This “Forgettable” Bathroom Transforms into a Showstopper with 2 Bold Paint Colors

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Olivia Harvey
Olivia Harvey
Olivia Harvey is a freelance writer and award-winning scriptwriter from outside Boston, Massachusetts. She’s a big fan of scented candles, getting dressed up, and the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley. You can make sure she’s doing okay via…read more
published Oct 10, 2024
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Redoing a powder room is an opportunity to get super creative. Since it’s usually not the main bathroom, you can go bolder with your style choices so that it looks like a work of art as you pass by. And when you want a more subdued vibe, you can simply close the door. 

When Yvonne Langen and her partner, Michael Rizk, moved into their 1940s Ottawa home, they had a lot of work ahead of them to make it their own. That included doing something about their boring powder room, which just so happens to be the first thing you see when you walk into the home.

“We wanted to transform it from forgettable to memorable,” Yvonne says. And she did just that, taking it from a background actor to a shining star.

Use wallpaper as a well of inspiration.

Every project has to start somewhere, and for Yvonne, all it took was a wallpaper sample to spark some ideas.

“I used Graham & Brown’s Edo Toile Wallpaper in Navy as the inspiration for the rest of [the] color palette,” she says. That print and its rich, bold colors helped her figure out exactly where to take the design — she also had an assist from a close friend with a design background.“I recruited the help of my friend Melanie Neault, founder of interior design firm Launch Your Space, to validate my design ideas, push me, [and] rein me in where appropriate,” Yvonne says.

Add wainscoting to give the space character.

The powder room didn’t have any personality when Yvonne and Michael first moved in, so they knew this $3,400 makeover had to make the small space pop as soon as you saw it. To complement architectural details elsewhere in the house, they added wainscoting to make the room more visually interesting.

Yvonne initially was going to stick true to the wallpaper and paint the wainscoting navy, but Melanie helped her land on a more striking design choice. “[She] pushed me to incorporate a big pop of color with a chartreuse paint,” Yvonne says. Using Graham & Brown’s Saffron paint, Yvonne added a surge of personality to the powder room.

Drench every surface with color.

Chartreuse wainscoting isn’t the only bold color choice Yvonne made in the space. The navy paint found its way onto the ceiling, and the floor is a teal ceramic tile laid in a chevron pattern. Both of the blue hues are found in the wallpaper and complement the green-yellow tone of the wainscoting.

In fact, Yvonne now calls chartreuse and navy her favorite color combination. “I love how the bright yellow-green is grounded by a saturated navy,” Yvonne says. “It’s like a lily pad on a still lake at night.”