We’ve always loved bold color and charm in our living spaces and designs—things like our camper’s geometric wood flooring and hand-painted Southwestern exterior, and our old pink dining room and our new pink dining room. Bold color, for us, brings a little extra joy into a space, and can really help a home’s design look and feel intentional.

So, when we moved from our cute bright pink house in New Orleans into a somewhat sterile modern apartment in a small town outside the city, we knew we were gonna have to really do some work to make the space pop in a true-to-Probably-This-way. We enlisted the help of our assistant, Fox the chihuahua, and got to work trying to find pieces that would bring this modern space from boring to “daaaanggg look at this!!” while making sure not to do anything that would enrage our landlords.

As always, we started the process of the room design by creating a moodboard. A collage moodboard is an easy and time-cheap way to make sure the pieces you want to include will actually look good together—ours is below:

A collage moodboard is an easy and time-cheap way to make sure the pieces you want to include will actually look good together.

Once we dressed up the space, we worked with local New Orleans artists, Logan Ledford and Cubs the Poet, to create pieces that complimented the room’s look and feel. We love working with local artists and makers on our projects—there’s too much talent in this city not to, tbh, and it makes home feel a little more like home.

The sofa, arm chair, and media cabinet all came from Joybird, a furniture company that specializes in midcentury modern designs with the option to customize materials, colors, and wood finishes. Their selection is absolutely incredible, and all three items we got from them look and feel so so high quality. The Preston Reversible Sectional in Cordova Amber is the real focal point of the room. If you’ve ever scrolled through our Instagram you may have noticed we love yellow, and we really wanted to lean into that love to bring a good bit of warmth to the space (and really make sure that we knocked out the sterile feeling). We styled the sofa with two pink seashell pillows for a touch of camp and hung a shelf we’d painted the lightest shade of blush just above the sofa. We used it to display the color swatch piece artist Logan Ledford created with some of our favorite colors.

Across the room is the view we have for a few hours every night when we’re binging Netflix. We got the first TV of our entire adult lives together last December (yes, really), and we’ve been patiently searching for the perfect media console to display beneath it ever since. The Oberlin Console Cabinet was an easy choice once we found it, since its natural wood doors and white and black accents is the perfect neutral complement to some of the brighter pops of color in the room. We’ve said it a dozen times and we’ll say it again—the key to working with bold colorful pieces is to make sure you’ve got something more neutral they can stand out from. This console does exactly that.

The third piece we got from Joybird is the Elliot Apartment Chair. We love a chair that can really swallow it’s occupant up in the coziest way, while still being a fantastic part of a room’s design. This chair does that so well, while keeping with the clean lines and minimal structure that all the room’s pieces have.

Finally, the rugs that serve as the canvas for the space. You probably saw them in our rug layering blog post—but we’ve got a jute rug on the bottom as the base and then a blue & white woven rug on top to add a pop of color. We love layering rugs, especially in spaces that are kinda barebones, as it helps to bring in a bit of coziness, as well as further dedicating a space in an open floor plan.

On top of those rugs sits the pink oblong coffee table from Article, because of course we needed something (else) blush. The two other tables in the room are vintage—one French side table that Matt scored at a local consignment shop, and another basket-weave side table we found in a thrift store in Tennessee. We pretty much always mix in some vintage (or just, like, old) pieces into a space because it does help add character, and reusing pieces is a great thing to do. Check out the links to all items used below, and let us know what you think!