Changes in the Music Room with Farrow & Ball

It sounds like some of you have seen our house spread in the fall issue of Domino! Now that the issue is out, I can share some more photos, including one of my favorite spaces - the music room!

I was lucky enough to get to work with Farrow & Ball on behalf of Domino a couple months ago. They had heard that I was picking a F&B color for my music room (I've already mentioned before that Michael and I had decided against the bright cobalt blue), and they offered to send a color expert over to the house for a color consultation.

It was SO FUN to meet Amber, who works out of Farrow & Ball's Chicago showroom. Not only was she an all around delightful person, she had the most amazing eye for color and so many insightful thoughts to share. We showed her our home and talked about our decor plans and our color preferences. I had been leaning toward a great color called Green Blue, and after lots of discussion about lighting and room functionality, Amber and I both agreed the color was the right choice for the music room.

Amber and I loved that the color was sort of a darker version of the green I had ordered for the library curtains.

Amber was really drawn to the watercolor abstract I had been planning to hang in the music room and we both thought that the warm, bluey green would compliment the painting really well.

She and I gushed about how pretty the green color pairs with oranges and wood tones. Since I had already purchased the orange over-dyed rug, and I knew I would want to hang Michael's guitars on the wall (more info on these purchases/projects in posts to come!), I couldn't wait to get this color on the walls!

My favorite part of my meeting with Amber was when we were wrapping up the consultation and she threw out a suggestion to wallpaper the entry. I had been so focused on other spaces that I hadn't even really been looking at the entry. She and I agreed that the space was begging for a pretty pattern, so we spent some additional time browsing her samples. Heaven, I tell you!

I'll be sharing some photos of the wallpapered entry soon, but you already have a sense of what happened in there. :)

I am such a huge fan of Farrow & Ball colors and paints - it was a pleasure to get to learn more about the company and their beautiful products during this color consultation. I truly couldn't be more happy with how the music room turned out. The color is just what I envisioned - cheerful and soothing all at once. :)

A big thanks to the Domino team for letting me be the Farrow & Ball color consultation guinea pig! It was an amazingly helpful service - I'd recommend it for even the most over-confident of decorators. ;)

And thank you to Stacie Lang for the photos of my visit with Amber!

Glossy Blue!

(someday my house will not be covered in a layer of construction dust)

Michael has a great eye and he has definitely become fluent in decorator-speak after years of hearing me yammer on about this stuff. He always has an opinion (and I love hearing his spot-on ideas), but he's also really flexible, for which I'm so grateful. He trusts me and is willing to sign off on most anything I am planning to do.

Kips Bay Showhouse

Because he trusts me so much and because I decorate our house as part of my job, he usually just lets me do my thing and chimes in when asked (except for the big decisions/purchases, of course). So I was a little surprised when out of nowhere he told me he would love to see blue lacquered walls in that little space next to the library we are planning to use as a music room... Uh, okay!!

Miles Redd

Miles Redd

We pulled out my paint decks and I was showing him darker blues with a healthy dose of green (like F&B Hague Blue and Ben Moore's Gentleman's Gray), but he was drawn to more clear and bright blues.

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Miles Redd

I told him I wasn't sure about doing an Yves Klein blue with our bright red door only a few feet away, but a bright blue with just a hint of green in it seemed really lovely. So I threw up five samples (all colors are Ben Moore -- the pale gray is from the other samples we were doing for the main rooms).

Pretty quickly I pulled out Symphony Blue because it was too purple in real life. Michael nixed Blue Danube (too green) and Gentleman's Gray because it was too dark (a fair point with all our dark paint projects in the house lately - mudroom walls, stairs, fireplace, bedroom walls...). We both were really drawn to California Blue and Champion Blue, so I painted out the other colors.

Michael says he'd be really happy with either choice, and I like both of them too. We bought a new vintage sofa a couple weeks ago that's a peacock blue velvet that I considered putting in the library, but now I'm thinking it will stay in the living room (some of you spied a sliver of it in this post). I like the idea that the bold wall color would be like a little preview of the sofa color. 

