Steal the Room: Rosehill Cottage (from The Holiday)

It’s late January and I think it’s safe to say that most of us in the Northern hemisphere have been bundled up in our homes for the past few months. If you’re like me, you’ve also probably been dreaming of other, cozier places you could bundle up instead. If you’re really like me, you’ve probably wondered why your home couldn’t be more like this home: Rosehill Cottage, the (unfortunately not-real) cottage featured in The Holiday (2006), a quintessential Nancy Myers interior-design envy film.

So if you’re interested in stealing this room for a Rosehill Cottage of your own, here are some ideas and sources for making that dream a reality.

Walls

Rosehill Cottage’s walls are a warm off-white. It has an accent stone wall with a built-in wood fireplace. The walls and ceilings feature rough wooden beams in a medium tone. All of these features create an impeccably cozy, rustic interior. There’s no way to exactly replicate this vibe, but even in the most basic “blank white box” room, there are tons of things you can do to attempt it.

Paint: Farrow and Ball Blanc de Treillage

Ceiling: Faux Wood Beam

Stone: Sandstone Real Stone Veneer, Field Stone Wallpaper, Stucco Wallpaper, Sierra Sand Faux-Stone Panel

Fireplace: Electric Fireplace

Furniture

Rosehill Cottage’s sitting room consists of a collection of vintage country furniture, with an eclectic mix of patterns and textures: florals and stripes, velvet and rattan. The look is tied together by somewhat desaturated shades of blue and a red that often reads as yellow on screen. The warm colors blend into the yellow stone and walls, fading into the room, and the blue provides a calming contrast. There’s a deceptively large amount of furniture in the room, and I didn’t even include it all, but the basic elements are covered.

Sofa: Yellow Stripes, Beige striped settee, Rattan Daybed, Wood/Rattan Love Seat

Armchair (Floral): Grey Thistle, Blush Primrose, Summer Birds

Armchair (White): Fluffy, Chair and a half

Ottoman: Madison, Blue storage, Navy linen

Bookcase: 3-Shelf, Shaker

Side table: Off-white, Hultgren, Livesay

Drum Table: Bronze, Rose copper

Wood Console Table: Medium tone, light cherry

Metal pedestal table: 3 tier, tray top, sleek

Accent Cabinet: Windowed, Noblitt, tall farmhouse

Decor

The vibe of the Rosehill’s decor is shabby chic clutter. The collection focuses on a lot of white elements: plain ivory candles, white ceramic bowls and vases, large white mats on photos. This helps keep the room looking calm and appealing, despite how busy it is.

In my view, this is where the room fails a bit. These are items you’ll find in any basic home goods store and they lack any semblance of personality beyond “nice middle-class lady.” It’s all bland, basic and could use an extra edge of taste and that same “eclectic collection” vibe of the furniture. Where is the person who mixed a blue velvet ottoman and a striped rattan sofa here?

If I personally were to replicate this look, I feel like a few swaps (like maybe a ceramic cat lamp instead of a ceramic vase lamp) would help step up the look while having the same cozy English cottage vibe. I would also aim for less, so it didn’t look quite so much like I’d just bought out a HomeGoods.

Throw Pillows: Chinoiserie Vines, Laura Ashley Blue, Nantucket Red Stripe, Rifle Paper Strawberry Fields

Rug: Kamran Royal Blue Ruggable Rug, Anmie Oriental Dark Blue Area Rug

Wicker Basket: With Tassel, Simple

Lighting: Tall white lamp, Anderson Table Lamp, Regency gold buffet lamps, Wall sconce

Wicker Trays: Rattan serving basket, Rattan serving tray

Floral curtains: Floral Fuscias, Chintz Floral

Vases & Bowls: Ceramic Vase set, Ceramic bowls, Ceramic Bowl

Dried Florals and Fruit: Faux Pomanders, Cotton Stems, Faux potted rose, preserved boxwood topiary

Framed Art: Cotswold & Co.

Candles: Unscented pillar candles

Fireplace Brooms: Steel set

Stay cozy this winter.

