Me? A Designer?

Hi friends. A while ago I mentioned I was working on a BIG project this spring and I’m excited to announce what it is today.

Every other year, the Junior League of Buffalo (a women’s volunteer organization) runs a Decorators Show House, where the region’s top designers and companies spend several weeks making over a house.

This year I submitted a bid to design and decorate a space and it was accepted!

Doing a room in the show house was kind of a goal of mine, one of those things you think you’d love to do but never believe it will actually happen, you know?

This year my cousin Tim and I joked about working on a space together. He worked for major retail brands including Target and Torrid and we always thought that if we both moved back home we’d take on a space together and make it an amazing one. Now we get to make our joke come true!

The house selected is known as the Edward H. Weber house, and is adjacent to a modern art gallery (the Albright Knox) in a lovely part of town about 10 minutes from my house. It was built in 1907-08 and is 6600 square feet in the Arts and Crafts style. These very snowy pictures give you a glimpse of the weather we’ve had in Buffalo this season. Coldest on record. Thankfully I’ve been inside with a newborn for most of it.

The space I’m designing is the master closet in the Carriage house on the property.  It’s a walk in room, approximately 7′ x 10′ in size and has two large windows. It is off the bathroom next to the master bedroom that Tim is designing and also leads out to the hallway. The closet is on the second level of the carriage house. It has a large open space and kitchen on the lower level and then master bedroom, bath, closet and second bedroom upstairs.

I plan to show you the projects I’m doing for the closet over the next few weeks but I couldn’t just leave you with those boring pictures. If you follow me on Instagram, you saw this preview of the fabric I got for the curtains.

It is totally out of character for me and is a really bold choice, but I LOVE it! This is only part of the fabric, which has several shades of red, pink green, blue and black in it. It’s the inspiration where I can use other colors within it to work in the room. Picture black, white, wallpaper, emerald green, pink and gold of course.

This coming Monday is the first day we can get into the space to start working on it and I’m busy preparing for all the things I need to do in there. There will be painting, upholstery, building shelves, a furniture makeover and more projects. I’m really looking forward to doing some new things in the closet that I wouldn’t normally do in my own house {cause hubs won’t let me, ahem} and in putting together an entire space in such a short amount of time. At home, rooms evolve over years, this closet will be done in 6 weeks.

You can follow the Junior League of Buffalo Decorators Show House on Facebook and on Instagram with the #jlbshowhouse hashtag. Stay tuned for the before shots, my room design and progress over the next few weeks!