“Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.”
Meryl Streep’s bitingly sarcastic character in “The Devil Wears Prada” may have had a point. But covering walls with big, bold cabbage roses does qualify as groundbreaking for my husband-design partner, Roger, and me.
Our design aesthetic has been described—sometimes flatteringly, sometimes less so—as “masculine.” While we aren’t sure why a color or texture needs to be assigned a gender, we can at least agree that outfitting our second-floor TV lounge—a snug, in British parlance—in floral wallpaper and soft pink walls is a curveball.
The slighly neglected room was just crying out for a happy, light design touch. A small bedroom with big windows facing the east and south, it somehow avoids gloominess on even the darkest of days. With some of the best views of our front yard and side perennial gardens, it only made sense to pull the landscape indoors.
Our first task was designing and printing custom wallpaper for the room. Inspired by vintage illustrations and our gardens, we created a pattern of over-scale cabbage roses set against a deep blue background, with a subtle repeating grid of beetles sitting between them.
Garden element #2 is the yellow-green color we painted on the floor. (Don’t fret; the wood floors were badly stained.) We’re obsessed with British conservatories, and the diamond pattern in white and Sherwin Williams ‘Bengal Grass’ delivers that feeling.
To break up the walls—because floor-to-ceiling roses seemed way too much—we added our quick board-and-batten treatment to the lower portion. Eagle-eyed followers of our Instagram will notice that the lower walls and trim went through a few color iterations, finally ending up with the soft pink of Benjamin Moore ‘Rose Rococo.’ The ceilings are painted in ‘Sporty Blue,’ by Sherwin.
Why the various iterations? Like all of our design projects, we improvised. At the last minute, a customer cancelled their sofa order. Already on a truck headed for Omaha, we decided that we could make the sofa work and tweaked the room’s color scheme to make it shine. The tailored sofa and chaise in soft, turquoise chenille fits perfectly. A bold yellow Karpen Horn chair from our friends at Modlines vintage has, after bouncing around many rooms, found its way into the snug.
Perhaps the best part of the space is the display of antique botanical prints. A collection from Roger’s mother, the illustrations cover a wall, wrapping around the mounted television and ducking behind the cane bookcase and two dog statues standing guard. The end result is a room that shouts Spring no matter the season.
Until next time, Roger and Chris, at Double Heart Farm.
This article is part of a series chronicling the home renovation of Roger Hazard and Chris Stout-Hazard, furniture designers with Roger+Chris. Read more at doubleheartfarm.com or follow along on instagram.com/dblheartfarm
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2023 issue of Omaha Home magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.