Nursery Inspiration

I won't bury the lead. I am designing the nursery around Brunschwig & Fils' Le Lac.

This is mind-blowing for me.

How did I arrive at this serendipitous occurrence? I'll tell you.

Way back in the day when I was just putting my first thoughts together on a nursery, I was pretty set on using Schumacher's Shantung Silhouette wallpaper for a feature wall in the khaki colorway and the rest of the room was to painted the same khaki of the paper's background.

Furnishings and fabrics would don a monochromatic palette with either pinks or blues and it all seemed like a fantastic idea. I patted myself on the back for coming to this conclusion so quickly.

I am being real perfect-like with this nursery and not cutting any corners so I was smart and before I ordered oodles of pricey wallpaper, I requested a sample (from here). The sample arrived and it was gorgeous - stunning, really. But the khaki was just too dark. And dark is the wrong word because it is not a dark color...but it's rich and saturated and felt too grown up as a color to paint the whole nursery with.

Womp, womp. My perfect plan was not to be.

I spent a couple of weeks completely stressed because this nursery obviously has to be the pinnacle of my design existence thus far. I tried to force the silhouette concept by ordering up a million other wallpapers, but nothing was right.

So I literally sat down one day and did a little self-centering exercise. I took a deep breath, completely cleared my mind of any ideas I had come up with so far, and started from square one by asking myself, "If I could choose absolutely ANYTHING to work with as a starting point...what would it be? ANYTHING!" This freedom of thought was fantastic and it took me about 2.5 seconds to pull out Le Lac as my answer.

The whimsical Chinoiserie toile has a buffet of colors and the oversized pattern is just gorgeous. And for me, Le Lac is closely associated with my favorite bedroom of all time - Joe Nye's iconic space that appeared in House Beautiful many years ago...

Photos by Roger Davies for House Beautiful

Le Lac combined with pinks and reds and greens and Chinoiserie details...it was the perfect inspiration. Exactly what I wanted my little girl's room to be like.

But there was the one tiny, little obstacle...Le Lac is bananas expensive. I'm going to guess it's about $300/yd, but I don't even know because I know it's too pricey to even get quoted. So although this exercise put me in a magical place for about 10 minutes, I quickly came back down to earth.

But my determination kicked in. I had heard of people getting great deals on Le Lac on eBay so that was my next stop...and no luck. Then I thought to peruse Etsy because occasionally, designer fabrics are listed for great prices.

And there it was! I hit the jackpot. Anne from The Decorators Backroom had Le Lac listed for an affordable price. I promptly contacted her to see if she had sufficient yardage for curtains and she did.

Serendipity! Fate! Destiny.

The focal point of the nursery will be a large window trimmed with Le Lac and a secondary, smaller window will have a matching pelmet box. Both will be trimmed in an adorable red ribbon. The walls will be green and the rest of the room will feature pinks and reds...my interpretation of Mr. Nye's spectacular bedroom.

Now to put it all together in the coming weeks...

Hope you enjoyed story time today...happy Monday!

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