Study Plans

If you follow along on Instagram, you know this room is well on it’s way. I wanted to share some of my inspiration and design decisions as I style out the shelves, await my art to arrive and put the finishing touches on this space. I have to admit when we moved in I was pretty stumped with this space. It’s a lovely “bonus room.” But in my mind there is not a whole lot of function to it. It’s right off the living room in the front center of our house. There is a closet and large window, plus it connects to the bathroom, which also connects to the kitchen. So it’s a good pass through room. I did not want to use this room as my office, because my office is a disaster 99% of the time, and also because, despite the large window, the lighting stinks.

I future vision is to open this room to the kitchen and turn it into a dinning space, but when faced with what to do with it in the mean time, I was pretty much stumped. The navy patterned wallpaper was not my choice, but there is worse and the bookshelves were nice, just not my taste at all.

Study Before

Flash forward to my discovery of Mandi Makes on Instagram. Her home and feed is a glorious journey of unbelievable and super-creative before and afters. The moment I saw her study I knew it was the direction I wanted to go for my own study. For someone who painted their entire house white (Polar Bear actually) within the first few weeks of living in it, I fell hard for this green-grey color. I loved how her shelves were filled with books like a traditional library, but yet it all looked so modern. See more of Mandi’s room on her blog.

The color Mandi used is called Oil Cloth by Benjamin Moore. I pulled about 35 green-grey swatches from every paint brand. They all looked so different in this room and so different in each light of day. The Oil Cloth color Mandi used looked really blue and really dark in my room. I ended up going with a color called Dusty Miller by Benjamin Moore and I could not be happier with how it turned out!

Study Inspo 1.jpg

I know I’ve seen and pinned that monochromatic look before, so I hopped onto my Pinterest to find all the interesting colored libraries that skewed modern. Many were a little too traditional for my taste, like this room. I had crafted my idea, now on to the executing and the dreaded tearing down of the wallpaper.

Study Inspo 2.jpg
Study Inspo 3.jpg
Monochromatic shelving

photos: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

I have lots more to share about this room and the reveal coming soon! See the items I’m shopping for styling over on my Pinterest Board.

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