Designing My Dream Space: Interior Design from a Beginner's Perspective
Help me choose a design!
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If I can take everything that I know about clothing in terms of color, texture, patterns and layering and apply it to interior design, then maybe I could be good at it?!?
-me, a few days ago
I got my window seat back this past weekend and while I’ve known this was going to happen for a while, I’ve been putting off thinking about what I’m going to do to this room now that it’s about to embark on it’s last (?) iteration.
I was recently at a new friend’s home and I loved how each room felt a little different, even though there was a cohesiveness to them all. I want that for my home, which currently all feels the same, and while I like how things look generally, I’m a little bored by all of the white, especially in this particular room.
I’ve never fully put a room together in one go, usually building onto it slowly, but I really wanted to try something new with this one. So, please join me as I explore the past lives of this small, but mighty, room and explore what it’s next life might look like.
The Past
The room that this window seat belongs to has had many lives. When we moved into our house, we had a 2-year old and it immediately became a playroom. We had moved from a 2-bedroom apartment without a lot of room into a 4-bedroom house and we were giddy with all the space. Almost instantly I ordered a train table and a kitchenette. The window seat didn’t exist yet, but I did buy a couple of cheap bookshelves to hold books, games and toys.
I have a flashbulb memory of my son and his little friend “playing” in the room one day and when I came to inspect what all the ruckus was about, I discovered that they had taken every book, game and toy off the shelves and out of their respective boxes/bins and strewn them all over the floor.
I couldn’t look at those bookshelves without remembering the hours spent cleaning up that mess and it wasn’t too long after when I started envisioning getting rid of them. Maybe you think that’s a strange response, but it eventually led to my beloved window seat.
The main problem was that we needed storage in this room. This was a few years before I became interested in minimalism and I was still striving for more stuff to fill all the empty corners of every room. So, I tasked my husband with building a bookshelf all the way around the window, which I wanted a window seat for.
I envisioned watching my kids playing in the yard from this seat and as they got older and didn’t need me to be outside with them constantly, that’s exactly what I did.
I spent hours at this window with Kaya by my side. Oh, how I miss my little shadow 😢
I never did have a proper cushion for the seat - I simply repurposed a number of different rugs (cotton or sheepskin) to make the seat a little softer but there were many instances of my butt going numb!
The walls changed from the burnt orange color that it had been when we moved in, which we had kept because orange was our son’s favorite color, to a dark grey, to alabaster white (SW) and we changed the flooring from carpet to wood.
Once the kids got a little older and could play in a more unsupervised manner, all of their toys that were in this room moved to the family room in the basement and this became more of a place to play games, craft and read books. And it stayed like this for a few years, until mid-2018 when I took it over as my studio, and also a partial closet.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, I decided to give my closet over to my husband for his office as he was solely working from home at the time and needed a quiet place to do video calls. So, all of my clothes, shoes and accessories were moved to this room, and it stayed this way for the next year and a bit.
It was great for creating wardrobe content but I eventually got tired of having to leave my bedroom every day to get dressed and once my husband was no longer using the closet as an office, I moved everything back up there. The room stayed as a studio until around 2022 when I took a step back from Instagram and creating content.
Hating to have a space we weren’t utilizing fully, we turned it into a den, mostly for my husband.
His hobby is music - playing guitar and listening to records. The window seat was the perfect place to put his record player, amp and speakers. The bookshelves were a perfect place to house his record collection and art supplies. We did keep a couple of shelves for some books but I had decluttered a lot of our previous book collection up to this point.
The Present
My husband wanted to find a vintage record console that he could rebuild, eventually locating one on Facebook marketplace for $300. He acquired it the weekend before Christmas and spent much of his break refinishing the console - it was in pretty good shape but the veneer needed to be redone in some places and he made all new legs for it.
His Christmas gift was a set of speakers for it and he was excited to install them. He bought an amp for it so that he could play music (and make sure that the speakers worked) while he waited to find a turntable for it. Realizing that it was pointless to have 2 record players, he decided to take the turntable out of the plinth that he already had and install it into the console.
