I know that’s just me, but I hate white walls. Besides, our pseudo-Scandinavian bookshelf system is going to cover much of that bright green, making it just a backdrop for all our shelved crap. To make a somewhat-lower cost version of this:

we bought those metal vertical rail things you get at hardware stores in brown instead of silver or white to mimic the look of wood. We chose supports in brass to give it a vintage look, and are staining the shelves to look like teak. To make it more interesting (and custom), we’re offsetting the shelves and cutting them in different lengths to accommodate our walls, sloped ceiling, cabinets, and sliding glass door. The brown and brass supports we found at B&B hardware in Culver City (Home Depot only carries silver, white, and some black), but they weren’t cheap: the hardware alone set us back $100 for the entire 10′ x 12′-14′ wall, but it’s a LOT less expensive than these vintage systems, which can run up to around $4000 in high end vintage stores and around $600 – $1000 on CL or ebay, if you can find one locally.

Because we need the space where the credenza is to walk around the table, we’ll only be recreating the upper storage boxes. Ikea’s small storage boxes work well for this use:

because they can be painted or stained to match. Naturally, they have shelving systems as well that are very affordable and can mimic this look too, but they kind of scream ikea and we wanted something more custom to our space. Thrift stores, too, often have wooden shelves with sliding doors as well that can fit under or over a shelf to create a block of enclosed space. So far, here’s what it looks like:

Then it gets a coat of bright green paint …

It’s one thing to redecorate a room or even a house using things you already have. But it’s not often you get a chance to start from scratch with a completely blank slate. It’s a little overwhelming, and it’s hard to know where to start. One thing I’ve heard you’re not supposed to do is start with colors – I think you’re supposed to pick your furniture pieces and then coordinate your wall colors and accents around that. But, being a graphic designer, I can’t help but start with wall colors:

To me, the best way to pick color palettes is to copy someone else’s. By that I mean sampling colors from posters, websites, paintings, fabric, anything with colors you arlready like and put them together to create a unique palette that no one else is probably going to have on their walls. I heart Matte Stephens, so I looked at paintings like this:

and tweaked the colors until I found combinations I liked. Now, whether these will actually look good on walls remains to be seen.