These chic guest room ideas will ensure that an overnight stay at your house beats a night in even the very best hotel room

Christie Tonnessen used sage green paint, custom touches, and a few clever design tricks.

BEFORE When we bought our home 7 years ago, the upstairs felt like it was mostly unfinished, other than one room – the guest room. Our first move was to finish the open attic room, dry walling it, and adding electric and flooring. We did that almost immediately when we moved in, and it then became Charlie’s bedroom. In the rush of day-to-day life we ended up leaving the rest of the upstairs mostly as-is, ignoring this large chunk of unused space at the top of our stairs. It became a dumping ground of toys, workout equipment we didn’t use enough, and clutter. Finally, at the end of 2023, I felt ready to tackle fixing the space up. I envisioned it light and bright, with a floor to ceiling bookshelf, housing games and books and creative projects. I wanted the space to feel like a cozy nook, and hideaway from everyday life where we could be creative together as a family. The first step was of course to add skylights! I had installed VELUX skylights in the A-Frame upstate, 9 to be exact, and we absolutely loved the ease of install and ease of use! The skylights are solar-powered, and …

The best design inspiration for any home’s guest quarters? That building-block of hospitality, the modern hotel room

Welcome to our library sunroom reveal! Here's how we combined a reading room with relaxing and even hosting guests

guest room on two levels

Every kid would like to have bedroom like these. Every kid would like to have bedroom like these.

One of our favorite Scandinavian spaces in recent years is the family home of Johanne Landbo and Lukas Filip Fernandes in Copenhagen. Their renovation cons

