The Morning Room - Coastal Victorian Decor

So I've been saying for a long time that I'd do a post on the morning room.  I haven't had a chance to take more pictures, so I just thought I'd put up the ones I have.

According to Wikipedia, a morning room is a nineteenth-century designation for a sitting-room, often with east-facing exposure, suited for daytime calls, or the middle-class lounge, a late nineteenth-century designation for a room in which to relax.

This is the only room in the house that we didn't paint. I wanted to go with a coastal look, and the walls were already a light sand color which was a perfect backdrop for the punches of blue I had planned. For this room, I was inspired by a painting I had called "Beach at Trouville."  As shown below, it depicts the beautiful french coastline during Victorian times.  It's another Claude Monet, like the paintings in my diningroom.

If you look around the room in the after photos, you can really see all the colors in the painting.  The blues and yellows are in the stripes of the sofa and loveseat.  The sand is the color of the walls, the turquoise on the staircases can be found in the vintage bottles on the mantel, and the brick color on the buildings match the brick of the fireplace.

And now for the before's and after's:

BeforeBefore
Before
After

I found the victorian fireplace screen on ebay.  It was originally black and I spray painted it white to have that victorian lace look.

The mantel displays lots of vintage bottles, old nautical-themed books in different tones of blue, and a ninteenth century toile vase from England.

And the room most certainly wouldn't be coastal without some shells...  :-)

I'm not typically a fan of tassels on drapery, but I wanted the window treatments to embody both the airiness of a beach house and the elegance of the victorian era.  So for the drapes, I went with a light blue and white striped sheer from the Martha Stewart collection.  And I went with the white tasseled valances, because they reminded of me of a victorian lady's parasol.

In decorating, I just kept picturing young girls picnicing on the beach in their victorian dresses and dainty parasols to shade them from the sun.  Add lots of beachy accessories and you have what I call, Coastal Victorian.

AfterYankee Candle of the room: Beach Walk.

This post is part of Met Monday.

 

House Listing of The Week

So I think it's safe to say that I have become obsessed with Annie Brahler's Beaux Arts home that was featured in Country Living a few years back.  I just discovered it a couple weeks ago and have been scouring the internet to get as many pictures of it as I could find.  

Here is a photo of the exterior.  As you can see, it's absolutely out of this world.  And her decorating is nothing short of breath taking.  However, I will dedicate an entire post to the interior.  (I found some exclusive photos shhh.)  But today, is House Listing of the week day.

After some research, I managed to find the address of the house.  It's located on West State Street in Jacksonville, Illinois.  The reason behind my finding the address was not so that I could catch a plane, hunt down the house, and sit on a lawn chair on the sidewalk in front and drool over the house in person.  But rather to catch a glimpse of the other homes on the street.  And just as I suspected, this isn't the only beauty in the neighborhood.  I took a drive down the street with Google street view.  Take a peak at some of the other gems I found on the street:

 

And then of course, back to the William Howard Thompson house:

You can imagine my excitement to find out a historic home on the street is for sale.  Gasp... that means pictures of the inside!

 

 The house is listed at $247,000 with 4 bedrooms, 2.5 bath, 3,712 sq ft.

Isn't it beautiful?  Here is the listing.  While the William Howard Thompson house still has my heart as my ultimate dream house.. this one is still very nice.  I love the street.  Google street view is so fun, thank goodness for technology!

What do you think of this home listing?  How would you decorate it?