introducing our happy breakfast area
As you may have heard, we moved just over a month ago. We are mere mortals who juggled full-time jobs, a toddler, and a shifting childcare situation during the pandemic last spring. That all seemed way too simple and relaxing (!!!), so we decided to stage and sell our home (with a realtor, thank goodness), make an offer on another home, back out after a plethora of inspection issues and extended option, make another offer and re-do all the inspections, then double-close and move in ON THE SAME DAY.
We’re still married and like each other, have jobs, and are healthy, so all in all we are doing very well. But my brain turned into lasagna for most of August and we floated around in a sea of boxes for two weeks. The boxes are down to puddle-size groups now, plus we have located most of our critical belongings. Things are looking up.
The breakfast area in question looked like this when the house was on the market:
Honestly, I intended to leave it alone for awhile since “we have a formal dining room we can eat in”. As it turns out, that room is exactly seven steps too far away to serve a 1-year-old safely while multitasking. We were actually eating in a weird no-man’s land between the built-in kitchen desk and the trash can, sitting on rolling desk chairs with plates in our laps. BLEAK.
At the same time, I was trying to make a cohesive design plan for the house and having a very difficult time choosing a starting point. In theory, the breakfast area is a small room with only a handful of decisions to make, so it seemed like an easier starting point. Practically speaking, we both kept walking into the very pointy and heavy chandelier. That thing needed to go.
Inspiration
The “breakfast room” would be the real daily dining room of the house, as our first month proved. This is where I envision my son drawing pictures while I make breakfast, us eating dinner every night, my dog scavenging under the high chair, and my cat pushing stuff off the table. It needs to work hard. It was important to me to make a space that really lifts us up and feels bright, happy and homey, whether it’s the beginning or end of the day. In my pinning frenzy, I found that these images stood out to me:
image sources top left | top right | bottom right | bottom left
In every room there is something that sparks my interest: those beautiful woven leather chairs with the seagrass pendant, the gorgeous blue tile, that stunning open-weave pendant and the pure energy of that blue-and-pink room. Our “moment” arrived when these crazy and very colorful bent plywood chairs from Anthropologie went on sale after I had been eyeing them for six months:
I just want to be friends with this person who clearly doesn’t take life too seriously and lives in a beach bungalow and has a plant living up on the ceiling beam. This person could be a Survivor fan favorite. My mood board was based on the blue-green chairs (“Ocean”) for a cheerful (but hopefully not jarring) breakfast area:
All in all, the palette is a warm, medium tone brown, warm white, dark blue, gold and a shake of turquoise. But first we had to deal with the old dark-gold beige on the walls (circa 2004).
PAINT
This room is visible from the kitchen and great room/living room. Without getting into too much detail, let’s just say I thought about a LOT of possibilities that started to make my head hurt, and the simplest thing was to continue the white that we plan to use in the adjacent living room. YES, maybe we will one day paint the upper or lower portion of the wall since it’s divided by chair rail. We tested several different shades of white (news to my dad, who thought there was “only one”) both here and in the living room. I think it helped to prime the walls because at first our samples were picking up a lot of the surrounding (and underlying) warmth from the beige. They were all by Sherwin Williams, just because it’s what we know and have been happy with in the past, having used Pure White in our bedroom previously. We put up Pure White, White Flour, and Greek Villa. White Flour fell somewhere in the middle of warmth, whereas the others were too cool or warm. We also don’t intend to repaint our trim around the house if at all possible, so we wanted the color to work with it. Most of the house gets good natural light and we don’t have to use lighting during the day.
Seating
It’s kind of crazy to me that I spent like, four straight days looking at light fixtures and basically ten minutes choosing the chairs. In part that was because I’d agonized over dining chairs in our last house and never got around to replacing them. I knew what was out there, and our hearts kept pulling us back to these. We LOVE the design by Montreal-based artist Claire Desjardins, particularly the blue-greens. They keep this room in the “under 50 years old” category. The chairs are lacquered wood, so they will resist peanut butter smears, juice spills, and husband cookie crumbs. The seat is unpadded by nature of that design, but this is where we will spend 30-45 minutes at a time, not two hours, so it doesn’t matter too much. We could also throw washable cushions on there if we really wanted, but we don’t want to cover up the colors! The lack of upholstery is what keeps the price pretty reasonable, in fact. I thought about mixing the chairs, but there were only three designs by her (many more in the Tamsin collection as a whole) and I didn’t want to bring in too many different colors given the open-concept design.