Bravo, Emily Evans Eerdmans! Her triumphant new biography/style book has just been published by Rizzoli. It’s inspiring, definitive, superbly illustrated, and simply delicious French antiquaire and interior designer Madeleine Castaing is the ultimate Paris design inspiration and insider. Her quirky and highly original style has become a cult favorite with top designers and decorating insiders once more. For many years, in Paris, Madeleine Castaing was part of my happy daily routine. As I marched along the rue Jacob from my apartment, I’d come upon her corner antique shop. Beyond the Napoleon III chairs and a swooping green velvet chaise, the sweet and almost childlike yet elegant face of Madeline Castaing, with its cloche of dark brown hair (wig, actually), two furry fringes of black false eyelashes, and vivid red lipstick was always a surprise and a jolt of nostalgia. Tucked into a comfortable chair, red gloves, perhaps, on her attenuated fingers, she quietly, in a wisp of a voice, greeted familiar visitors to her iconic Left Bank antique shop for many years. But who was Madeline Castaing, and why is she so revered and eternally stylish? All is revealed by the brilliant design historian/blogger Emily Evans Eerdmans’ new book, ‘The World of Madeline Castaing’ just published by Rizzoli (also my publisher), with a foreword by Jacques Grange and a preface by Frederic Castaing. (Emily’s blog: http://emilyevanseerdmans.blogspot.com) Emily’s book is a magnum opus. At 272 pages, it’s fat and juicy and colorful. The research and dept of information are impression. With hundreds of full-page color images, it ‘s essential for the design library of designers, design students and Francophiles. Madeleine Castaing (1894-1992) was a prominent antiquaire and interior decorator in Paris for more than fifty years. She reigned supreme at her shop on the corner of rue Bonaparte and rue Jacob (now a chic and popular Laduree patisserie/tea room) and was legendary both for her style and her reluctance to actually sell any of the furniture, art, decorative objects and paintings in her highly original gallery. It’s all spelled out on the pages of ‘The World of Madeleine Castaing’. Castaing's neoclassical taste in color and decor were counterbalanced with her consistently with-it, glamorous appearance even into her late 90s. But just a decade or two ago, design and style seemed to have left her behind. Castaing’s life-long preference for cozy Napoleon III furnishings, her florid carpets, the decorative floral and striped wallpaper and her distinctive 18th century English furniture seemed a little dowdy and dated. Still, she was a heroine and a trendsetter to leading decorators like Jacques Grange, a protégé, and to historians and collectors of art and design. Now, Castaing is the height of chic. Glancing through the pages of the book, it's shocking to see that so many of her neoclassical rooms, her décor for her country house, Leves, and the Malmaison rooms, look current and bracingly fresh. “Beauty in a room derives from a touch of mystery”—Madeleine Castaing Today she is the height of chic once more. Her idiosyncratic design sensibility inspires young designers like Miles Redd in New York, as well as high-profile decorators like Michael Smith in Los Angeles, and Stephen Sills in New York, who choose her ocelot-patterned carpet. Chic young couples in Paris channel her eccentric mix of antiques and spike their rooms with Castaing’s floral stripe wallpaper, flat-pitched black lamp shades, and the neurasthenic little bamboo chairs and tables she favored. Fashion designer Christian Lacroix is among her greatest admirers. “During the French decades of militant modernism, Madeleine Castaing lavished her rooms with pattern and fringe, crystal chandeliers, and a feeling of nostalgia for the style of Napoleon III,” said Lacroix in his witty design book, ‘Styles of Today’ (Le Promeneur, 1995). “She lived to see her style admired and uncontested.” “I don’t care if a piece of furniture is ‘good’. What interests me is its secret life, which only becomes apparent in an ideal ensemble, in a kind of perfect harmony.”—Madeleine Castaing, quoted in ‘The World of Madeleine Castaing’ Castaing, whose iconic shop on the Left Bank was a must-see for a coterie of design fans, displayed there her passion for Veronese green, crimson, jade green, turquoise and shocking pink on walls and as accents. The result was a nervy combination of French history with an irreverent dash of kitsch. As she established her career as a decorator, working for clients like Jean Cocteau in the austere post-war forties and fifties, Castaing muscled her way through high-Victorian and Napoleon III styles, as well as richly gilded Russian and Swedish antiques and she was a trend-setter with Orientalism, Charles X and Biedermeier, which were also not at all fashionable in France at the time. Castaing never did classical French interiors with de rigueur Louis XV and XVI furniture. She loved the confection of elaborate swagged curtains, banana-leaf patterned carpets, colorful Majolica ceramics, and eccentric pieces like her Napoleon III-era side chairs with gilded wood frames carved to resemble twisted rope. Emily Evans Eerdmans has captured her mythic décor and masterful use of color in archival images presenting Castaing’s work over five decades. Madeleine and her adoring husband Marcellin were key members of the artistic community of Montparnasse in the 1920s and 30s, and became patrons, fans, and friends with writers, musicians and artists. “Madeleine Castaing was always irreverent. She brilliantly created pure Napoleon III, but tweaked it with eccentricity based on her unerring taste. Castaing: a bit textbook but with lots of side notes.” —Houston designer, J. Randall Powers A conversation about Madeleine Castaing The Style Saloniste chats to Andrew Virtue, Interior Designer, Long Beach and Los Angeles “I acquired a pair of late 19th century English Staffordshire ceramic garden stools at the Madeleine Castaing estate auction,’ said Virtue. “I had to have them. I wanted a piece of design history. I bought one of them because I loved the rare lavender color of the of the transferware pattern. It sits at the end of my bed, piled with books.” “Madeleine Castaing loved colorful ceramics, and collected lots of Majolica ware and late 19th century English pottery—at a time when it was not fashionable,” said Virtue. “I was always been inspired by MC and her taste, her mysterious and charming personality.” “MC had such a great and sure sense of vibrant, contrasting color—and a love of jade green, turquoise, shocking pink, which she would throw in as accents in a rather sedate room.” Noted Virtue. “These colors would give the rooms a spark.” “I always admired the way she went against the grain with design and color,” said Andrew Virtue. “She was 40 or 50 years ahead of her time. She had a sense of fantasy, and an idiosyncratic and whimsical sense of the 19th C. She was never boring. She never did the expected…and she never did the ‘Frenchy-French’ expected Louis-Louis furniture that all the other designers worked with.” “As important as the element of fantasy to Madeleine’s roomscapes, were comfort and practicality, and every detail was thought of by Leves’s chatelaine: the patterned ocelot carpet that hid muddy footsteps; a well-stocked bar tucked behind a blind arch in the corner of the salon; the guest rooms outfitted with assorted furniture and trays to unpack one’s wardrobe with ease.”—Emily Evans Eerdmans, ‘The World of Madeleine’ Credits: ‘The World of Madeleine Castaing’ by Emily Evans Eerdmans, with a Foreword by Jacques Grange and a Preface by Frederic Castaing, published by Rizzoli, October 2010. Chapters include Le Style Malmaison, A Universe Cocteau-Castaing, In Search of Lost Time (in reference to Proust), and highly detailed information and illustration on Leves, the chic and elegant country house on which Castaing lavished her design talents. There’s also a very useful and practical section on fabrics and carpets (many still available), and excellent close-ups of furniture details, trims, curtains and upholstery. Bravo, Emily. All images published on THE STYLE SALONISTE are used with express permission by Rizzoli.

When hosting out-of-towners, try doubling up!

I just want to have a completely adventurous, passionate, weird life... All while posting pictures of clothes

517 views on Imgur

Kristin Cavallari and husband Jay Cutler listed their Nashville home for $7.9 million. Take a look inside the expansive southern property.

