Interior Inspiration From TV Shows + Our Guest Bedroom Mood Board: ORC Week 2

It was a tense scene, set in the 60s, in a beautiful hotel. A cut to a different shot. *GASP* Dustin whips his head to me “What???” 

“Did you see that sconce???” I ask, completely, 100% serious. Cue the eyeroll.

I am annoying to watch TV with. I recently called Dustin to tell him about a show I liked and found myself saying “It’s a good show, lots of great wallpapers.”

I can’t help it! Once we bought this house, I started finding design inspiration everywhere—hotels, restaurants, AirBnBs, books, and, yes, TV shows and movies. 

Which brings me to today’s topic: the guest bedroom mood board, and the TV show that’s inspiring it!

This is the second post in my One Room Challenge. Need to catch up? Last week, I shared the before photos of this room, just so you know where we’re starting at. Be sure to click the logo to see what the other participants are up to!

Guest Bedroom Inspiration

The recent obsession that I can’t stop thinking about? The Duchess on Netflix. I’ve already watched it 3 times, I’m buying every headband I see, and these pajamas have been in my cart for months. (Please invite me to a fancy pajama party so I can justify the splurge.)

But the aesthetic that really grabbed me? The interior shots of the townhouse. Specifically, the living room. So much so that I just went ahead and let that living room become the inspiration for our guest bedroom. It’s proving difficult to find stills from the show, so bear with me:

Once I saw that blue-green wall color mixed with pops of yellow and pink, I knew it would be perfect for the guest room. We don’t use our guest room a lot, so we have the freedom to experiment a bit. That color scheme of blue, saffron, and blush fits with our plans for the rest of the house, but dials up the volume a little bit.

And then I saw that the 2021 color of the year was Aegean teal, so I was sold. It’s a little brighter than the teal color in the show, but that’s fine by me! I started looking up teal rooms to find even more inspiration. Here’s some more teal inspiration:

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Of course, it’s not just the colors that are inspiring the room. The whole attitude of the show, in which Katherine Ryan plays a feminist potter and single mum to a tweenage daughter, is liberating my design in here. It will skew a little feminine, a little quirky, and a little playful. But I’m hoping to keep *some* adult sensibility so it doesn’t end up feeling like a kid’s room.

Colorful Guest Bedroom Mood Board

You’ve waited long enough, though! Here is the mood board for our colorful guest bedroom:

It’s still a work in progress as I try to determine the actual art I want in here, but I love the idea of putting in a picture ledge so it’s easy to swap out artwork, or just completely load it up for a really playful look!

That aegean teal is going to run around the bottom part of the walls, with a piece of trim dividing it from the top white section, like a chair rail. As I said, we will install a picture ledge and a bunch of fun art (I’m having WAY too much fun picking out prints and frames).

We’re also thinking a lot about guest comfort and convenience so that this room actually serves their needs. There will be a few hooks since I really like guests to feel taken care of—that way, they can hang their clothes, bags, etc. instead of tossing them on the floor.

We do want to have a TV in here—in the past, we’ve had guests that are night owls or early risers and they appreciate some entertainment options that don’t disturb us. But I am thinking of ways to perhaps make that TV area look a little more intentional.

And, in the corner, I’d love to have a twin pullout sofa (loveseat sized) so that any guests with a young kiddo can feel comfortable staying, or anyone can just have another seating option besides the bed.

I also believe in fans in guest bedrooms so that everyone is a comfortable temperature, but we’ll swap out the existing awful ceiling fan for one we pulled from another room, just because it’s a bit more modern look and will hopefully work better.

Finally, the carpet! The existing carpet is old and awful and STINKS. So, my plan is to swap it for (YEP) a plaid wall to wall carpeting. What do you think?? Too wild or just enough?? The carpet company was…confused. But that seems to be a growing theme when I call contractors.

Anyway, the mood board is really depicting the ultimate goal in here, and we’ll see how close we can get during the One Room Challenge. So, on to the practical notes…

Refreshing a Room And Keeping Our Furniture

I know guest bedrooms usually end up being the slush bedroom: the furniture you’ve grown out of or that got handed down accumulates in there and is sort of ignored until someone comes to stay, and then you run out to buy new sheets quick.

This is somewhat the case in here (the bed is from my NYC apartment, and the lamps graced our nightstands in our last home), but we actually still love a lot of it, so we’re keeping the nightstands, bed, and lamps that we already have. Plus, we’re keeping the curtains because they definitely work with where we’re going in here, and I think that splash of geometric pattern is needed as I don’t usually gravitate toward geometric art.

That means our focus will be on painting and getting new bedding, hanging some budget-friendly art, and installing a picture ledge and some hooks.

As much as I love (LOVE!) the loveseat in my mood board, it isn’t in the budget quite yet, so we’re going to skip buying it for now. It’s just not a priority yet, so we’re going to wait until it makes sense to invest in that update, and in the meantime I’ll style it out with the pink chair from my office so you can still see where we’re headed eventually.

Finally, we are definitely getting new carpet in here, but the exact timing is a bit up in the air because we’re getting new carpet in a few different rooms and we’d like to do them all at once. So I’m not sure if that will be done when I reveal this space, but, if not, I’ll be sure to update when that eventually does get done!

Besides those two things, we’re getting ready to make this room look a lot like the mood board—and I can’t wait to see how it turns out! First up is clearing out the space and getting some paint on the walls—that update will be coming next week.

Guest Bedroom Update

So, what do you think? Are you feel the vibe we’re going for in here? Would you go with a bold color scheme in your own guest bedroom? Sound off in the comments and let me know if you’re as excited to see this all come together as I am!

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