Victor had always tried hard to entertain the boys with charades, Scrabble, and other games, so an entertainment center with lots of storage was central to the design of the room. But this would also be their all and everything room, the place where they could entertain and just hang out as a family, so it needed to have a sense of warmth and light, too. Because this was a family of men, I could easily have gone with all the typical male furnishings in browns and dark leather, but I chose white and orange instead: white to reflect that the family was making a clean start (and I mean that in the truest sense of the word-their dingy old furniture was so infested with bugs we had to burn it), and orange to keep the room young and hip.
After all, it was going to be inhabited by five boys and one very cool dad. Shelby Pope is a thirteen-year-old girl with polymorphic light eruption, a disease that makes her allergic to sunlight. She isn’t able to go outside or even sit beside an uncovered window without having Orange as an accent color keeps this room young. Even the orange shag rug -a ’70s nightmare made hip again-looks cool.
The Everything Room 171 her skin covered, so until we gave the family a new Shelby-friendly house, she had spent much of her time in a dark, tiny bedroom. My job was to turn an old barn into a place for the whole family to gather and, after circumstances demanded it, their own private wine bar.
The Popes live right in the heart of wine country and, as it turns out, instead of bringing over brownies or an apple pie to be neighborly, the people in this neck of the woods show friendship by making an offering of wine. During the short time we were in town making over the Pope home, the whole community came out toting along bottle after bottle. The family ended up with quite a collection and, well, we had to put all that wine somewhere. Since the setting for this everything room was a barn, I kept the feel of the room rustic by using a lot of fairly rough recycled materials.