Design perfection is never the goal

Designer Frances Merrill will take everything hand-painted, please.

Anddd we’re back! Let’s start off the year inspired, shall we? Today, our guest editor is none other than Frances Merrill, founder of Reath Design and master pattern and color wielder.

For me, her project reveals are equivalent to Taylor Swift releasing a new album. I have no choice but to drop everything and dive in, inspecting every last kaleidoscopic detail. The rainbow of bathroom cabinets, lavender kitchen countertops, and pattern-on-pattern sofa collab she’s dreamed up live rent-free in my mind years later. And so will the beautiful hand-painted finds she’s sharing with us here, I’m sure. I call dibs on the mochaware! —Lindsey Mather, digital director

Current Mood

What I’m loving right now: Anything hand-painted. It’s comforting to be surrounded by things where you can feel the human that made them. Especially if they are a little wonky and a reminder that perfection isn’t the goal.

Photography by Laure Joliet

How I’d bring the look home:

1. We recently installed a solid silk wallpaper in the dining room of a project and the wonderful women at Londubh Studio painted on top of it (above left).

2. I splatter painted some old floors at our house and getting the paint out of my hair was the hardest part.

3. Mixing styles of hand-painted furniture, like we did in a bedroom on the Massachusetts coast (above right), with one antique floral piece alongside a contemporary geometric one, in different color saturations.

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1. A milk glass flush mount light from the 1960s.