Best,

Julia

Our Nursery Design Process

I recently shared a bunch of mood boards for our nursery! It was so much fun brainstorming all of the possibilities for the room, and it really helped me explore what was out there and discover what my tastes were.

It’s a little weird to think that this room will be someone else’s soon—someone I haven’t even met yet!—and that in a few years, it will totally morph as that little someone starts expressing their own tastes and interests.

But for now, the room is how I’m introducing the baby to their world, and I want to make that introduction as amazing as possible.

In my next post, I’ll show the room reveal, but in this one I just want to talk about my initial ideas for it!

The Blank Slate

Here’s what we started out with, once we emptied out all of the guest room furniture. It’s hard to tell here, but the wall was actually a very light blueish grey. There are technically curtain rods on all of the three windows, but only one had a functional set of curtain hardware—there’s a tension rod in one window and in the last, the curtain is hooked into defunct hardware, and the curtain rod isn’t attached to anything, it’s just hanging in the curtain!

The one nursery item in this picture is the rug (the Sima Abalone from Ruggable in 8x10’ with the cushioned pad), which Chase bought for me for Valentine’s Day. We laid it out for a little over a day before rolling it back up for painting!

I think one thing that’s apparent in this picture, however, is how much natural light this room gets. It’s truly beautiful, especially in the afternoon when golden light dances through the trees outside the windows.

The Walls

One thing I knew I wanted in this room was a wall design—whether it be wallpaper or a mural or a stencil. I keep talking about it, but I really wanted this room to feel like a place for a child to let their imagination run wild. Here are some of the walls that really inspired me:

In the end, I decided to apply a wallpaper-look stencil to the walls. Stamping or stenciling a wall is something I’ve been wanting to try for a few years, and I thought it would probably be more durable, easier to fix, and cheaper than wallpaper, and easier to execute than a mural. I noticed a lot of the wallpapers I was drawn to had both animals and florals, so I tried finding stencils that included those features.

These were the finalists:


In the end, I decided the last stencil “Forest Pattern” by StencilRevolution was the one that best fit the vibe I was going for. I loved the animals featured and the flowers. If I had a ton of time and energy, or if I was only stenciling a small area, I might have stenciled the elements in different colors, to give it a more intricate look, but I decided that with such a big room and a baby on the way, creating the “perfect” faux wallpaper wasn’t going to be a great use of my time, so I decided to paint the stencil itself white and focus on a search for a good background color.

I used Pixlr and some rudimentary photo editing skills to erase the walls, add the wall stencil I had picked out, and try out a few different wall colors. After asking my husband for his opinion, we settled on a sagey color I pulled from the rug.

The Decor

After creating all of those themed nurseries, I realized I was loving the vibe of the whimsical nursery the most—a room with an English country home vibe, with a vintage feel and woodland creatures. I wanted to bring my adventures in England into my home and into my child’s life. I picked out my favorite furniture and decor items that fit that description—as well as incorporating some pieces I already owned, like the chair and the bookcase my dad made me—and used Canva to create a little collage of what the nursery might look like (uploading images of all of the products, removing their backgrounds, and “placing” them together in the room) .

I loved it all. The room felt absolutely perfect. I showed it to Chase, who approved the design, and went out in search of paint that evening, ready to start turning the design into reality!

That process ended up taking over two months, with a lot of twist and turns along the way! So, I’ll save that story for my next post.

Best,

Julia

Prior to the Blank Slate….

Just to embarrass myself, I’ll show you what we actually started with when we “started work” on the nursery back in January! We had some damage to our house from Hurricane Ida in August and had to empty out some rooms to get it fixed last fall. As a result, entire closets were piled into our guest room.

This first picture—where you can see the floor—isn’t even half as bad as it was back in December when we were getting the work done. With the little energy I had in my first trimester, I went through 50% of our possessions, filled bags with donation items and others with trash, and reorganized the rest as I put everything back where it belonged.

In late January, I finally finished getting the room back in order and by February 1st, it was in the “blank slate” state from the start of the blog.

Just looking at pictures of the state it was in stresses me out! It’s completely unrecognizable as the same room now.