Magical Thinking

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what sort of feeling I'm going for in the bedroom in my new apartment. I knew from the start that I wanted to add complexity, pattern and COLOR with the curtains, because everything is white, and not in the best shape, so it would be nice to distract from the bones of the place. (Though I'm not so sure about my impulse for patterns anymore.) Which colors, and what styles, I still haven't pinned down, but I do know I want to do something more romantic than my last bedroom, and my perfect bedroom senior year of college (one photo is here). By 'romantic,' I mean more magical, a little softer, with a little more (ordered) clutter, more bountiful details. I want to balance out the clean Ikea lines that you find in every other corner. 

The balancing books are magic in themselves. No, but done carefully, that could be a really cool (if also grossly contrived) look. Which Emma is a master of.

I miss visiting Emma all the time, because it's always fun to see how she arranges her things—both when it's tidy and when it's not. For better or for worse, my stuff is a big part of who I am, and I think collections of personal belongings—in their natural habitats—can be lovely. (Like the art of the mess.) So I'm thinking about Emma's old bedroom in our house on Packard, which became so atmospheric with those leftover balloons. (More photos, and context, here.)

When I was going through my extra hard drive to retrieve these pictures, I also looked at photos from Emma's and my attic apartment, which we lived in the year after I graduated from college. We had the entire top floor of an old, dirty, run-down house in downtown Ann Arbor. What it lacked in laundry facilities, heat vents, and peace and quiet, it made up for in charm. Okay. The charm couldn't take care of everything, but we picked it because we always pick the old house over anything else. My bedroom had three skylights and a peaked roof and westward windows (my favorite), and I made these beautiful curtains from antique Italian cotton with handmade lace. I hung my star lights, which have moved with me from home to home since freshman year of college, in drapes around the window, with my paper globe lamp to one side, like the moon.

So that's one room of mine that had some magic to it.