To Create a Room…
The magic of Interior Design, is that the most wonderful spaces, the most intricate and layered spaces, tend to start with a swatch of material no bigger than this…
The smallest of things can inspire the ‘biggest moments’….
De Gournay ‘St Laurent’ becomes the grounding inspiration in this decadent study… As the central theme solidifies… the room starts to grow around it…
Photo: Aaron Leitz
This room was intended to be the cozy TV den in a fabulous top floor penthouse in an old San Francisco Co Op building… We had found the wallpaper and had thought it would make a beautiful Powder Room… When our client saw the scheme with the paper she exclaimed: ‘that paper is WAY to pretty to be stuffed away in the powder!… can we find a place where everyone can see it and enjoy it more!’ ….uh, yeah. we can. The ‘cozy’ den, became the perfect blank slate!
Robin Jerome, Stuck Up Wallpaper, inspecting material on installation day. Critical partner in ensuring the safe installation of the goods… its important to work with people who love what they do… and smile.
With every De Gournay order comes a detailed elevation layout of how the panels are to be laid out in the room… pictured just below.
Farrow and Ball ‘Stifke Blue’ became the perfect ceiling and trim color to compliment the peacocks and the ground of the metallic silk paper.
It is so important, when doing a ‘major design moment’ like this exquisite paper, not to forget about the other elements in the room… and how they play to the ultimate design vision…. since this was a cozy study and the material ground was this deep elegant blue, it seemed enormously out of place to NOT treat the millwork and ceiling as an ‘extension’ of the ground… I felt like any other choice, other than continuing the deeply saturated blue of the ground, would have disrupted the balance of the scenery.
Here, the ‘Finished Photo’ of the study… Although the de Gournay ‘St Laurent’ chinoiserie is spectacular in its own right, the combination of the other elements in the room: Paint, decadent silk mohair upholstery from Corragio, silk rug, drop crystal chandelier, vintage glass mirror and bronze table all rise to the level that the walls established for this room!