old & new coming together with a little styling

The floral den is done! When we began creating this space, we knew we wanted it to be something special—a room both bold and charming and full of ‘grandma chic’ while still feeling comforting and cozy. The room is separated from the rest of the first floor of the home (as opposed to the office, front sitting room, and kitchen and dining room which all kind of flow into one another) so we wanted to take that opportunity to make it a little splashy and surprising to walk in to.

We wanted to push our own boundaries a bit, trying to piece together old and new in extreme ways, like placing a gigantic sectional in a room that we’d normally plop a Victorian love seat. It all came together just as we’d hoped. During the day it acts as a place for a little respite or a cat nap, and at night in the glow of the art deco pendant it acts as the perfect place to read or, lately, watch a slasher film. We’ve decided to play into the natural shadows cast around the room, letting the wallpaper do it’s own dark and moody thing. We find it’s always best to let a room that gets little natural light stay on the darker side.

We decided to keep the framed out portion of the back wall behind the sofa as opposed to sheetrocking over it all—this was, at some point in the last century, an opening to another room (currently our navy office) that somebody had sealed up. We kept it closed off but added a more elaborate door casing to make it spicy. It became the perfect space to curate a gallery wall full of old and new art pieces, alongside some personal photos.

Given that the wallpaper was one of the first design decisions we made in here (it’s called Bloomin’ Marvelous by Divine Savages), we drew from it to inform the paint color. We could have chosen to tone ourselves down here and gone with something muted or even a warm white, but we wanted a color that really went in for the maximalist kill, complementing the pink hues in the paper and starting to flirt with sensory overload. We found Rosedust by Sherwin-Williams did just that. We actually hesitated a bit on painting the baseboards and door and window casings this same color, but hesitation doesn’t make a fun space, so we went for it and I’m really glad we did.

There are plenty more images for you below, and I’ve gone ahead and linked some of the pieces towards the very bottom of this post :)