Tasked with reinventing this cottage on the Bradford Estate by its owners, Viscount and Viscountess Newport, Emma Ainscough has created something magical - and the best bit? You can rent it out for holidays

I have been meaning FOREVER to do something about the wall above my little guys crib. It looks like this: (SORRY--bad camera phone picture) What is so bad about this you might ask? Well NOTHING--if your name is LANDON--not COLTON. BUT if you are COLTON and this is YOUR bed--and you are now over 2 years old and your older brother LANDON is now 4 and hasn't occupied this room or this bed for 2 years--then THERE MIGHT BE A PROBLEM WITH THIS WALL!! So the story goes like this: I wanted to do COLTON'S name on the wall--but I frankly didn't want to spend the $ to buy any more wood letters that I would have to paint or mod podge or something. So I was waiting for a brilliant idea to move me into action. Well it did. I found THIS gal (at the Brassy Apple) doing THIS (Heat-n-Bond WALL ART). I was BLOWN AWAY by the AWESOMENESS and BRILLIANCE of her idea. And I knew immediately that THIS was what I had been waiting for. So I went online to a free font website and downloaded a fun font for Colton's name. I figured out the size I wanted and printed each letter out. Next I chose some fun coordinating fabrics to use and cut a square of each of them. Next I got out the Heat-n-bond. This is the kind you want to use--the one made for light fabrics: Then I pressed a square of Heat-n-Bond to the back of each of my fabrics. Next I traced my lettering onto the paper making sure to trace it so that when it is placed on the wall it will be going the right way. This is always the tricky part of using Heat-n-Bond. You always have to think backwards--which I always have trouble with. If you are smarter than me and can think backwards better--you can probably trace your lettering on the heat-n-bond before you put it on your fabric--but I have learned from past experience that I like to have the fabric on--so I can really see which way everything is going to come out. So here I am tracing my letters. Here they are all traced--see how they are all backwards? And here they are all cut out--facing forwards: Next all that was left to do was IRON THEM TO THE WALL!! And I must say--it is a funny thing to iron a wall. Funny--and GENIUS!! I started in the middle of Colton's name and worked out--so that I would make sure to be centered on the wall space--and to make sure I stayed more level. I lightly pressed each letter first to make sure I liked the placement--then pressed it for 20-30 seconds. And I am SO IN LOVE with how it turned out!!! And the beauty of this project is that it didn't cost me a cent--as I already had EVERYTHING on hand. AND I literally had this done in MINUTES. AND when it comes time to remove it--it just peels off like a charm!!! (Just as a side note added later--I've had a lot of questions about how the heat and bond comes off the wall when you want to change it out--So to answer your questions--we just recently moved and I took mine off the wall after a couple of years of them being up--and they peeled off perfectly fine! They didn't leave any residue or glue behind and didn't peel off any of the wall or paint underneath. It worked great! I would always test a small patch on your walls in an inconspicuous spot just in case though.) I LOVE THIS IDEA!!! The possibilities are ENDLESS!! I have visions of fun characters and designs for my kids rooms--and even some more sophisticated design ideas for the other areas of my house! I can guarantee you will see me use this idea again! And at least for now--Colton--after 2 years--finally has a NAME. Linking up to THESE parties. And this one:

Vintage Style Peel and Stick Wallpaper, vintage wallpaper, peel and stick wallpaper, tree wallpaper, wallpops, nuwallpaper, dear Lillie

Vintage Style Peel and Stick Wallpaper, vintage wallpaper, peel and stick wallpaper, tree wallpaper, wallpops, nuwallpaper, dear Lillie

We are often so concerned with finding the perfect accessories for our rooms that we don’t give the walls the credit they deserve; that can all be changed by

The best design inspiration for any home’s guest quarters? That building-block of hospitality, the modern hotel room

Welcome to our library sunroom reveal! Here's how we combined a reading room with relaxing and even hosting guests

Guest Bedroom with Twin Beds, guest bedroom, tree wallpaper, twin beds, vintage style guest room, vintage wallpaper

It may be hard to decorate your kids’ bedroom for any number of reasons. Perhaps they’re going through a Pepto Bismol Pink infatuation and want the room

. . . and it is very possible that there may be one too many projects happening here at once, and every time things get a little too hectic, thoughts seem to turn to seaside cottages nestled among leafy trees and manicured hedges, facing the water, always, and every room in pretty wallpaper and perfectly patterned floors, the cane beds have canopies and the bed linens are monogrammed, and every night, there is nothing but the sound of crashing waves […]