Family Room Reveal + Dream Chair

I feel like with each room I share, I always say “this one is my favorite”. But for real this time, this one is my favorite. Two years of religiously buying a piece here and there has finally landed us at “complete”.

Family Room Before

I wish we would have taken more pictures of this room when we moved in. It’s really a simple space. Once a garage, the previous owners converted it into this family room/ sun room situation. It was love at first sight when we saw it as two people who have not had a lounge space in our adulthood but really wanted one. A space where we could veg out without wondering if it was clean when guests visited, where we could forget shoes and computers and just cut out the lights and go to bed. Where we could corral the dogs belongings without worrying about tripping over them. This room served that purpose from the first day we put our furniture down.

We started with a blank slate of brown paneled walls and brown floors floors. The one defining feature being the pop of red for the closet. I like to think that the before inspired me since the pop of red remains in the after.

Paint Color and Layout

This room is quite long and we’ve actually divided into two parts to make good use of it. One side where we watch tv and gather and the other side where we actually have our home gym equipment. Nothing like an old habit stack. Because you can ride the elliptical in that unseen corner and watch the tv at the same time. In order to keep this bowling alley room with two spaces from feels more disjointed, we painted everything one color. Ceiling, walls, trim and all. Everything in this room is Contented by Sherwin Williams.

Originally we tried the color “Calico” and found it to be just a hint too dark during the summer month, ironically. When the trees are all filled out, We have such limited lighting at the beginning and tail ends of the day that we just decided that we needed some brightness. So we selected “Contented” the perfect green that leans blue and feels cool and like the perfect base.

We started bringing furniture into the space with this perfect denim sofa that is almost the same color as the paint color. It’s Pottery Barn that we found locally on Facebook Marketplace, of course. It was exactly what I was looking for. Wide enough to fit three adults comfortably, deep enough to snuggle and more importantly, denim. I’ve talked about my love affair with denim in a previous post about our Cowboy Powder Room. But I will spare you a recap here about how denim is both quintessentially Americana but also African Americana. It was the perfect base to pair with Marcus’s favorite Ikea side chair that has lived many lives in this home. To avoid match matchy here, I decided against a second chair and brought in a little print.

Dream Printed Chair

This ikat chair is the stuff of my wildest dreams. I have spent the better part of three years with searches on all resale and vintage sites for “Vintage Milo Baughman Parsons Chair”. They are hard to find and when they are found, they are quite pricey.

But imagine my surprise when I found one not only locally, but affordably as well. I have never in my life gone to pick up an item so fast. Only to put it in the garage for a year waiting for its day in the sun while I then hunted for the perfect fabric. This fabric I selected in a partnership with Spoonflower that I did on Instagram. (Meaning they are not paying me here), I just really love Spoonflower which is why I chose to work with them. They work with small artist to create so many different textiles and they’re located in my own backyard. In fact, the chair and fabric are from the same town.

I scoured the Spoonflower site until I fell in love with the Mariah Blue Ikat in the Classic Blue color way by Whitney English. In full transparency, I find the Spoonflower website a bit difficult. Not because it’s not simple to navigate. There are just so many choices! I am a person who gets overwhelmed in Costco sometimes so you know that level of choices does. I set out to put together a nice collection of prints that paired well with this one so that later on, I can pull in any of them into this space with no sweat. If I were furnishing my house from the beginning again, I would honestly just use this collection and work my way around the house with this as the palette.

Anyways, I went with the gorgeous Ikat. I loved quite a few of Whitney’s prints but the scale of this one when the sample came it made me drool. I chose to do it in Spoonflower’s Dogwood Denim (Cc my previous comment about my love affair with denim). Not only is it pretty but it’s also 100% cotton and durable which I always look for in fabrics. Makes it easy to wipe it down when life inevitably happens.

I sent this piece to one of my favorite favorite local upholsterers, Ms Annie of Bowden Upholstery. She is a one woman band who works out of a shop in her home with help from family members. She also did our green sofa in the blue living room. The work she does is absolutely pristine. I mean look at the print matching on this piece. There is no way that even in my wildest dreams that I would have been able to DIY this piece so I’m grateful she agreed to take it on in a short time frame for a price that was for me, very reasonable.

Art Choices and Print

I pulled the blue from the chair into several other places. Whenever I am planning for a busier set of prints, I try and choose two colors, in this case blue and red, and then varying them in size and pattern across the room. So the blue from the chair is carried into the pillows, the chinoiserie jar and a few of the pictures. While the red falls in the pleated shade that I DIYed from this fabric, the art, and the pillows. The great thing about print mixing, is that it’s no pressure, if you aren’t liking what you’re seeing, you can always add or subtract.

Art is everything to a space. The presence -or the absence of it- really says a ton about where a space is going. Whether you commit to one big statement piece or a gallery wall, it really helps to set the tone and mood. We wanted this space to feel collected and lived in. A place where you could put your feet up without worry and a gallery wall is perfect for that. Especially one that isn’t too planned. I stuck with the pops of blues and red and then layered black and white images into the space. Everything consists of the pops or neutrals.

I’ve been storing up many of the images in this room just waiting for them to see the light of day. Whenever I chose art, I try to go for art where I see myself reflected. So lots of images of Black women and families in positive lights. I also layered in a few pieces that are significant only to us; a sketch that people swear has to be me because it looks just like my signature braid, a Franklin Institute banner as a call back to my childhood, Marcus’ favorite Nantucket restaurants both a matchbook and a doodle of the structure. This room is so much us that it makes my heart happy.

And how can any of us forget the print that launched a thousand trips to the framer. This print of these two women has been a comedy of errors from the company originally sending me the wrong size print to moving it to my mom’s to bringing it back home when I couldn’t figure out how to make it work in my final design. She is finally where she belongs in a custom frame with a custom mat. Prints this large are usually more expensive to frame than the image itself and with the wonky size that the company sent me, I had no choice but to order a custom frame online. I ordered the burl wood style, Ruben, after trying out many different combos of frame and mat in my phone.

Beneath my girl are a few family photos on this skirted table. I’m sticking to metals -golds, brasses, tortoise lined with gold- to give some level of cohesion. My hope though is that over the years, this ends up feeling like that one table at your grandma’s house with all the family photos. And I gotta say, I look forward to that day.

Thanks for hanging! XO- Prepford Wife

Shop the entire room below: