DC Design House - Butler's Pantry - Part VIII

DC Design House 2015 

- Butler's Pantry - Part VIII

With our finalized design in place, we are ready to go.

Rendering sketch by Maria Morga, www.MorgaStudio.com

 The presentation board is complete and we are working with the utterly amazing and talented Maria Morga, who is doing this beautiful rendering of the space.  We send her all measurements, details, colors, fabrics.  Literally everything we can.  And then she begins her work to create a perspective that is fantastic.  Here is her first sketch of the space above.  Did I tell you she was talented??  I will do a detailed blog just about Maria in a few weeks.  I love her butler walking through the space.  He's fun.

And... After many more emails, communications and phone calls, here is Maria's final rendering of the space:

Color rendering by Maria Morga, www.MorgaStudios.com

Her work is lovely, isn't it?  I can't even believe how talented she is!  We are thrilled with her work.  And this rendering (or really, piece of art) will be shown on the website for the DC Design House and it will also be featured in the program for the house.  I just hope our space can look somewhere near as nice as her perspective.

More to come... And thanks for reading.

Best,

Margery

DC Design House 2015 - Butler's Pantry Part VII

DC Design House 2015

Butler's Pantry 

Design Process Part VII

As we talked about the other day, we had a new dilemma to work out with the mirrored tile backsplash.  At first we started down a completely new design path, with fun fabrics that would work with the tiles.  We would still try to hide a bit of the tile somehow, but we would incorporate it into the entire design.

Here was the tile we were suddenly working with on the main wall of the Butler's Pantry below:

We re-selected a new window treatment fabric and then the new design was ON!  There is nothing more fun than starting this process.  And a designer's mind is then all over the place thinking of the new direction and all the possibilities and the details. So below was our new fabric selection.  What do you think?  It goes with the tile wall.

And the natural woven wallcovering from Maya Romanoff would be like the one pictured in a home we designed a few years ago.

Dining Room in Vienna, Virginia by Margery Wedderburn Interiors, LLC

Maya Romanoff wallpaper - closeup

Look where we would take the entire design with the funky vases and cool colors, above.  
And then for the ceiling, check out these photos of Leonardo DiCaprio's new home in Palm Springs.  Instead of the fauxed ceiling in pine, we would still do the faux wallpaper ceiling, but it would be in a highly lacquered style, such as the ceiling shown here in these pictures featured in American Luxury online magazine (- http://www.amlu.com/2015/03/12/rent-leonardo-dicaprios-palm-springs-home-for-4-5knight/?utm_source=MailingList&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2015-03-nltr5)

www.AMLU.com

www.AMLU.com

So much fun to figure out!  Now this is FUN.

Back to the Original ...
But then, we really wanted to go with our original design,and so we had to find a way to safely cover that tile wall and remove it all at the end of the Design House.  We brought in Knightsbridge Interiors, an amazing window treatment and fabricator company in the area, and decided to do fabricated wall panels.  See pictures of examples of them below.  

Back side of pre-fabricated board

Front side of board.  Our fabric will be the Hines white one with green vines.

They are pre-fabricated and then installed, and the back side is like a gypsum board...very soft.  It will not be nailed in place, but, rather, it will be site measured and then pressed into place.  Very tricky.  We are so grateful to Knightsbridge Interiors for working with us in great detail on this.  We will blog on them in the future.

And so with that in mind, we added a marble backsplash, thanks to R. Bratti (www.rbratti.com), the 4th generation stone contractors in Alexandria, VA.  And now we are ready for the pre-fabricated walls!!  They will be site measuring for them later this week.

More very soon!

Margery

DC Design House Part VI - Butler's Pantry

DC Design House Part VI - Butler's Pantry

First, a big congratulations to Paula Daniels who is our winner of the Pottery Barn monogrammed soaps.  They are being monogrammed as we speak and will ship off to Paula.  Stay tuned for more giveaways in the weeks to come as we unveil our newly updated website and blog.

DC Design House, still under construction

Butler's Pantry, DC Design House 2015

Our presentation board for the Butler's Pantry is below.  These boards are important to show to the DC Design House committee our ideas and how we are going to implement them.

In our case, we were giving an interpretation of the country home with the traditional aspects and yet with some updated and hip accessories.  All in all, just a fresh approach to design today.

Presentation Board by Margery Wedderburn Interiors, LLC

Our ideas were approved, and we were ready to move forward.

However ...

We wondered what the backsplash tile would look like but no one seemed to know.  We assumed it would be similar to kitchen tile and detailing.  See the pictures below of the kitchen.

Subtle, beautiful tile in the kitchen.  This is what we expected for the pantry.  But then they did tile the pantry and...

Not what we were expecting or banking on...Beautiful in certain applications...

We were quite surprised to see what backsplash was selected and installed in the space!  This is a mirrored tile.  There are black mirror tiles, antique mirror tiles and regular mirror tiles.  A few pictures below can show it up close.  It's a great tile, but just didn't fit with what we were planning to do in the there.  This herringbone style tile would be beautiful in a NYC kitchen or bathroom, or in a contemporary style house in DC, or in a Las Vegas restaurant.  It is a very cool tile.  It just didn't go with everything we had already presented to the DC Design House committee!  Aacckk!  What to do?

In this shot above you can see how much it reflects.  And since the tile spans the entire wall, there would be no way to attach or hang anything on it.  Our entire design direction was going to have to change.  This is what makes participating in show houses around the country such an adventure.  You just never know what you will encounter!

