Home Style Guide - Brought to you by Linden Street and JCPenney

Isn’t it amazing how one photo in a design magazine can stick with you? It’s happened to me before—a rusty orange rug in the bedroom of a Colorado home, a cool steel window in a Wyoming residence, a certain cerulean vase on the bookshelf of a Manhattan loft. I remember these random, tiny details, just like I remember a bedroom I saw in a spread in a magazine last year. Oh, was it ever perfect.

There was a four-poster bed—not the old fashioned kind, with mosquito netting or curtains hanging all around—but a more squared-off, contemporary bed that was much more updated than the old traditional four-posters. It was adorned in simple, clean white linens; at certain angles, they almost looked gauzy. The walls of the bedroom were a mottled, taupe-gray-brown color—one I just can’t get out of my head because it was so beautiful. The resulting color scheme—the rustic brown of the bed frame, the subtle taupe of the wall, and the white of the linens—was really something special. It’s remained in my gut ever since.

What I loved about this bedroom—whose magazine spread, unfortunately, I tossed out with the trash one morning—was its intentional simplicity. There weren’t mirrors on the walls or decorative pillows on the beds, no ornate rugs or vases with reeds. There was only simplicity—but miraculously, it wasn’t cold and sterile.

I must be drawn to rooms like this because they don’t even come close to resembling every day life in my own house. In my house, the bedrooms are lived in—lived in to the Nth degree—and that’s okay.

But for The Lodge bedrooms (above), which will ultimately be a haven not just for me and my family, but for guests, I plan on starting things off right. The right bed, the right linens, and the right paint color are my focus right now, and I plan to get those in place and re-evaluate before adding any other furniture or accessories.

I know that level of simplicity is difficult to pull off, and as a woman, the need to build a nest can often involve adding, adding, adding. But since I’m starting with a clean slate, I’m considering it a personal challenge to reproduce the feeling of that original bedroom I saw in the magazine.
I just hope I don’t forget what it looked like.

by Pioneer Woman

A week after returning from my sister’s home in Austin (see above), my house is much farther along on the road to being clutter-free—well, unless you go upstairs to my kids’ rooms, and I haven’t even begun thinking about that trip through Purgatory. But the downstairs? The kitchen and living room area? It’s so clutter-free, it’s almost scary. I still can’t decide if it looks like mom and dad came and stripped my dormroom of all their furniture…or if it looks the way it should look. All I know is, it’s sparse. And I’ve never been happier in my life. Suddenly, a huge weight has been lifted.

We’re in the middle of a huge remodel project on the ranch—not in our own home but in The Lodge, an old guest house up the road from our place. We’re more than halfway through the remodel, and are about to finalize the kitchen plan. Soon we’ll begin thinking about wall colors, furniture, and accessories. Here’s what it looked like before we started the remodel:

My recent Clutter Revelation has got me thinking. While I want The Lodge to be comfortable, homey, warm, and inviting to guests (or Marlboro Man and me, when we escape the mile and a half there to go on an occasional “date”…but that’s another story for another time), I can’t help but shake the notion that I want things to be simple, clean, understated, sparse. It is, in fact, a “lodge”, though, so stark stainless steel and sleek, contemporary furniture and cabinetry would be completely out of place. But the way my mindset is right now, so would big, ornate leather sofas, Navajo throw pillows, and paintings everywhere you look. I don’t want the place to look highly contrived and decorated. I want people to walk in, kick off their shoes, and feel at peace.

Basically, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I want the Zen-type feel of sparseness and clean lines. But I want the warmth of a luxurious Colorado ski chalet. What approach am I after?

This is what’s been occupying my thoughts all week.