Sunny Chartreuse Living Room

Chartreuse is the happiest of colors. It’s like if grass mated with the sun. I even love the word chartreuse.  Elegant, vibrant, and so very French. The color is actually named after a liquor French monks first made in the 1700s, which makes me like the color even more.

I’ve always loved chartreuse. My mom let me redecorate my bedroom in high school. I painted the bottom half of the walls chartreuse, the top with wide chartreuse stripes, and separated the two sections with a black and white swirly wallpaper border. I’m pretty sure my bedspread was zebra print. Mom kept my door shut when we had people over.

Despite that garish bedroom, I wanted to revisit the color when decorating our living room. The room is already cheerful and sunny on it’s own, with a high, partially domed ceiling, and epic windows. It’s a social room, where we sit and talk, where Mr. Dame practices the flute, where we mix up drinks, and where I occasionally work out, so I wanted it to be energizing and have a sense of fun.

First, a before pic:

It’s not quite done: I loathe the cat-hair collecting black coffee table, and still am looking for some cool art to replace my DIY bird montage.  But here’s what I’ve got so far:

UPDATE: I made some improvements to the chartreuse living room in the year or so after these photos were taken. Here was how the room looked before we packed it all up and departed Spain. 

To sunny spaces,

The Dame in Spain