~ The Yellow Gold Stripe Dining Room

The room I fell in love with. By Paula Prass

You can see the before and after, and the process here on Paula's site.

On Twitter, I saw a tweet by a designer and followed it to her blog. And I found this picture of one of my most favorite rooms ever. She was discussing how the same picture was being used in a book without giving her any credit. Now that just isn't right. Of course when I used her as my jumping off point several years ago for a dining room makeover, I did show her room picture on the decorating site I belonged to, but I did not mention her by name. Sorry. This is the beautiful work of Paula Prass.

Be sure to go by and see how Paula transformed this lack luster room into a charming cottage dining room!

I feel so in love with this room, it is the one only time I really did just flat out borrow so many ideas from another decorator. When I saw her dining room, it was so familiar to me and my tastes that I wanted to move right into it. So I did the next best thing and recreated lots of her ideas.

What I thought would be the easiest part was finding a pretty stripe fabric, but that proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be. The colors were all wrong or the weight of the fabric wasn't right. I finally found the perfect one, and from there I was off and running.

The walls were painted in a two tone yellow/gold stripe with a metallic glaze over the top of the darker stripe. It was warm and really inviting in a room with no windows. The ceiling was changed by adding molding to make a mock step-up effect, and then was painted the same colors that were on the walls.

The chairs were reupholstered in the stripe fabric and then I made a bee design on the back of the end chairs. Yes, that idea came from Paula as well.

I had to deal with the problem of having no windows since Paula had such a wonderful idea for her window, and the white was a very needed design element for a break from all the color in the room.

This room did however have French doors leading to the morning room. So I made simple panels of white on white damask with a black top valance.

The dining room stayed like this for a little while and I totally loved it. Since redoing it, the panels and pillows have found their way to Sweet Daughter's house which is the most fun way to rationalize changing my decorating. I saved everything when I made changes just in case she might wish to use anything when she was making her nest.

Today the dining room has very deep gold walls, but not the same, and everything else has changed except I kept the furniture and the original watercolor painting by Sweet Husband. Then I found the fabric that the chairs are upholstered in today, and a new love affair began. Yes, the fickled heart of a decorator falling for a fresh new line. That lime green and brown is still here, and I don't think it is changing any time soon. Although I'm toying with moving the dining room to the little used living room area, and making the dining room just a little sitting area.

See Y'all Soon!