And he’s very happy with how it turned out. He has a gorgeous piece of furniture that plays music as he had envisioned it. I like that it sits in our living room and now we can play music for the whole house, basically.
But that means that this room is free again to be whatever we want it to be. And we’ve decided that it will once again be a cozy family space where we can read, play games and be creative.
A few days ago, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, we removed the remainder of the record equipment and started to shape it into what I hope it will become. We still had the little table that I bought a few years ago to use as a desk/sewing table so we brought that up out of storage. We placed an old bench that was in the foyer behind it for a full side of seating. I brought an extra chair that is generally unused in for seating on the other side.
I took the old curtains (these ones) down and washed them (embarrassingly, for the first time) and then I folded up an old quilt to act as a temporary cushion. I did fold a grey/white duvet cover over it because I liked the pattern more than the floral one on the quilt.
I brought in our chess board that my husband made and some card games that are now stored in a bin as opposed to a kitchen drawer and added a little rug in the window unit to make a cat bed.
All of the records are still being housed in here until we save a little more money to build 2 matching cabinets to go on either side of the record console in the living room. But in the meantime, I’m working out a plan for this room.
I think I said this last year as well, but I really want to make our home feel cozy and warm again. I was going back through old photos as I was writing this post and I feel like our house was more a reflection of us back then than it is now.
I think a part of that is due to my minimalism phase and while I still prefer for the main space of our fairly open plan house to remain alabaster white (which is actually quite a warm white), I’m ready to infuse some color back into smaller spaces.
The Future
When it comes to interior design, I’m not very confident. Not that I think I’m bad at decorating, I just don’t think I’m great at it.
But when it comes to clothes and styling them, I feel very confident and I had a sort of lightbulb moment this morning - if I can take everything that I know about clothing in terms of color, texture, patterns and layering and apply it to interior design, then maybe I could be good at it?!?
And then I reminded myself that I’ve been playing with clothes for decades - at times, it’s been my only hobby - so it makes sense that I feel really comfortable in that realm but that I’ll feel like a fish out of water when it comes to something new, like interior design!
Paint
This room has a mostly northern exposure which means that it doesn’t get much direct light and the light that it does get tends to be cooler toned (think grey-blue).
The one saving grace of this room is that the window in it is large in relation to the size of the room, so I don’t think I need to worry about making the room feel smaller with a darker paint color.
Based on all of the research that I’ve done, the consensus is to paint the room with a warm-toned paint to balance the naturally cool tones. I’m thankful that we chose SW Alabaster all those years ago as I do think it looks nice in here, but it doesn’t feel cozy in here during the day!
I have settled on painting the walls, trim and built-in bookshelf/window seat some shade of green. A search of warm toned greens on the Sherwin Williams website yields the following plethora of colors that I can choose from:
A number of decorating websites and reddit threads have returned “Liveable Green”, “Grassland” and “Softened Green” as nice choices for this type of room. These all read a little too grey for my liking.
In the mid-green range, I am attracted to “Clary Sage”, “Broccoflower” (maybe it’s the name), “Leapfrog”, and “Artichoke” (this makes me think of my best friends in college baking a big artichoke heart and serving it with dip for my husband and I - miss you, V!)
As I scrolled through colors on my computer one night, my husband and I both liked “Greenfield” and “Inverness” (honestly, I might just go with this one purely for the name). Inverness invokes the memory of our trip to Scotland and reminds me of the greenery.
Ughhh, I can’t wait until I get to go back!
Window Seat Cushion
This time around, I’m determined to have a proper cushion for the window seat! I’m looking for one with a zipper as we have cats that like to sit and look out the window, and who have also had fur balls while doing that in the past (actually, it’s just been Claire!) so it’d be nice to be able to remove the cover to wash.
I know that a basic window seat is something that I could probably sew but I’m not confident in my ability to put a zipper in or to do piping which I would like to have on one side at least. Unable to locate somebody local and not wanting to go with any of the big companies that come up when you search for “custom window seat cushion”, I took my search to Etsy and looked for a small company in the US.
