Restoration Hardware Hack: Living Room Design

Mr. Zoom and I are slowly, slowly, trying to get our house feeling like a home. We’re coming up on the two year anniversary of living in our current house, and we’ve done a lot this year to spruce the place up. We have no real defined design style, but tend to be attracted to things in Restoration Hardware on a weekly basis. We’re aren’t however attracted to their prices.

In January, we painted our open plan family room/kitchen/living room “Gravel” by Restoration Hardware via our local friendly Home Depot paint guru. We’d be given a sample (the real stuff from Restoration Hardware) by some friends and fell in love with the color on our walls. So we brought it over to Home Depot and met a great old man who’d been a paint designer in LA many years ago and specialized in matching paint tones. Score. He did a great job, and we got a couple of gallons on the cheap (comparatively).

Sometime last year we fell in love pretty hard with a $14,000 leather sectional sofa. It was a dream. We were after deep seats, and soft “bomber jacket” leather, and Restoration Hardware nailed it. After the saleswoman priced it out for us we about died laughing. We’re weren’t, and probably won’t ever be, in the market for a $14,000 couch.  After months of searching we finally managed to find something pretty similar at a dealer in North Carolina and ordered it on the spot. We’ve had it for several months now and are super pleased!

We’ve always loved the Subway art displayed in their stores. Something about the simple classic design appeals to us. I’ve recently been a slave to Photoshop and late one night, figured I could probably play around with some fonts and textures and create something similar, but much more personal. And here they are. Our very own custom Subway art, Restoration Hardware style. We found a Groupon (thanks Alison!) and got these 2ft x 3ft gallery wrapped canvasses for a whopping 70% off. I think we wound up paying 10% of the Restoration Hardware cost (and we got 2)!

It’s always a little scary when that gigantic Restoration Hardware catalog peeks out of the mailbox. Mr. Zoom knows he’s either in for a spending splurge or another DIY job! Go find your favorite catalog and see if you can DIY something of your own this week!