One Room Challenge Week two: My pied-a-terre

Here we are at the One Room Challenge Week Two. This Spring the Boston Design Center is a sponsor of the ORC and I was honored to be asked to transform a space for them at the Innovation and Design Building. This large open loft space has a killer view of Boston but is, shall I say, I bit rough around the edges. I am transforming it into my imaginary pied-a-terre.

Last week I began visiting the showrooms to see what they were willing to lend me. I started with showrooms that had a more contemporary vibe which I am envisioning in my “hip city loft”. Not surprisingly, some were more “enthusiastic” than others about lending out their furniture. As of now I have secured a rug, a table, two open bookcases and a sofa chaise. Needless to say I have a LONG way to go.

My One Room Challenge Space

The space itself has undergone a cosmetic improvement. As I mentioned in week one, since this is a commercial building, I am not allowed to alter the walls or ceiling.Originally I thought of tenting the ceiling but the HVAC air vents down so that was a big fat “no”. I was however allowed to paint the floor. That is now complete and boy did it made a huge improvement.

I always tell clients that paint is the biggest bang for the buck and it certainly was in this case. The guys also painted the bright yellow electrical cord on the back brick wall to camouflage it a little. I need to figure out a work around of those cords but I’m thinking a large table and artwork will hide most of it.

The starting Point for my room

I knew from the get go that creating a cohesive space with furnishings loaned from different showrooms was going to be a very big challenge. This is called “piecemeal” decorating and is the most difficult way to complete a room. I decided choosing a rug was the best way to begin. Since the space is large at 31′ x 21′, I needed the biggest rug I could find.

Carpet showroom JD Staron was able to meet the challenge and found me an 18′ x 14′ rug. This rug is the starting point for my color palette as well as something to warm up and soften that raw space. To be honest, it was not what I had initially imagined and upon seeing it I blurted out, “Oh wow! It’s REALLY blue”! I hyperventilated a little bit and then realized it would be fabulous against that bright white floor.

The cool thing about this rug is that it is hand woven out of recycled silk sarees. After hearing about the labor intensive process to create a rug like this it’s understandable why the process takes up to six months to produce. This is what the dealer emailed me about the process.

”Silk garments are extremely popular in the Asian culture, therefore there is an abundance of these, that once no longer used, go into recycling plants. The mills that produce the recycled sari have their own plants where they send in “pickers” to pick out the similar colors for that particular rug (i.e if you want red rug they will pick out all similar reds from the pile). This then goes into a shredder to turn them back into fiber and eventually spin it.”

Now that I have secured a rug, I can work on creating a design plan. My pied-a-terre will still be light and bright like the inspiration photos I shared last week, but I have switched design direction a bit. This bright blue rug dictates a bolder color palette so my plan is to incorporate more saturated color. I don’t want to give anything away just yet but here is a hint of the direction in which I’m going.

Next week I hope (pray) to be able to show you what I have procured for loaned furniture. Today, I’m off to do more “begging”. Wish me luck!!

In case you missed week one you can catch up here: One Room Challenge: Week One

Be sure to see what progress the other featured bloggers have made on The One Room Challenge Week Two and on Thursday the link up bloggers.

Apartment 34 | Beginning in the Middle | Coco & Jack | The English Room | The Gold Hive

Gray Malin | Jenna Sue Design | Jojotastic | Kelly Rogers Int. | Linda Holt | Marcus Design

Michelle Gage | Natasha Habermann | The Painted House | Rambling Renovators

Sacramento Street | Shannon Claire | Sketch 42 | Stephanie Kraus | Style Me Pretty Living

Media Partner House Beautiful | TM by ORC

 In by chance you are new to this series, the One Room Challenge was started by Linda of the blog Calling it Home. Each April and October, twenty featured bloggers have six weeks to completely transform a room of their choosing. Each Wednesday the twenty bloggers update their progress. The following Thursday, hundreds of other bloggers who have linked up to the challenge, share their progress. It’s a wild six weeks filled with challenges but somehow in the end almost everyone finishes in triumph.