We thought about covering the wall with a light gypsum board and then wallpapering it, but as you can see from the picture above, the process of cutting a board around the window trim (not to mention the cabinets) would be extremely difficult.  One contractor wanted to attach a wall board directly into the brand new cabinets with nails, saying we could patch later.  PATCH LATER??  Absolutely not!  We have to protect the brand new cabinets and the very expensive wall.  This home is for sale!!

Our design suddenly veered to this possibility below.  This would be the window treatment fabric and we would use a natural woven wallpaper for the walls.  It would take us in a completely different direction, as we couldn't ignore the tile wall!  See below.

This fabric is absolutely beautiful.  This is the crazy thing about design.  Once you have a new direction, you mind just runs with it, and suddenly we were going in this new direction and really having fun with it.  We could use these beautiful teals and the periwinkle and navy, shown in teh fabric above.  We would use a natural woven wallcovering, like one featured below.

Dining Room in a Vienna, Virginia home designed by Margery Wedderburn Interiors, LLC

Our favorite idea was to use the wallcovering featured here in a dining room that Margery Wedderburn Interiors designed a couple of years ago.  A whole new direction!

But then, we really loved our original direction, and so we HAD to find a way to do it but to protect that wall.

We found Knightsbridge Interiors, a drapery and wall paneling company in the DC area, and they are going to add these pre-fabricated wall panels to the walls with the same fabric as our favorite Hines wallpaper from our original presentation board, and voila!  Now it is all going to work out.  Phew.

DC Design House Process - Butler's Pantry - Part V

DC Design House Process

Butler's Pantry

Part V

We are contining our series on the design development of the Butler's Pantry for the DC Design House, a showhouse which will feature 27 local designers for a month in April and early May.

So with the walls, ceiling and colors figured out, we moved on to the flooring.  Here were some of our ideas:

Home in Potomac, Maryland by Margery Wedderburn Interiors, LLC

We designed the home above and used a Helios style striped rug a few years ago, and I was thinking that this linear quality might be nice for the show house, but in a different colorway.

http://helioscarpet.com/carpet_detail_color_options.aspx?carpetid=565&carpetname=Cote%20D'Azur

Here is another image from the Helios website of this style of carpet, which can be made in to an area rug.

However, we decided to do something more natural in style and feel, and what better than a sisal rug to fit this bill?  Stark Carpets is helping us out here, with the sisal shown below on the bottom.

While the top style is really casual and country farm - ish, we needed the lower one because we are now going to add stenciling to it and tie it in with other elements in the room.

Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out what chandelier to use.  Something fresh, different and unexpected.  See below some of our first considerations:

www.horchow.com

This was one of our first choices, from the Horchow catalog.  We loved the reflective quality of it which would be perfect withe the beautiful light streaming in that window.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#safe=off&q=dering+hall+lighting

Then I found this utterly amazing Dandelion Chandelier, above, on the Dering Hall website and fell in love.  Have you ever seen anything so beautiful or ethereal?  I tried to get this for our room but it is a brand new light fixture by Remains Lighting in NYC, and they could not meet our deadline for the show house.  So we searched on...

We found this one above which seemed similar to the Dandelion.  This is a beautiful product from Matthew Studios Inc. of NY.  We never could reach them, though.  We left messages but did not hear back.

But then I had an epiphany about what I wanted to do...  See below...

http://www.americaneyewdc.net/Vendors.aspx?ModuleID=3

This is the perfect thing for our Butler's Pantry.  It is from the American Eye showroom in Washington, DC.  And we are going to lacquer it a peacock blue tone.  Should be really pretty.

With this completed, I then decided on the stencil pattern for the area runner, which will be a peacock stencil pattern which mimics the pattern of this chandelier.  Voila!  See below.  Our faux painters are working their magic again with this idea...

Here are our samples.  Which one do you like the best?  We already know what we are doing.

Okay, stay tuned for more very soon.  We are having fun with this and hope you are too.

Best,

Margery

DC Design House - Butler's Pantry Part IV

DC Design House

Butler's Pantry

Part IV

This is our continuing blog and study of the Butler's Pantry that we are designing for the DC Design House, which will be opening in April in McLean, Virginia.

So we had our first inspirations which included the coffee mug, the wallpaper and our main colors, the green of the wallpaper and turquoise, aqua and peacock.  We were ready to move forward.

Mug from Pier One Imports

The ceiling and the flooring were the next steps, and we wanted something to read linear on the ceiling and then an area rug to tie together some of the details.  Here were some inspiring images for us:

Kelly Wearstler Interiors

RE: the image above.  This is not what we are going to do, but I just had to show you this...This is an incredible interior by Kelly Wearstler - a bar area that she designed.  We are also using the cut malechite style for some of our details on her back wall.  But beyond that, check out the ceiling.  This linear style gives so much energy and definition to the space.  Ceilings should always be taken into account and treated too, as they are another surface.  Don't just ignore a ceiling with some white paint.  So while we were not going to paint in blue and white lines like above, we were going to use this linear style for our ceiling, but in another way.  But I just had to show you this bar from Kelly Wearstler because it is bold and completely too cool.

These images represent what we are really going to do.  Our incredible faux painting team, Stacey and Derek Tranter from Twin Diamond Studios, are going to faux paint wallpaper that will be applied to the ceiling.  HOW GREAT IS THAT???  We are so excited to have Twin Diamond on our team for this pantry.  I will be blogging about them in a later piece, but they have a new line of wallpaper coming out, and this will be a debut of one of their wallpapers.  Can't wait to see it installed.

Then we are going to use these items in the space.  And they will be for sale, if you want to come along and buy them.  20% of the proceeds go to the National Children's Hospital, so you are investing in something for yourself while also supporting Children's Hospital.

More on the entire process soon.

Margery