Rustic Spanish California Home – Simple, Eclectic Guest Bedroom

Nothing hurts my soul more than not being able to find a ‘before’ photo. Can you imagine watching The Biggest Loser and the contestant saying ‘Sorry, we forgot to take photos or weigh me at the beginning but trust me, I was a lot bigger!!’

Its just devastating. But I’ve looked through two old computers and 2 old phones and I’m now convinced that I didn’t even take before photos, in fact I’m wondering if this room actually existed before. Did my imagination dream up this room? Did I use The Secret and produce this room with my brain? Maybe. My brain be very powerful. As I’m writing this my powerful brain is renovating my disgusting bathroom. Finally, I found a (mental) contractor that is in tune with me. (Meanwhile this was all before DropBox, which I realize every single day saves my career).

Luckily this room makeover is the fastest and least dramatic of the whole house (which is why I’m posting it so fast after the living room) so a lot of process photos aren’t totally necessary. It is the guest room and you know how most guest rooms go – no splurging; just pretty and simple. Lets get into it:

After the reno was complete we just needed to get this room to be functional and ready for Shana’s family to come and visit her and her newborn (read this post if you don’t know the back story of this situation). She wanted us to focus on the other rooms first to make sure that we weren’t inspired to spend like 15K in this room. Instead we used a rug she already had (I mean, who just has these rugs just lying around in their garage?) and we custom-made a bed, changed out some sconces, dressed the bed and thats pretty much it.

Unfortunately there is really only one angle that Country Living shot, because the rest of the room was just simple – a wardrobe, a bench and that’s kinda it. We are shooting the other rooms in the house tomorrow and if we have time we’ll shoot a pulled back shot of the rest of the room for you, but honestly it wasn’t totally designed so there might not be much to see.

We ordered the bed from Dekor (like the sofas) and chose this more classic, and slightly deco shape to work with the house. We pulled the color from the rug and wanted it to feel seamless with the rest of the house, so that blue was a no brainer.

Shana bought these french antique sconces from a dealer, but as you can see, when Orlando held them up we thought they just didn’t portray the french beauty that they had and went kinda ‘wanna be’ really fast, even though they were the real deal. They were candle sconces and would have had to be rewired to function so we decided that the effort and expense wouldn’t give the result that we wanted. So we nixed those and decided to do something slightly more modern with the sconces seen on the right. They still felt old world (they are aged bronze) but had a simpler shape. We kept her side tables and lamps because they were pretty great. Ready to see it transformed?

Welcome to the new guest room:

Yeah. I’d move in. We styled it pretty differently for the style book (I can’t wait to show you) but I love how they styled it, too. Here’s a secret – there is only one of those brass lamps – they must have photoshopped the other one in. How do they do that? They have the camera on a tripod and they take one photo with the lamp on the left, then they move the lamp to the right and take another with the lamp on the right and then they put the two photos together in Photoshop. I would say they were cheating except that for the book we actually made that painting larger over the bed – it’s a bit dinky as is. Magazines are full of lies. Beautiful, wonderful, eye-candy lies.

Don’t you agree that the painting should be about 10″ bigger? And how do you feel about those shades? I still kinda want to modernize them with drum shades but at the same time I think that traditional bell shades like these are coming back in so maybe in a year I’ll feel differently (but maybe not pleated?)

Right outside the guest room is the backyard and the view/light in here is just beautiful. It’s such a happy room which is why we didn’t put too much money or effort into it. It kinda looks good all the time because the light is just so beautiful.

That tassel bedding is just incredibly adorable if not perfect. It’s from Anthropologie and its expensive but you could DIY that pretty easily.

Its simple, happy and totally guest friendly.

Some quick questions answered: The wall paint is Swiss Coffee by Benjamin Moore and the window frame color is Deep Space, by Benjamin Moore.

Regardless of the lack of ‘totally before’ photos, this transformation is still pretty satisfying, no?

Here’s a ‘get the look’. (And I read all the love for the ‘look for less’ in yesterdays post so don’t worry more of those will be coming, we just didn’t do one for this because it was just so few things).

Happy Friday. Now go get your guest room ready because Tailor Swift and I are on our way over. We hang like that. xx

*photos c/o Country living Magazine. Photographer Max Kim Bee and stylist Elizabeth Beeler