I found a shop called FabricDesignHomeART in Forest Hills, NY and at first I really liked the idea of a velvet cushion, but after going through the materials, I didn’t really like any of the samples that were shown, realizing that I’d like to have something with more of a weave texture, like linen. I settled on this one, I think.
We also plan to do some kind of wood surround all the way around the window seat box and the stain color that we choose will depend on the paint color that we go with - if a darker green, we’ll probably do a lighter stain and if a lighter green, we’ll probably do a walnut colored stain. This might impact the color of the cushion as well.
Actually, after putting some ideas together, I was able to decide on a cushion color that I liked with every option - “Mocha”.
Rug
This room has a weird floor plan as it has a coat closet protruding into one corner and I find this makes it challenging to get a regularly sized rug. Right now, we have an old wool rug in here that used to be in our living room but our cats thought it was great for sharpening their claws. It was an 8’x10’ rug but we had to cut a corner off it to accommodate the closet and make it fit the room.
If I could find an 8’x8’ rug, I think that would be perfect for the space.
I think I’d like for the rug to be plaid, after seeing this one, and the 9’3”x7’3” would work in the space but it would take up most of the width - does that break any decorating rules for rug size?
There also wouldn’t be any rug back in the far end of the room, under the table, but I think that would be fine.
This one comes in a 7’10” square so I think the size would work well and I really like how the colors complement the paint and wood of the combinations that I’ve come up with:
As much as I would love a wool rug, my cats can’t be trusted to not destroy it and they love being in this room, so I’m not looking to spend a lot on it.
Lighting
This room has one ceiling light and I only recently realized that it’s not centered in the room in either direction (the placement is actually so weird), and I find it very annoying!
It currently has an old plastic “artichoke” light that we bought YEARS ago for $30 at some home improvement store. It looks pretty crappy and needs to be replaced - the plastic has even warped in some areas.
Because of the weird placement of the light, I think I’ll stick with something with a flush mount to keep it a little closer to the ceiling, as opposed to a pendant. I also like how the light doesn’t interfere with our view of our “mummers” across the top shelf.
I think I like this one - unimposing but nice to look at. It also has a linen shade which ties it in nicely with the seat cushion.
Finishing Touches
I am unsure about what to do with the curtains. I think I would like to do something with a diffuse floral pattern in the same colors as whatever rug I choose for a little pattern mixing. I think I will sew the curtains for the room myself and I would probably choose a material with an ivory or beige base - something like this or this would work:
There are also sheer curtains on the french doors but I think I would dye them to match the paint color.
I will use paintings and pictures that we already have for the walls and I am unsure about the cushions for the window seat - I will also likely repurpose ones that we already have in another room.
Final Design
After going through all of that, I think I’ve narrowed the design down to 2:
Ok, that ended up being a much more in-depth post than I had originally intended! But I feel really good about the direction this project is heading in.
I have a couple of questions for anyone who wants to chime in:
I know I want to paint the built-in the same color as the wall. Would you also paint the trim the same color, à la “color drenching”?
On the same vein, would you also paint the ceiling the same color of green or keep it white?
If you have any advice, I’d love to hear it!
Thanks for reading! xx Gillian
I love this kind of post, especially as I’m currently looking at a million swatches of things too!
My whole apartment is dark, and after fighting it for years I know have a lot of dark paint, and will never change it back. I love that Inverness colour, and think it will make the room so welcoming. Also, dark paint is cosy in winter and cool in summer.
I chose your lighter flooring option just because I thought that might be similar to the rest of your house and provide coherence.
I went for the more orangey rug, too, so you weren’t tied too much into greens.
Colour drenching might work well in here. I’m coloured-ceiling curious but not sure I’m brave enough to do it myself so I’ll look forward to reading other people’s advice.
I can’t wait to see how this turns out Gillian, and you definitely have the skills to make it beautiful 😍
I think I would paint the ceiling another shade of green. A lighter tone, maybe even clary sage ;)