Colours are the smiles of nature.
-James Henry Leigh Hunt
Back in the late 90s, my family and I lived in San Jose, California. My husband and I purchased our first home during a pro-seller market. Houses were selling quickly after being listed and often there were bidding wars. It was a dream come true to successfully navigate those nerve-wracking real estate market conditions and to finally own a home, a home that I could decorate the way I wanted. A home that had a large backyard with green grass and an enormous mulberry tree, a large cherry tree and two mature apricot trees that produced the most amazing fruit.
It was during that time that Pottery Barn introduced faux painted walls to the masses. I loved turning the pages of their dreamy catalog and seeing the beautifully colored and textured walls with admiring eyes. After living in rentals with white walls, I wanted to live with color. My sister, Linda, bless her heart, visited for an extended period of time and taught me how to faux paint after she had mastered the technique after experimenting with painting the walls in her home.
Together Linda and I faux painted the living room apricot with accents of terracotta. The colors in the backdrop are similar except that the walls in my California home were darker. After the painting was complete, I purchased velvet curtains from Pottery Barn for the big window. My living room looked like it had been photographed for a magazine. I was in interior designer heaven.
Continuing on we faux painted the family room and master bedroom a subtle yellow, the color of a Bee’s wax candle. The kitchen’s accent wall was painted a reddish terracotta and carried through to the entry way and down the bedroom wing’s hall. The dining room and guest bedroom featured seafoam green walls. My daughter’s room was purple. The au pair’s room a light blue. It sounds awful, like a big color mishmash, but it worked.
During the month of July 2020, during the extended Covid-19 quarantine, I embarked upon what I coined, The Backdrop Project. I spent weeks painting photography backdrops in similar hues to the colors I chose for the walls of my California ranch home. (What goes around, comes around.) Linda and I only used brushes on the walls in California to blend and mix the paint. A textured roller from Home Depot was infinitely easier to work with to add texture to many of the backdrops, including the apricot hued canvas featured in this post.
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