While I love the inky depth of color in Champion Blue, I think I'm leaning a bit toward California Blue, just because it would be fun to make a big statement in this really small space. There will be a big mirror in here probably and guitars on one of the walls, the camel leather Chesterfield, a piano and a rug to break it up, so the bright contrast might actually be really perfect. What do you think? I'm mostly just thrilled that Michael chose the direction and that he gets a room that's all his idea (for once!).

PS After I nail down the color choice, I'm going to do some experimenting on plywood with DIY lacquering vs just high gloss latex and I'll be sure to share what I learn. Lacquering walls is notoriously tricky, so this one might be a job for the pros. 

Newly Painted Doors and Walls!

The foyer, library and living room all have really crazy-high vaulted ceilings. Like 20 feet high. The idea of even climbing a ladder that reached that high is pretty dizzying, let alone painting the walls. Let alone skim coating and sanding away the texture on all the walls! (shudder!)

I hardly ever hire out painters for my own spaces because I don't mind just doing it myself, but the job for these three rooms was definitely in the DDIY category, and I called in the big guns.

The company I ended up using had had a cancellation and they were available to start work within a few days, which was great, but also meant I had to nail down paint colors very quickly. I stress about 100 million times more with paint colors when I'm hiring the job out. When I'm painting myself, if I make a color mistake, all I'm out is $50 in paint and a few hours time. Big paint jobs like this are (very) expensive though and the pressure is majorly on.

You might remember from this post how I was leaning toward Benjamin Moore's Titanium. I'm glad I had a few weeks to sit on the decision though. I ended up feeling like the blue undertones in Titanium weren't actually doing me any favors for making the floors look less pink.

So I went to the paint store in search of a new gray. I picked up a few samples and threw them up on the wall. I put Titanium up there too for comparison.



I thought Ralph Lauren's Stone was really, really pretty, and I almost went with that. But then I started looking at Brushed Aluminum a little more. I liked that it was a neutral, but with a depth of color in the undertones. Equal parts blue and green. I threw up a bigger sample in the library and loved it more. So I put up samples on most of the big walls, just to see how the color changed with the light. It was so interesting to me how it was more of a color in the front of the house and was way more true gray in the back of the house.



Here it is next to the Titanium sample I had up for forever. The soft blue gray color is so pretty, but it sort of fell flat for me after a while. The rich, warm greeny grays of the Brushed Aluminum felt like exactly what I wanted, but didn't really know it. I think it's just right with the floors. And it pairs SO well with bright colors (which we all know are inevitable in my rooms). You can throw pretty much any color next to it and the combo will be brilliant every time.



So I took a leap of faith and handed the painters the Brushed Aluminum paint chip. They were actually here for more than a week. I had them float the walls in the living room to cover the high texture on the drywall and that alone took nearly three days. (!!!)





After day two, I was so happy with how much brighter the living room felt with the majority of the brown paint covered up. What a huge difference the light drywall mud was making in the color already! And the smooth texture? SO worth the time and expense. The room has such a glow about it now. The light bounces around in such a lovely way. The other common spaces in the house had already been smooth-coated so it seemed worth it to match the texture in here too, especially since this is a room we'll likely spend the most time in.





I had all the ceilings in the three rooms painted the same white as all the trimwork - Benjamin Moore's Chantilly Lace. It's one of my favorite whites to use because it reads as a true white. There are no gray undertones like White Dove has and no blue undertones like a pure white usually gives off. Simply White is another favorite, but it's a little more yellow than Chantilly Lace. I wanted a bright, clean white in here.







All the doors were painted Onyx, another favorite shade of mine. It's a black with depth - a lot like Farrow and Ball's Off Black (but without the insane price tag!) :) I'm so happy with how the front door turned out! (ps the white astragal down the middle will be black)



We're going to do something special in the music room like lacquer or grasscloth, but I want to go more colorful in there. Michael's vote is a bright, inky blue, which I love.





I'm so happy with how the new paint has completely transformed the look and feel of these three spaces! When I look at all those ladders and the scaffolding, I know it was worth every single penny!!