Café Design
Decorating Consultations

Living Room Progress

Well, things are shaping up at the Contreras household. After a long weekend filled with both work and play, we’re happy to be done with the messier projects in our living room. We finished the bookshelves a week ago but we wanted to take advantage of all the books being on the floor and paint the walls too. This board below illustrates my initial plans for the room. I say initial because I have since changed my mind. I still love my original choices for the space but, I have realized that they won’t work so well for our room. The reason is the lack of architectural details like crown molding, trim or hardwood flooring. I’d love to see this scheme come to life with a backdrop of white paneled (vertical shiplap) walls, even a fireplace and pickled, wide heart of pine floors. I’m looking for a chic cottage feel but the truth is our simple white walls and beige wall-to-wall apartment carpeting won’t do this blue-and-white scheme justice.

Amity Place 2jpg

View Post

Bookshelf Styling & A Mini-Makeover

We’re just about ready with our Ikea bookcase upgrades (it only took us three weeks 🙂 ) and I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out. I’m still trying to figure out how to best style them and fit all of our things (i.e hide all the ugly stuff) and still have them look pretty. In the meantime, here are some different configurations I’ve been contemplating for arranging our books. There are certainly many schools of thought on the subject, and everybody likes different things.  Some prefer to arrange their books by color & size, with spines reversed, upside down, with/without protective jacket covers for a monochromatic, unified look… there are so many ways to go about this!

So far, I’m a fan of keeping it simple and arranging them by size and theme, spine forward and no dust jackets, rather than by color, but I’m experimenting with different configurations. After looking at many of my favorite bookcase images collected over time, I realized I also really, really love the look of bookshelves that are full, maybe 97-98% books and only the remaining 2-3% decorative objects (blue and white porcelain, picture frames and/or boxes, shells and other bits and bobs). How about you? Do you have a favorite way to style your bookcase? Do you display more books, or more decorative objects? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this…  In the meantime, here is some Pinterest shelf-candy!

view

View Post

My Dream Home, For Sale

I fell in love with this image many years ago, from a photograph torn out of an old issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine. I had no clue about its owners, its location or anything more really than this picture of its exterior. But it was enough because I’ve never seen a home more beautiful, more charming or more inviting than this one. With perfectly manicured hedges, a white picket fence and an old world lantern by the front gate, white shutters on white exterior, cedar shake roof – this home spoke to my love of old houses and classic design. It is a dream, and the front yard alone is impossible to rival, in my opinion. I knew right there that the owners must have impeccable taste and suspected its interiors must look just as lovely. And I was right! I’ve recently found out through Instagram that the home is located in Lyme, CT but it wasn’t until last week that I accidentally found a real estate listing for it. It turns out it is for sale, although I can imagine it must be with heavy hearts that the owners are parting with it. Here’s what I found out from a Sotheby’s listing.

Dream 1

View Post

Our Home | A Cool New Find

As I shared before, I’m working on decorating our apartment and it’s coming right along. We started with the living room because it’s the largest space and the room we spend most of our time together, entertaining or simply relaxing with a book. Once we decided on a furniture layout and color scheme, (I wrote about our plans HERE and HERE), we started with our bookshelves. We have a pair of Billy’s that we’re in the process of upgrading with new trim and bead board backs. 

Just adding the crown molding and base boards made such a difference and I can’t wait to show you the finished result. They are now primed and I’m still deciding on paint – simply white with/without (?) pale sky blue backs… I think both ways would look great but I’m taking my time because I want to spare myself the trouble of removing a million books in order to repaint the backs… So, while I’m mulling over paint swatches I’m also on the hunt for pretty, one-of-a-kind accessories for our home and, on that note, I want to share with you a sweet find. 

quilt1

View Post

Our Living Room Design Plans | Bookcases and a Cozy Reading Nook

Hello, friends! Decorating our living room is all I can think about lately so I thought I’d share with you more about our design plans. We made all of the major decisions about the space like furniture layout, mood and color scheme (blue, green and white with natural textures thrown in), you can read about that HERE. All in all, I feel like things are progressing. Slowly, but progressing. This is a sketch of how we’d like the space to look like when we’re done.

40318596_291851064944356_1495977378810167296_n-2

View Post