I know I’ve been littering this blog with posts about my ‘inspiration’ for my home renovation lately, but you all are probably wondering if you are ever going to see any results. Well, me too. Everything takes so long when you are working on renovating a home, from ordering custom light fixtures, to finding the right shade of brass handles, to designing your own wallpaper (yes, I am in the process of all three of those g*d help me). The kitchen reveal should come next week- cross your fingers– as long as my electrician pulls through later this week.
As for the next project, it’s our downstairs powder room. If you don’t recall, I will refresh what it looks like with this fabulous ‘before’ imagery below:
I don’t have to express how pepto-bismal barfingly pink this space is. And to make matters worse, it’s microscopic. The door opens right into the toilet and its very hard to maneuver yourself around to actually shut the door from the inside. Now as much as those 2 things drive me crazy, they are of course the 2 most difficult and expensive things to fix. Getting a sliding door would mean I have to put in an entirely new wall, and the pink granite countertops from the seventies (?) eighties (?) mean a lot more cash than Mr. R and I are ready to spend at this time. That unfortunately means this redecoration is purely cosmetic, and that I have to find a chic way to live with the pink granite.
Let me just say that as you know you can pinterest anything and you will find at least 2 dozen iterations of inspiration that help you. Unless what you are looking for is pink granite countertops, and then you will find exactly one. And it’s straight outta victoriana hideous. Seriously, look it up.
So there you go. If I manage to make this bathroom work, I will be a Pinterest sensation (or actually not because apparently NO ONE searches for inspiration for pink countertops, they just rip them out as they rightfully should). So once I do the reveal, you all are going to pin my bathroom right? Ok, great, now that we’re agreed on that let’s move onto my inspiration for how I would like to wallpaper the space.
Here we go. Keep in mind you have to have vision here people.
The first (and safest) way to go is to bring in light colors and metallics to add a bit of shine and really make the space glow from the inside. Knowing that I have a pink countertop, I would have to keep the space very white and grey/silver, with maybe a touch of brass at the fixtures and handle pulls in order to play off the warmth of the pink.
The second option is to go bold with black and white, and then just basically let the pink countertop be what it is- silly and whimsical and the focal point (I die for that Kelly Wearstler one below). As much as I would love to go moody here, with a dark wallpaper that maybe has a touch of pink in it to play off the pink granite, overall I think the space would still be too dark, I may have to try that in the next home when we have some overhead lighting wired in the bathroom already.
The last option is more whimsical and fun, and inspired by my love of travel. I used to hate anything Chinoiserie (I think I OD’d on travel to China when I was younger – remember my mom was a flight attendant!) but now 20 years later the style is having a resurgence in my mind and if done well, then I think you can have a really unique space. The benefit of doing this type of style in the powder room is that it’s so confined- you don’t have to feel like it’s taking over a huge space in your life. I would pick a wallpaper that has a healthy dose of pink in it (I am particularly inspired by the Flowering Quince wallpaper in the first image) to play up the pink instead of fighting with it.
Which style is your favorite? Which one do you think I should go with for my tiny space?
