Finally! The reveal post we have all been waiting for! And if you haven’t been waiting and just happened on this post, welcome! I’m Janet Lorusso, a designer and design blogger in Acton, Massachusetts and this is the reveal of a bedroom makeover dubbed the Vintage Diva Glamour Den that we did for the national, biannual One Room Challenge. You can catch up on how we got here in the previous posts from the challenge.

WEEK 1 | WEEK 2 | WEEK 3 | WEEK 4 | WEEK 6 (and sort of 5) | more WEEK 6 | WEEK 7 | WEEK 7plus

This was my first time participating in the One Room Challenge project and I picked a doozy of a time to jump in! The pandemic certainly put the challenging in “Challenge”! With so many things having to be ordered blindly online instead of selected in person, we were exceptionally fortunate to have everything work out so well. We are also incredibly grateful to the workrooms, installers, and family members who dove in at the last minute as lockdowns were being eased to make it all work, and to our photographer, Megan Booth, who captured the outcome in beautiful images for us! We had some extra time and a delayed start this season to help and I want to thank Linda Weinstein, One Room Challenge founder, and Better Homes and Gardens, media sponsor, for this wonderful opportunity to be a part of the One Room Challenge community!

The Vintage Diva Glamour Den is finally complete and I am happy to report that the Diva is delighted with her new space! The project name is a mouthful that requires a bit of explanation. The space is for my daughter, called the Diva because she is a classically trained opera singer. Vintage is because she has a fondness for vintage hats, and Glamour Den is because of her eternal love of dress up and the occupational hazard of a gown collection! - To recap, here is the wish list for the space:

• New full size grown-up bed to replace the twin daybed

• New window treatments

• An actual rug

• A full length mirror - a Diva NEEDS a full length mirror!

• Comfy seating

• Dressing table (for the Glamour portion of this enterprise)

• New dresser to replace the dilapidated armoire

• Storage solution for the vintage hat collection

• Rehabbed closet

Let’s take a look at where we started, shall we?

Inspiration for the space included the aforementioned vintage hats, along with the Diva’s elegant Victorian sensibility and secret garden vibe. The Diva modeled ALL of her hats and some creative hat-like objects in the weeks leading up to the challenge - you can find all those pictures along with possible color pairings on our IG and FB accounts, but here are a few. She wears them well!

The starting point for this whole adventure was our feature wall. We wanted a garden feel mural with trees but also were inspired to make it magnetic so we could add moveable hooks for hat display. We created three millwork framed sections of mural mounted over steel sheet metal panels. The tree murals gave us the secret garden feel, and the cast iron tree branch hooks are attached via magnets for versatility and infinite rearrangement possibilities giving us a place to hang the hat collection so the hats appear to be hanging from the tree branches!

A sisal rug grounds the room in a quiet neutral with a natural garden feel. A wheat colored matelassé from the Company Store makes up the dust skirt and covers the custom designed upholstered headboard sponsored by our upholstery genius, Danny, at Boston Furniture Design. Danny also made the custom slipcover for the wing chair. Watch for more about Danny and Boston Furniture Design in an upcoming post! Both the slipcover and the upholstered headboard use matelassé coverlets as yardage. The wing chair slipcover uses the scalloped edge as the border of the chair skirt. The drapery rods were a DIY project to upcycle things we already owned. And the gorgeous vibrant floral printed linen from Richloom was made into custom drapery panels for the two windows by our workroom. Bamboo shades add another layer of garden texture and offer privacy and light control. Our incredible installer, Wayne, is our secret weapon for perfect custom window treatments (you can see him in action in THIS post).

The original vanity was revived with green paint and is paired with a gilded carved mirror hung from a green velvet ribbon. Both the paint and the ribbon were ordered online in the middle of the lockdown and by some miracle are a perfect color match! The vanity positioned next to the bed, pulls triple duty as a nightstand and a desk for zoom meetings. A floral embossed metal chair with a seat upholstered in a jacquard leaf pattern serves as seating.

And what is a Diva without a fabulous closet and a collection of gowns?! In a last minute addition, we upholstered the inside of the closet (formerly a stucco finish in Pepto Bismol pink) with the same fabric used for the drapery panels. Another vintage chair with horsehair fill was procured from elsewhere in the house and serves as additional seating near the closet.

The storage from the armoire was replaced with this fabulous crotch veneer mahogany vintage dresser we found on FB Marketplace for under $100. The piece has a cherished history and the couple we bought it from were happy to see it go to a new home now that they can no longer use it!

The full length mirror was a DIY project. We disassembled a cheap cheval mirror-on-stand with a broken stand, pried off the fake seashell decoration, sanded, painted, and added a hand painted laurel and bee motif in gold and voila - a much classier full length mirror for the Diva!

What started out as a simple rehab project ended up blossoming into a full-fledged makeover in the spirit of “if you are going to do it, do it well”. The only things that remained unchanged in this room were the wall and trim color, and the buffet lamps on the vanity. Everything else is either new, vintage, upcycled, or pilfered from stuff we had elsewhere in the house. The Diva is delighted with her new space, which of course, is what matters most!

Special Thanks to our Team!

Every project takes an army and countless hours behind the scenes to get to the pretty picture stage! We’d like to extend special thanks to our team:

Danny Gallagher at Boston Furniture Design for custom upholstery and slipcovers

Wayne Stockwell for window treatment installation

John Lorusso for feature wall panel installation

Joyce Shetler-Holt for artwork

Diane Ross for furniture transport!

Wallmur for custom production of the wallpaper mural panels

Brad at All Metal Fabricators for fabricating the steel sheeting for the feature wall

Sam’s and Sons for custom drapery fabrication

Megan Booth for photographing the finished space so beautifully, you can also find her on IG at meganbooth_architecturalphoto

Please visit the ORC blog for inspiring project reveals from the Spring 2020 One Room Challenge community!