my home office: progress

After much debate, I settled on a nice yellow print for my curtains:

It’s Amsterdam by Premier Prints in yellow and white. The fabric is cotton but it’s a medium weight with a slub texture so it looks and feels more like linen. I got mine at fabric.com (on sale after Thanksgiving!) but there is a huge selection of similar prints at the Premier Prints website.

I usually do a lot of google image searches before buying anything online, and admit that I was sort of influenced by how well they worked in this dining room by Restored Style. (I’m not sure what the difference is between this Netherlands print and my Amsterdam print, but it looks like the yellow is a little less intense and it’s on a linen color instead of white.)

Source: Restored Style (more pictures here)

It arrived the first week of December and completely lives up to my expectations.

Onto the next step!!  Paint color.

I definitely wanted to do a color since it is my office and I want to feel energized. For me, this choice came down to:

• green
• turquoise
• lavender, leaning toward gray (I have a thing for yellow and gray recently)

And I considered pink for a brief — VERY BRIEF — moment.

I do really love turquoise and yellow, but I ruled it out for a variety of reasons (namely, that I already have blue all around my house).  If you were hoping for a great turquoise and yellow office inspiration, here’s the best I can give you:

Source: Maria Killam, Colour Me Happy (more photos here)

I felt like the green and yellow combo would be the best for getting me through the Minnesota winter months, plus I really have a thing for green and so far have only ended up with one other green room in the house.

Inspiration photos:

Source: I don’t know! Please tell me if you know where this photo came from so I can credit it. The watermark is for Carolina Panache but I’m not sure if the photo actually belongs to them or not.

Cover of Veranda magazine, November-December 2010

Full disclosure: my wedding colors were green and white with a bit of purple and yellow. You can see where I’m going here…

I’m definitely looking for a “fresh green” over a sage green. I think it’s a little more “now” and I tend to prefer cleaner colors over dirty colors. (Although I learned from trying Behr’s asparagus in my dining room, which I wrote about here, that “fresh green” can look like crazy monster green in my house with all our natural light and oak trim. Lesson: Fresh green, if leaning toward yellow, requires lots of white.) .

First picks:

Benjamin Moore – Stem Green 2029-40 (a Pottery Barn color)

Sherwin Williams – Mesclun Green SW6724

And here they are in my office:

I’m not sold on either option… At night the Spring Green (left) looks fantastic and the Mesclun Green (right) looks too blue — frankly, it feels a bit dated to me. But during the day the Spring Green is pretty bright due to the underlying yellow.

Oh, and that’s not actually my furniture in there — it’s my husband’s… we’re swapping rooms (for another post!)

Admittedly I like the Mesclun Green in this guest room at Carolina Patchworks (thanks again, google image search!)

Source: Carolina Patchworks

Yet another reminder that color must be considered in context of lighting, trim color, etc.

My next steps? Trying to decide whether I want to go more toward kelly green or just cop out and use the color I know looks good in my house.

After seeing the cover of Veranda (above), a kelly green is appealing. Taking it a step or two darker from the Mesclun Green brings me to Pickle or Talipot Palm.

They look great here but then I found this photo on ohdeedoh of a SW Pickle room. Great for a kid’s room, but maybe too bright for my office:

Source: ohdeedoh (more photos at link)

I know I can’t rely on photos to decide on color (case in point below), but I’ll just have to get a few more color samples.

The green I know looks good in my house is Sherwin Williams Great Green. (pictured here, in my dining room) – it’s less saturated than the two above (for those of you who have spent a lot of time at the paint store, it’s a row above the brighter saturated greens… not just a few paint swatches to the right or left)

No, this isn’t a trick, it really looks different in all three images. Another reason you can’t pick paint color online. The closest to “real life” is the more yellow-y one on the right, taken by manually setting the white balance on my camera.