Thank you all for the warm welcome back! Y’all are making it much easier to dust off the keyboard after so much time away. Continuing the farewell tour of our old house, here are a few more “now and then” shots! As you can tell, we didn’t really change much over our three years in our old home. For the most part, it was more a process of growing into the spaces.

Kitchen 2012

2015

The kitchen was always one of the rooms I was proudest of. It came together exactly like I had hoped, and it never stopped delighting me. We eventually added shades in one of my favorite fabrics by Peter Dunham, that we carried into the attached breakfast nook as well…

Breakfast Nook 2012

2015

There are actually quite a few changes we made here, but they are subtle. I switched out the table from a reproduction that wasn’t quite right to the real deal, reupholstered the window seat cushion, added a shade in a matching fabric, brought in some art, and switched out the light fixture.

Dining Room 2012

2015

Soon after our first shoot with Emily we hung curtains we brought with us from our Austin dining room, which really brought things together. We eventually added in a rug, which you can’t really see in this shot, and hung some more art, but otherwise this room pretty much stayed the same. And, I cannot stop laughing at my super creative styling efforts of the table in 2012. That would be an embroidered shawl layered over a linen table cloth? Goodness. Gracious.

While not a lot changed downstairs, we did do a mini-makeover on our master bedroom…

2012

2015

Those who have been around here for awhile probably have heard this all before, but I had purchased the DeGournay wallpaper for our bedroom in Austin. As I mentioned in my last post, almost immediately after we moved into our house in Austin we felt like we had made a mistake and should have stayed in Houston, and so I held off hanging it since the super special panels wanting to save them for wherever we ended up.

(Our Austin bedroom for reference & funsies)

When I decided not to hang the wallpaper, we painted the walls a similar gray/blue thats in the paper but the room felt unfinished, so we put up an accent wall of a much less expensive paper from Osborne & Little that had a lot of the same colors, but it never really came together like I had imagined.

Houston 2012

2015

Obviously, we did decide to move back less than a year later, and so when planning our Houston master bedroom I pretty much just applied the original plan for our Austin bedroom. We hung the wallpaper, which I loved, and used all of the same furniture we had in Austin including cutting down the rug to fit our new smaller space- except for the side tables which we switched out for the side tables we had in Chicago, and new lamps.

One thing that never quite felt right about version 1.0 was our bed. Our bed in Chicago was low and cozy with a canopy, and the yellow bed (which was a restoration hardware bed we had painted and recovered in the yellow velvet) was much taller and more open. I always felt a little Princess and the Pea perched up so high, and so eventually we decided to add a canopy and go back to a lower bed. Choosing a canopy fabric was tricky since I didn’t want to mess with anything else in the room (rug/curtains/wallpaper) so I had to choose something that worked with the colors & patterns we already had going on. The hot pink Les Touches worked for me because it was more graphic and modern than the wallpaper and that contrast makes it interesting, but still reads somewhat classic like an animal print. The color matches a subtle accent in the wallpaper, and the small scale of the print balances the larger scale floral. I matched the hot pink in the velvet of the bed, and tied it back into the chartreuse accent with a trim that was already on the windows.

Looking at our original bedding combo from 2012 makes me smile. We had just launched Biscuit and it was my first chance to put my own line of bedding on my bed. I was so excited I couldn’t choose a pattern, so I went with our Austin in a multi, the Paul pale blue (which stayed), coral border duvet, and I think there was a Katie coral dot in there as well. All of the things!!!! By the time we left we had paired down to just the Paul, which is one of my all-time favorites, and brought back some monogrammed shams that were a house-warming from my Mom when we moved to Austin.

It finally came together! I think the smaller size of our Houston room helped make the design feel more lush and layered and cozy. We got amazing light, and the wallpaper is still one of my all-time favorites.

2012

This picture! Pete is clean-shaven, my hair is super house-wifey, and Gigi is so LITTLE with so much ‘tude! Love it all.

2015

Then, of course, the best change we made to the house in our three years there was adding our wild, sweet, HarrBear to the mix! Thank you to everyone who has checked up on Harry, he is doing much better, and he and his big sister are becoming the best little odd-couple buddies you ever saw. I feel like the luckiest. ♥

2012 Images by Emily Johnston // 2015 Images by David Land