Design: A dining room with blue reflections

As a co-founder and principal designer of Dipped Interiors, Vicky Little regularly infuses bland spaces with bold color, vibrant patterns, and unique textures. Her client’s Baxter Village dining room needed all three. Little transformed the forgettable light blue space into a colorful entertainment center with a wallpapered ceiling that made guests want to look around and up. “She asked us to gently push her out of her comfort zone while still integrating it with the rest of the house,” Little says. “She was okay with the dark, moody wall color, but this wallpaper was the finishing touch. She trusted us completely and was thrilled with the result.”

A DARKER SHADE OF BLUE

The homeowner wanted to use the custom wood table and bench she had recently purchased, so Little designed the dining room around those elements. She painted the pale blue walls and white baseboards in Sherwin-Williams’ Bunglehouse Blue and installed a Phillip Jeffries wallpaper mural on the ceiling. “I was already familiar with the pattern, and when we first visited her house, I was immediately inspired by it,” Little says. “We designed the dining room around the table, but we also designed it around this wallpaper. It has a watercolor look and a seaweed texture.”

SHINE AND SHINE

Little anchored the space with a shimmering rug from West Elm and complemented the table with upholstered chairs from Bassett Furniture. “I love their performance fabric,” she says. “You could spill wine on these chairs and have it come out effortlessly.” She chose a white buffet from Made Goods with a shagreen texture and hung a brass starburst mirror from Crate & Barrel above it. “This had “I love how it goes with the dark walls,” she says. “But it was very heavy. We had dents in our arms after hanging it.”

FULLY CLOTHED

The room already had plantation shutters, and Little softened them with floor-to-ceiling white linen curtains. Brass curtain rods complement the Kate Spade chandelier, which has the sophisticated, tailored look Little wanted. “I loved the combination of white enamel and brass,” she says. “It made its own statement without detracting from the wallpaper.” She added a few pops of green with the fig tree in the corner and the plant on the sideboard, and she commissioned the painting from local artist Kelly Ivey. “I love that layered, textured look,” Little says. “What really tied this space together was bringing the colors and textures of the large floral mural down the walls and balancing it in the room.”