living room wall decor target

meet james aguiar and mark haldeman. they live in park slope, brooklyn in a fantastic house that was built in 1899. what is so unusual about this particularstory is that mark and james have lived in this apartment twice. when we decided to leave this fabulous apartment, we had bought a house upstate. they found a similar apartment two doors down that was just one floor. later deciding thatthey missed their old space, mark and james decided to move back in.

so when we approached designing it the second time, we had a lot of our friends say, "are yougonna go back and do what you did before?" and we said, "absolutely not. we'vegot a clean slate. we can redo the whole thing." i just happen to have a copy of the magazine the first time we photographedtheir apartment. and we decided that we wanted a properlibrary. we have a lot of books. we just sort of decided to be unapologetic. and then one day i said, "but i think we need to do the ceiling."

and he was like, "you've got to be kidding me. nobody wallpapers the ceiling." i love my library, but i love the living room upstairs as well because it just feelsso different from the rest of the house. what i love about this room is that thelight is constantly changing and right now it feels like i'm sitting in themiddle of a pearl. we've never really done a white room before. it's not strictly white but it's very muted, and having kind of that dichotomy of going fromthese spaces downstairs into the upstairs living space, it was really one of thethings that i was most excited about.

we tongue-in-cheek-ily call our artcollection "the gallery." it's very much a high-low mixture too. we have wonderfulpieces from hunt slonem and robertson. that was a really fun thing to beillustrated by donald robertson. two of my favorites are these etchingsillustrations by a french artist named jules abertis. the bedroom palette was really conscious in choosing a dark tone. it is dark and it's nice tojust kind of envelop yourself. fashion and style kind of really enter thisapartment and in a very interesting way and it's very illustrated in the bedroom.the most fun for me when we moved back into this apartment was turning what wasa former office into a dressing room.

the high-low of how we did the dressing room, with taking an ikea cabinet, multiple closets, putting it together, insertingthese tack boards for ephemera of memories and invitations and inspirationand photographs, and then behind that to have our wardrobe was really a coollittle project for us. entertaining and dining is one of the most important things that we do here because not a lot of peopledo it in new york. there's not space, it's at a premium, time is at a premium.yes, setting the perfect table is really important but i cook, we make everything,we don't call it in and it's a really wonderful thing.

my takeaway is to be a little more adventurous because i love the way that their style keepsevolving and they're not afraid to change things up and that's anotherreally important takeaway for me: change.

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