Hey Hello and Hi there to everybody following along out there!
Today I'm so excited to share with you our updated living room spaaaaaaaaaace! woo!!
I know that as of May 1st it will mark us living in this apartment a YEAR already, so I'm feeling kind of guilty that it's taken this long to getting everything all set up. We kinda got everything to a livable situation and then got a little lazy :/
But such is life. In a lot of ways I'm fine with it because if I tried to do all this earlier it wouldn't have turned out like this, and I really like our current living room.
Over the winter I did do a little update with our Xmas decor in place, so there aren't as many photos of that angle I shared last time, but you'll recognize some things updated from that space reveal and some things we're keeping going into spring as well.
I think the main thing I wanted to achieve in styling our living room was to have a consistent ocean theme but make it really moody and mysterious. Someone once told me in college that all of my work had a very Wes Anderson feel to it, and I think it might be one of the best compliments I've ever gotten. I love that. I'm consistently drawn to intricate miniatures and a very purposeful and complex color palette. I also see similarities in the way that I tend to draw and frame lines in styling and photography.
As with all my interior stylings I strive to blend old things with new things to achieve a unique mix of highly curated decor. I love mixing fantastical things with historical things, and then adding just a touch of my own memories. In the example of the pictures hung on the left side of our fireplace (pictured below), I have the bottom two as pieces I picked out from a vintage shop. One is a pastel art piece, and one is a vintage photograph of a group photo from some school a long time ago. I love that it is hauntingly creepy and moody. Then the top picture is a metal print from mpix of a photo I took on the beach where Drew proposed. It reminds me of a sun soaked afternoon at the beach skipping rocks into the ocean. These pictures are balanced in terms of size and shape, and evenly staggered across the southwest triangle pattern of vinyl clings I adhered to the wall behind. There's a lot going on, but there is symmetry happening and everything is balanced to feel calming.
Now if you back up a little and scroll up to the photos of the other side of the mantel (the one with the trunk at the bottom) you can see that those photos are also balanced but in a different order, and then they are also balanced to flow with these ones on the other side. I think this particular wall is why the whole room took some time, because I really wanted to get the triangles up right and get the artwork balanced so it didn't end up just feeling overwhelming instead of intricately balanced!
The final pieces of me finishing off this room finally came together over the last few weeks. I don't think that I've ever shared this wall with you guys, and that's because it was a whole lot of nothing until pretty recently. I knew that there was so much going on with the mantel wall and I wasn't sure how to correctly balance it out, keeping in mind we have this big 'ol tv hanging out over here as well.
I've been saying for the better part of a year now that 'one of these days I'm gonna 'do' the bookshelves' and we've had boxes of books and random decor around in piles... well that day happened!! I'm saving those bookshelf stylings for another blog on another day, but today we can just take in the wall.
Ultimately I really want to paint this wall like a very dark dusty blue/green because I've seen some seriously dreamy dark walls on pinterest, and I love it so much. But to do that I need to email our landlord for permission and then actually paint it... etc. So it just hasn't happened yet, and the other day I kind of had a "so what?!" moment and decided to just put everything up and if and when we get around to painting we'll just have to take it down and put it back up, big whoop. Having this done is gonna feel way better than putting off all of it because we're waiting to paint.
Again, even though it all feels super cohesive and balanced color palette wise, each item has a different history and meaning to us. Some are things I found at estates, a couple were xmas gifts from Drew, some are things given to us from family, and then others are art I made or something we bought on vacation, like the masquerade masks from New Orleans. Everything has a purpose or a story and transports me to a memory of a time or place or loved one.
Until Next Time,
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