Project #2 at Maple Hollow Cottage is underway! Adam and I spent the last couple days picking out paint colors for various places in (and outside of) our house and I have to say, when all was said and done and I laid our final choices out together, the color palate was very cohesive. I didn’t want to go into deciding paint colors trying to pick things that “went together” because I wanted to be able to focus on each space individually. But, of course, you don’t want the colors in your home to feel haphazard, clashy and off-key to each other so I was pleased to not have to make any amendments although I was prepared to tweak if there was anything too far off from the rest of the palate. I’ll put the final palate here and then go through each color below!

TOP LEFT: Luckily, we picked a house that already had a lot of colors we wanted to keep. For instance, throughout the house, the main color is Pure White by Sherwin Williams and we liked how open it made the spaces feel so we decided to keep it. However, since it was a lived in house there were natural nicks and scratches or discolorations here and there and the previous owners had painted everything but the inside of closets, which they left a weird yellow color from the previous owners. So last night we bought eleven gallons of Pure White to just go through and freshen up absolutely everything.

TOP MIDDLE: In our current house, Adam and I tackled the project of painting our study a hunter green (pro tip: always hire a professional!) and we loved it so much we decided to duplicate it in the new house. Maple Hollow Cottage has two master suites, one downstairs and one upstairs. We’re turning the master suite downstairs into a library/study that will double as a guest bedroom (custom made Murphy bed desk/shelving unit in our future!). The paint we decided on for this room is Peacock House by Valspar. Think: hunter green walls, hardwood floor with a preppy plaid rug, stone fireplace, brown leather seating, dark wood furniture, crystal decanters of whiskey, golf and equestrian decor…I can’t wait to finish this room and share the pics!

TOP RIGHT: Right now, the house has black front doors (yes, there are two front doors) and black shutters. And since it’s a Cape Cod style house, there are a lot of shutters. I didn’t totally love that they were all black and it certainly didn’t fit my vision of an English cottage. I wanted to be able to play off of the lush green grass we have (a rarity in Oklahoma), our beautiful mature trees and our shrubs and vines, so we’re swapping out the stuffy black for Meadowgrass by Valspar. Am I downright giddy about slapping a lemon wreath on that color front door? Yes. Yes I am. Sidenote: the house exterior is natural stone and beige side paneling. While I love the stone parts, I loathe side paneling. We won’t be doing this immediately, but eventually we will be taking off that side paneling and replacing it with rough stucco and timber, which will REALLY turn our house into the Tudor-style cottage I’m envisioning and all I can think about is how lovely Meadowgrass shutters and doors will look with that. I. Can’t. Wait.

BOTTOM LEFT: Right now the master bedroom has purple-toned walls (hate) and a white ceiling. I also suspect the previous owners painted it themselves because the lines where the walls meet the ceiling are not crisp at all. Double hate. SO we’ll be starting fresh in there. We wanted a cozy color to coat our walls and ceiling so we landed on Sea Island Cotton by Sherwin Williams. I liked that it’s a dark but muted tone because it’ll be sandwiched between a fun wallpapered master closet (more to come on that) and a master bathroom with serious character (more to come on that as well).

BOTTOM MIDDLE: My favorite room in the entire house is the kitchen. This is largely the case in any house, though, since I’m a big believer in the kitchen being the heart of the home. I’m a nightmare while house-hunting because if the kitchen isn’t perfect or there’s no hope of renovating it into exactly what I want then its bye-bye, on to the next. Luckily, we hit the kitchen jackpot with this house. It’s open, bright, airy, crisp and clean with a lot of white but the island is a navy blue. In the house we just sold we also had white cabinets with a navy blue island so WIN! The formal dining room is right off of the kitchen with a direct view of the kitchen island so we decided to take that color and paint it in the dining room as well to really add some fun color and dimension. We’ll only be painting the top of the dining room and the bottom half will be white wainscoting (but right now is just split by white wood beams). The island is Blue Endeavor by Sherwin Williams but we’ll be painting the dining room Blue Coal by Valspar.

BOTTOM RIGHT: Y’all didn’t think I wasn’t going to personalize a home office, right? We have four bedrooms upstairs, which gives us ample rooms for guests and the ability to take one of them and turn it into my own space. After a thorough search of Pinterest for some inspiration, I’ve decided to have a pink/peach toned marble wallpaper accent wall and then paint the rest of the room Champagne Pink by Valspar. It’s the absolute most subtle pink tone and I’m just smitten. I cannot wait to tackle designing this room and to share it here.

Et voila! That’s it! Everything that’s not a specific color will be default Pure White by Sherwin Williams. I’m so pleased with our selections and can’t wait to see the final product at the end of this week!

A word about my method of picking colors:

Like I said, I tackle room by room instead of trying to pick them all at once. Once I have my room in mind, I go through every color in the tone I’m looking for and pull out all of my favorites. And I bend back all of the colors I don’t want to look at so I don’t get distracted. From there, I take my selections and compare them together. Somehow looking at everything you selected helps you to see tones you didn’t realize where there. For example, I had originally started pulling a lot of light greens for our doors and shutters but compared to the others, they looked more like neon zesty limes which I DID NOT want. So I was able to pull out the exact color I wanted. Likewise, choosing the color for my office was interesting because I pulled about 8 colors that I thought all looked so similar, but when held up to each other I could clearly pull out overly peach or overly purple tones and pare it down to the champagne pink I landed on. By doing this, I get to see all of my options and then whittle it down to the exact shade I want by process of comparison and elimination.

So there you have it! The Maple Hollow Cottage Color Palette! Stay on the lookout for more blog posts coming soon to detail more and more projects!

XOXO, Thessali

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