While we could have pursued a banquette in the window (for normal people: "a window seat”), it just wasn’t a cost or project I wanted to take on at the moment. I love the way they look all styled out, but from a functional standpoint it isn’t the best fit for our family. We need chairs with backs.
lighting
I found a lot of really gorgeous options for pendant lights that I’ll round up soon and share, along with a discussion of WTH is a pendant versus a chandelier (?!), but I knew I wanted something quieter to let the chairs be the real moment in this room. I wanted to “turn down the crazy” just a hair. This pendant by Crate and Barrel with two tiers and a classic drum shape has just enough interest (probably the requisite amount…) to not be 100% boring, and it can tolerate the lighting in the rest of the house (which is undecided) going more modern or transitional. It’s the flattering black t-shirt we should all have in our closets . I’m still VERY tempted by this open-weave pendant though, and the pendant light can always move to a bedroom if we want to change it up.
The table
I absolutely ADORE tulip or pedestal tables both for the aesthetic (so slim and elegant) and for the convenience of never running into a table leg. Three out of my four pins above have a white tulip table! But could it tip over if a toddler or two were hanging onto the same edge, swinging like monkeys??? What if they tried to team up and tip it over on purpose?? I felt better looking for a medium-tone wood table, as opposed to white/black/dark wood, glass, or marble. (We can’t handle the upkeep of keeping glass smudge-free or maintaining marble, so a “used wood” table seemed ideal.) And to fit in this area, it obviously needed to be round. I trolled Craigslist for a few days, and I found this 48” round table that was ACTUALLY genuinely mid-century modern, by furniture maker Conant Ball. Also, it came with two 12” leaves so we can drag it out and squash my extended family around it for overflow seating! Kids’ table extreme! It’s solid maple and has a good bit of orange undertone, but it can always be refinished if I really want to refinish a vintage table (I do not, currently). A 48” table will easily seat 4 and your daily pile of junk mail.
Here’s where it was right after priming and a new light fixture:
That fixture got lowered like 15-18” after this was taken, so it sits about 36” above the table. It has a diffuser on the bottom, which means we aren’t staring up into the bottom of the bulb when we are seated, and it puts off a lovely soft light.
The rug
Let us be clear: it is infinitely easier to have no textiles under your kids. But…the floor is off-white tile (at least for now), the walls were going to be white, all our trim and doors are white. That is a LOT of white, and most of the textures were super hard. All-white everything under the guise of “bright and airy” is super in right now, but I wanted to warm up the space a bit and ground the area. I thought a two-toned jute rug would give me that relaxed vibe that I wanted (I’m not a regular mom; I’m a cool mom). I love back-and-forth contrast here between the tile, outer rug, table, and inner rug. It is an 8’ round for our 4’ table, and fits the chairs perfectly. I browsed a little for indoor/outdoor round rugs that fit my specs, but didn’t come up with anything worth spending too much on. MEANWHILE, we secretly use this dropcloth under our kiddo’s high chair to make cleanup easier.
artwork??
There’s a great place for art between the utility room door and the window, and I originally went with a seascape featuring some of the same colors in the chairs. Then I went “lemons!!!!”, then really abstract, and then I remembered that Earth poster that my sister in law gave us a couple years ago that we already had framed (albeit in a cheap white Ikea frame). PERFECT color match and a bit quirkier and youthful than some of my other options.
This is where we landed for now:
STILL TO GO…
FLOORS AND WINDOWS. Oh, and styling. The floors we hope will someday be a warm, medium brown hardwood, but that decision involves lots of dust (aka tile demo), multiple other rooms, and a lot of money. The current east-facing windows are double-pane (yay) but a very plain white vinyl (boo). I could put the white wood blinds back up now that we’re done painting, but LOOK AT ALL THAT LIGHT! I’m thinking we will get a cordless Roman shade so we can actually see and enjoy the backyard.
Someday we’ll have it all “done”. I love how it’s coming along so far!!
One last shot that Pierre caught as the sun was coming up:
Bisous
Nicole
