apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I want to like it but... is it because there is too much beige?

Not my style...but I can appreciate it :)

There are great elements, but... mix it up a little! And the cupids freak me out.

the doll at the bottom of the bed creeps me right out. I wouldn't want to wake up in the middle of the night to find it staring down at me . . .

ScottB & lookingupat leaves beat me to it. This has so much potential, but too much of the same repeated style/elements and scary dolls push it into the "NOT" category.

Mirrored cabinet! Sumptuous fabrics and fittings... and I love those wallpaper panels. I am a sucker for the eclectic class of this room, and while this is not my colorway by a country mile but I think this room is sexy as hell... with the exception of that doll. Maybe I'd take out the cupids, too.

Tough crowd--it's fabulous!

I like it but only because it doesn't look like IKEA or CRATE & BARREL or POTTERY BARN.

Paint the headboard dark brown or dark gray... swap the desk chair for either a ghost chair or something with squarer, sleeker, lines... replace the doll head with something less representational (and without the little flower wreath)... and it would be hot.

This is sooo not AT but in my opinion, quite gorgeous nevertheless! Slight details like updating the lampshades could go a long way to modernizing the space and making it more timeless. Beautiful, but yeah, the cupids have to go.

It's just not my style. It's fine for somebody else, though.

Just because a particular style had its period of greatest popularity a century ago, I don't consider it necessarily inappropriate for modern life, but I do want to see it done well, and this amaateurish interpretation of an Edwardian scheme reminds me of a poem translated from a foreign tongue by someone with limited language skills: the translator may have the words--thanks to a dictionary--but he doesn't know how to put them together and as a result, the whole becomes less than the sum of its parts. Same here.

This Frenchified room is like Edith Wharton or Elsie deWolfe gone wrong, with centrifugal force sending all the individual pieces spinning off in a dozen different directions. The wriggly French screen behind the bed has nothing to do with the boxy, mirror-covered chest at the other end of the bed, the chest & the rug are starting to squabble over territory like fussy kids in the backseat, and that unnecessary gilding on the walls' lower panels is just the camel's nose under the tent, because because you start out like this, with just touch of gold, and pretty soon you want a little bit more, and before you know it your place looks like Donald Trump's crib.

And that's not all that's wrong with this room, not by any means. That cheesy stenciled border up above is totally unrelated to anything else in the room, the last thing that beautiful wallcovering needs is those stupid little cherub plaques covering it up, and that tchotchke at the foot of the bed flat out gives me the creeps. Here's the biggest issue: this allegedly "French" room is totally lacking in the one thing that most great French rooms have in spades: discipline. Even so, it's far from hopeless, because once all that superfluous crap is eliminated--or painted over--this could actually be a good-looking room.

As Edith herself put it, "Any work of art...must justify its presence in a room by being more valuable than the space it occupies--more valuable, that is, to the general scheme of decoration. Those who call this view arbitrary or pedantic should consider, first, the importance of plain surfaces in decoration, and secondly, the tendency of overcrowding to minimize the effect of each separate object, however striking in itself...[T]he Oriental habit of displaying only one or to objects of art at a time shows a more delicate sense of these limitations than the Western passion for multiplying effects."

"Slight details like updating the lampshades could go a long way to modernizing the space and making it more timeless."

How does narrowing our historical perspective to that which has been in the last few years make our efforts more "timeless"?

A very interesting, creative effort, Heather. Thanks.

magnaverde -- well put.

this is neither fish nor fowl, just cheesy

What a great escape!

I like a lot about it...but that cupid at the end of the bed made me say NOT!

Too fussy, pretentious. Like a museum display. I personally wouldnt feel comfortable in a room like that. I may not possess the technical knowledge that Magnaverde does, - and quite frankly I'd rather not overanalyze every room I looked at in that fashion unless it was my professsion to do so - but I know what I like ...

... and that's not it..

I do love the floors though...

some really great elements but there is just too much that everything looks washed out and overdone. I like the trunk at the end of the bed and the muted colours.

I think if you took away the freaky cherubs and doll things, and freshen up the colors, you'd have a sexy little bedroom.