Just to be clear I never dreamed of having an all-brown office. When we moved to this house the office was just that. All brown. Brown floors, brown wallpaper, brown built-in shelves, brown paint, brown vertical blinds on the windows. Brown, brown, brown. I thought, “Wow, this is a lot of brown.” My immediate reaction was to eliminate all the brown. I wanted to drench the entire room in high-gloss dark blue paint or at least take down the brown wallpaper and replace it with something bolder.
But then I started taking a closer look at each piece. The wallpaper, my friends, is authentic grass cloth. It has a lovely vintage look. It fits the house. It has these nubby knots in the fibers and a beautiful sheen when the light hits it. No, I couldn’t bring myself to take it down. That would be sacrilege.
Check out those wallpaper nubs.
Then there are the built-ins. Once again, a wall of brown. But it has this interesting border at the top in lighter wood and the speakers are stretched with a linen-looking cloth. If I were to drench them in glossy paint, then the subtle variations in tone would be lost and the fabric could get damaged. I couldn’t do that either.
So, I went about de-brownifying where I could. Painting the walls white, taking down the old dusty vertical blinds, putting in a large curved white desk that peninsulas out from the wall. I brought in a large Ficus tree with an all-business look that works well in an office. I went through an intense KonMari-style purge of my book collection to fit into the available shelf space – asking each one individually if it sparked joy and ditching it if it didn’t.
See the border at the top?
For decorative items, I have a lot of brown things that I really like. Framed sloth prints, charcoal drawings my dad made in the 60’s, a giant Sequoia pinecone, an antique brass chandelier I shlepped through several moves that wouldn’t work in the current dining room, a wooden guinea hen that I got during a trip to Mozambique (where the name Happy Eyes was born - blog post here). Can you tell that I'm a collector? I decided to ride the brown wave and put them in the office.
There's the guinea hen.
Then pinks and reds started to come into the room like Tetris pieces. A red carved house panel from a remote village in Indonesia, a tapestry from Kyrgyzstan, and a flowering pink African violet in a pink enamel planter that my mom randomly dropped off one day. I like the juxtaposition of the 50’s doo-wop planter with the traditional piano. It lightens the corner.
Leaning into the pinks I dug through a stack of sarongs I got when I studied abroad in Indonesia and had custom pillow covers made for the chairs. The pillows arrived on the same day as the rug that picks up all the colors in the room and amplifies them (blog post about that rug here). Now the room feels complete and I’m content to spend 40 hours/week here.
So, somehow through the process of de-brownifying, hitting the accelerator on brown and bringing in the pink, the room went from drab and depressing to soft, textured, layered and decidedly elegant.
The end.
Post Script!
Here's what is really happening behind the plant on the desk. Multiple monitors. A necessary evil, but form was not sacrificed in the name of function in this case. Hot tip: Pair plants with electronics to make the electronics feel less aggressive. You can do this with TV's, too.
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