To suit the size of the
room, furnishings are smaller
than standard. Click image to
enlarge.

Seaside Serenity

"In all honesty, I think small spaces are misunderstood," interior designer Kay Bailey McKallagat says. "People think no pattern in a small room, but I think the opposite is true." Her theory is demonstrated beautifully in a petite 8 x 13-foot bedroom in The Inn at Castle Hill Designer Showhouse in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

"It has a slanted ceiling and one window, and it needed to be a fully functioning guest room," McKallagat says. Holding to her beliefs, she covered the walls with toile and added simple matching toile panels at the window. Though the approach is traditional, the pattern isn't.

"It has a charming seashell motif that seems so appropriate for [the house], which sits on the ocean," she says. Choosing the small-scale pattern in brown on white allowed the designer to launch a look that is "very calm and quiet," she says. "It is not heavy at all."

 

Needlepoint upholstery bound
in chocolate brown complements
the soft seashell toile. Click
image to enlarge.

Turning the slanted ceiling at one end of the room into an asset, she tucked a daybed against the wall and created a sleeping alcove with a wooden cornice detailed with a painted motif borrowed from the toile. She flanked the bed with filmy voile panels.

"It really all turned out charming," she says. "It's just a very alluring space that makes you want to curl up and read."