This is the living room of the cavernous, three bedroom apartment that I share with a few really awesome and intellectually intimidating persons. When we first moved in there were three of us, now there are four (and a half!). At the time, the artists (myself and my other female roommate - let's call her Clementine) outnumbered the engineer (heretofore Mycroft). We instilled in him a deep fear that we would turn our living room into a Victorian Bordello & Theatre filled with boas, hats and a rotating gobo. And who knows - maybe even the occasional zebra print. In his best restrained and polite way, he requested that our living room somehow resemble a living room. After that, howver, his only expressed stipulation was that he wanted color. Bearing this in mind, I started collecting fabrics and paints. One day, when Mycroft was planning on working late, my co-conspirator Clementine and I spent the whole day turning our living room from plain to palace - just like one of those cable makeover shows!
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After about fourteen hours of hard labor, what we ended up with was this! A sort of Turkish Lounge that was inspired, as most of my projects are, by a single swatch of fabric (which proved exceedingly difficult to coordinate). Our budget was sparse, so I used existing and found furniture and built two platform seats from scratch to augment the seating area. I finished the platforms with a Moorish design that I jigsawed from luan and backed with satin skirting. Copper piping proved inexpensive and gorgeous as curtain poles and old (free!) restaurant chairs were recovered to coordinate. Clementine crafted our damask stencil and gilded one wall at my behest. She also wanted bees, so I obliged by including them on the stenciled curtains. It turned out quite lovely, I dare say. It's dramatic, definitely, but I think it still feels like a living room and luckily, Mycroft agreed! It's bold, warm, full of storage and seating and lends itself very well to entertaining. |
