Somewhere Over The Rainbow

Bonjour,

I really adore my whiter than white house, almost all of the walls are white and even the original wooden floor of my boudoir is painted white but amongst all of that heavenly hue I felt a strong desire to crack open a giant bag of skittles and dance in the colourful rainbow!!

So L'Homme and I got to thinking about our staircase, it's in the hallway right so it's not like you have to look at it all the time and besides a sleek white console table there is no other furniture to match (or potentially clash with) so the stairs we decided, would be our canvas.

This picture was taken on our second viewing before we even bought the house. The textured wallpaper and brown carpet made the pretty Victorian entrance hall feel narrow and dark but we could see the potential and I adored the wooden banister and arched ceiling.

We completely stripped out the hallway and the rest of the house too (which you may see in future posts) but with no carpet, a few rusty staples from previous underlay and a couple of blobs of old paint here and there our stairs were looking slightly forlorn and they were in no way contributing to the stylish aspirations we had for our home.

I spent hours trawling the internet for ideas and came across a couple of contenders on one of my favourite sites for decor porn http://www.housetohome.co.uk/.

This fantastic striped stair carpet was created using IKEA rugs, just genius...

...and we toyed with the idea of having a runner fitted like this one...

But after going to a few carpet shops we just had no luck finding the colours or style that we wanted (I would much rather be in Laura Ashley oohing and aarhing at cushions than looking at giant rolls of carpet) and my enthusiasm was seriously waning.

For a while we did nothing and the stairs sat bare and unloved for a good few months until I saw an advert for a certain collosal paint brand and a pretty pair of legs sashaying up a case of glossy red showstopping stairs and a lightbulb sparked bright in my imagination. We'd been looking in the wrong aisle the whole time, paint was the answer and we snapped up a few tester pots for £1.50 each (much less than the £3000 beige carpet quote!).

Rainbow Stairs

I adore the transformation and the stairs are even a hit with Pierre le Chat!

Rainbow Stairs

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream,
Really do come true.

Love
Lorraine
Lacroix