Café Design

Decorating Consultations

Living Room Updates & Neighborhood Pretties

Six months ago we moved into a sunny apartment in Amherst MA. I was immediately taken with the views and the amount of natural light. The forrest is literally our backyard. However, it is a rental and it lacks any architectural embellishments. It’s a blank canvas without crown moldings, wainscoting or a fireplace – you know, all the good stuff. However it has amazing views and a semi-open floor plan which we liked. It also has a 6-foot window seat that soon became our favorite spot for watching the wildlife  in front of our window. 

As I mentioned before, this place will be our home for one or two years, until my husband gets a tenure track and we move to someplace more permanent. Investing too much in a home we’re going to leave so soon made no financial sense to us. However, the decorator in me still wanted to cozy-up the place and make it look pretty, even if on a budget. 

living room 1

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Our Home | Updates and Pretty Finds

As promised, here’s a little sneak peek of our progress with our living room makeover. If you’re new here, we have so far updated a pair of Ikea Billy bookshelves with base and crown molding and it’s made such a difference. We also painted our walls a warm green/grey with subtle yellow undertones and I love the cozy feel it has created in the space. I now regret living with white walls for so long.  At first I was afraid F&B French Gray (matched at a local paint shop) might look too dark and make our little apartment look and feel cave-like, but the two large windows make the living room walls lighter and the room looks bigger and more interesting than it ever was. 

shelves

Over the last few months I collected inspiration – images and fabric samples, as well as some new accessories. eBay, local antique shops and estate sales have been great places for one-of-a kind pieces. I even bid on a tortoise table and won! This past weekend we braved the cold to attend Olde Hadley Flea Market and came back with a handful of stuff. I found a sweet little blue and white plate which I’m already using as a catch all for keys…

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Q & A With Heather Strommen

Instagram is my favorite hangout place when I want to meet kindred spirits and feel inspired. It has become a cliché in the design world because it’s been so often said but it has been said so much because it happens to be true. Instagram has become the great connector and by far one of the sweetest people I befriended on Instagram is Heather Strommen, of the blog Sweet Shady Lane. I met Heather a year and a half ago and was instantly charmed by her friendly demeanor and excellent taste in design. I soon discovered that we share a love of relaxed and cozy interiors, an appreciation for blue and white and, we even have the same favorite interior designers we look up to.

Heather has recently opened her own design consultation business, perfectly complemented by The Vignette Box. A carefully curated selection of decorative objects hand-picked by Heather herself, The Vignette Box will imbue the same sense of style to your own vignettes. Her home, lovingly named Mona Bina, which means Home For All, has been Heather’s design laboratory over the years and, as illustrated by the pictures below, she has a knack for creating beauty in every nook and cranny. It is then no wonder that her work has been featured in several national magazines and her Vignette Boxes were listed in Minneapolis Home Design as one of the 100 best of local design. Today,  I am delighted to welcome Heather for a quick and fun Q& A session! 

Q: Welcome Heather! I’m so happy we’re finally doing this. Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your passion for interior design. How did it all begin?

A: Honestly, I started decorating around 9 years old. My mother would come home and I would have rearranged the living room sofa and moved knick knacks from here to there…I always loved the day we would clean my own room and were able to make little changes, like kitty cornering the bed. Sometimes, I still feel like that little girl after I’ve moved things around in my own home—excited, renewed and ready to accessorize.

Heather 7

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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

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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!

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