Drama, The Good Kind.

Rumour has it that during the filming of Flashdance, when Jennifer Beals chopped the neck off of her now famous jumper, it was for practical reasons rather than to start a fashion revolution. After shrinking it in the dryer by accident, she realised it could no longer fit over her head, and took matters into her own hands. Inspired by Beals, young women around the world picked up their scissors, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Our bedroom was my personal shrunken jumper.

Our north facing flat actually does get a good amount of light in the living area, thanks to the floor to ceiling windows. Our mezzanine bedroom, on the other hand, always read as a dingy beige colour, despite the bright white paint and decent sized skylight above.

Contrary to the usual fear of dark colours, I was actually was really missing our charcoal fireplace wall. So in the spirit of Jennifer, I decided to work with the dinginess, rather than trying to make the room something it wasn't.

In the end I went with Farrow & Ball Studio Green, and the result is rich and dramatic.

Here are the initial plans and the before:

And here is what it looks like now:

The only remaining task for this room is to close off the open wardrobe (with thick floor to ceiling curtains), but I'm having a mental debate about the best way to do this with a curved ceiling line.
That side of the room looks like this:

Still, I'm crossing this one off the list and calling it done...ish.
 

Sourcing: Wall Colour - Studio Green F&B, Valentin Bed - Sofa.com, Chevron Grain Bedside Table - West Elm, Steinhauer Mexlite Swing Arm Lights - Wayfair, Astor Noir Bedding - Designer's Guild, Pillow Fabric - Waverley Olana Bayleaf fabric.com,  Pillow Inserts - Homescapes on Amazon

The Bedroom, Revisited

A holiday, a chest infection, a surprise proposal, and a new kitten - suffice it to say, the last four weeks have been quite eventful. So it feels like it was eons ago that I revealed plans for the new bedroom.

West Elm eventually opened after a couple delays, Christmas and New Years came and went, and now we finally have a new bedside tables!

Perhaps I should back up a little. At the moment, the bedroom still looks like this -

The only source of natural light in the bedroom is through the north facing windows downstairs, and a small the skylight. The effect of this unfortunately, is white walls that look dingy and bland. This is why I knew I had to go dark up here. Embrace the dingyness, if you will.

The only problem is, much like a ping pong ball, I kept going back and forth between F&B Hague Blue, and F&B Studio Green. So after riffling through my art supply stash, I created a large sample by painting an old canvas with my sample pot of Hague Blue. The pillow is just a sample as well - I will be making bigger ones in the same fabric (Olana Bayleaf by Waverley).

I'm probably about 70% sold on Hague Blue, but just to be sure, I have ordered a sample pot of Studio Green.

There is still so much to do - find the perfect lighting, order more fabric, and hire someone to paint, but it does feel like were slowly getting there!

The Bedroom

The last thing I should be doing today is writing a blog post, what with my ever expanding to-do list and ever dwindling living space.

As the boxes pile up, threatening my view of the TV from the sofa, there are a multitude of tasks I should be seeing to, like clearing out the cupboard under the sink perhaps. However I'm not quite brave enough to face the black hole that exists beyond the mountain of plastic shopping bags, so instead I procrastinate, and as a result, I have finally made some proper plans for the new bedroom.

I had been coveting the beds on Sofa.com for months, so finally we popped into their Chelsea showroom a few weeks ago...and when I say "popped in", what I really mean is took a 30 minute tube journey, walked 15 minutes from the station, and then climbed 3 flights of stairs up to the showroom. They couldn't have been more accommodating though, offering us every drink under the sun and being just lovely in general. About an hour later, we were the proud owners of the fabulous bed below.





I ordered the bed in an off-white coloured linen because I knew I wanted it to be the focal point on very dark grey/green walls. I also knew I wanted to use Waverley Olana Bayleaf fabric for pillows, and brass swing arm lamps, so finally, I put it all together for a visual:

There are only two teeny issues with this scenario:

1. I really like the look of Knoxville Grey for the walls, but finding Benjamin Moore paint in the UK is nigh on impossible. Quite frankly, the odds of Russell Brand asking me to marry him are greater, so I will have to either colour match or finding a similar hue by another brand.

2. The bedside table shown is from West Elm which is due to open it's first UK store here in London, but not until November. These bedside tables are my everything. Not only do I adore them, but they're also the perfect size and colouring for space, so it looks like we won't have bedside tables for a while.

So there you have it, the grand plans.

At some some point I would also like to add some sort of architectural detailing to make a feature of the main wall, but for right now it's baby steps.

I suppose I better get back to dehoarding and packing now....