You just have to open your eyes and your mind. 44 Inspiration In most homes, bedrooms tend to be on the quiet side, with the “wow factor” left to more public spaces like living and dining rooms. But there’s no law that says a bedroom can’t also be high impact (and if there is, well, rules are meant to be broken). In fact, sometimes bright, mood-elevating splashes of color are just what the doctor ordered. There is, though, a smart way to go about creating a bedroom that’s fun and lighthearted. After all, you don’t want to turn up the volume so high that it’s impossible to sleep. ABOVE Photographs of flowers were enlarged, printed out on canvas, and stretched over frames to make inexpensive artwork. OPPOSITE PAGE Fun, attention-getting bursts of color work in a bedroom if they’re balanced with muted tones and clean-lined accessories. The extras are kept to a minimum with only a few understated lamps and a couple of elegant floor vases. Likewise, when your headboard is ornate, keep the bedding simple. Here, all we needed for oomph was a few flowered throw pillows.
Sudden Impact A balance between high spirits and liv- ability is what I was going for when I created a bedroom for a woman by the name of Colleen Nick. One summer night, Colleen and her eldest daughter, Morgan, traveled to a nearby Arkansas town to watch a Little League baseball game. During the game, six- year-old Morgan joined her friends to catch fireflies in an adjacent field and was never seen again. She simply disappeared, possibly abducted by a man who witnesses saw watching her. That was in 1995, but Colleen has never given up hope that she will one day be reunited with her eldest daughter (she also has two other children, a boy and girl).
After her loss, she established the Morgan Nick Foundation and she’s worked tirelessly ever since to help other families find lost children and to implement protective measures so that kids don’t get abducted in the first place. Colleen is an absolutely incredible woman. After years of neglect while the family concentrated on finding Morgan, the Nick house was in a pretty sorry state. The carpet had gotten so bad that they had ripped it out and were padding around on bare concrete floors. (Her son and his friends, though, thought it was cool-they were skateboarding on them.) While the EMHE crew worked on giving the Nick family a new house, I joined in on some of the continuing efforts to find Morgan. I was helping to put a time-enhanced photograph of what Morgan might look like now on a billboard next to a highway when I looked down and there, growing out of a cinderblock amidst old tires and machine parts, was one little yellow daisy.
This one small flower, somehow surviving in the middle of all this junk and trash, seemed like the perfect metaphor for Colleen herself. With all the pain and suffering she endures, I thought she deserved a room that brought some light and joy into her life. And that daisy, unabashedly bold and bright, was the perfect inspiration. But while I wanted Colleen’s bedroom to exude exuberance, I also wanted it to be a place where she could relax-a little hard to do if the walls are screaming at you. So here was the compromise: I saved the bright bursts of color for the artwork I created to adorn the room, then painted the walls a deep, but fairly muted mustard yellow and light olive green.
Because they’re associated with nature, both shades symbolize new growth, but neither was going to keep Colleen up at night. To create the flower pictures above the dressers and on either side of the bed, I took digital photographs of daisies and sunflowers and transferred them to my computer. I then enlarged the flowers and deepened their red and orange hues so that, once framed (they’re printed on canvas), they’d really pop off the yellow and green walls. I also carried the flower motif over to the solid maple bedroom set I custom built for Colleen.
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