Photography by Ashley Gieseking
Jen Teasdale was in a pickle over some pink-and-orange striped Roman shades and pink window-seat cushions with white piping that she had made for her daughters’ playroom in their Central West End home.
“I didn’t have a real plan,” she says. “I see pieces I like, but I don’t know how to get the whole thing. And I stress over paint colors. I know what I want to see, but I don’t know how to get it. It doesn’t always look the same as that little paint chip.”
Ah, the common laments of so many homeowners. With an assist from her sister-in-law, Cindy Teasdale McGowan, Teasdale met Amie Corley of Amie Corley Interiors (amiecorley.com). “It was 2008, and she was my very first client,” Corley says. “Jen and I have very similar styles, and we just clicked. But she was so brave to trust me. We do one project in her house a year, and it has been so much fun.”
The first assignment was sprucing up the Teasdales’ entryway and nearby family room. The following year, Corley tackled the playroom that had flummoxed the young mother of three girls. Corley found a butterfly-print wallpaper with a pink and red that matched the shades and window seat, but with an aqua background and punches of Kelly green and yellow.
“We had the paint color matched to the background of the wallpaper to make it seamlessly flow from wallpaper to paint,” Corley says. A master eBay shopper, she found a storage piece that Teasdale repainted a high-gloss yellow. Then Corley found two vintage ladies’ chairs on eBay and had them reupholstered in aqua Sunbrella fabric. The lighting comes from IKEA.
“It’s a playroom, so you don’t want to spend a ton of money, but you do want it to be fun and creative and inspiring,” Corley says.
After Teasdale’s two older daughters, Kate and Ava, announced they wanted to share a room, it was time to replace one twin bed–and–trundle set with two twins. Their room’s design began with the orchid pink–patterned Manuel Canovas fabric used on the custom-made headboards.
“[Teasdale] saw an ad for it in Elle Decor, and she became obsessed with it,” Corley says. “We started there, and everything flowed from that.” While the pink is repeated in the pillow shams, the rest of the bedding is crisp white. The walls are a subtle shade of the same deep pink.
“We knew we wanted that color, but really, really watered down,” Corley says. “They just kept mixing in white until we got the right color.”
The butterfly prints behind the bed come from perch., a store in Corley’s hometown of New Orleans. “Her daughters are obsessed with butterflies,” Corley says. “They are girly girls and like creatures that have pretty wings.”
On one side of the room, the wall juts out to accommodate the fireplace stack. It’s now a gallery wall. Slipped in among photos of the girls and their artwork is a framed collection of coquinas, also known as butterfly shells.
“We wanted it to be girly and feminine, but something that could stand the test of time and still be current, even when they are teenagers,” Corley says. “When you invest a lot of money in a kids’ room, you don’t want to be redoing it in a couple of years.”
