The grass is greener...or is it red?

I've always had this kind of "grass is greener" inner conflict between light, spare, modernist design and dramatic, layered, colorful spaces.

I think it's partly because I imagine that if I lived in white rooms with just a few simple pieces of modern furnishings, maybe I would become as clean, simple, and spare as the rooms around me.

Maybe I would have a sleek blond ponytail and get up early to jog and apply stain-remover to the family's laundry (which they would have already sorted and neatly placed in my all-white laundry room). Maybe I would have the grocery shopping done by 9 a.m. and miraculously my dog wouldn't shed all over...heck, I guess I wouldn't have a dog. Maybe the design would have transforming powers and my life would be sort of a Nike-ad-meets-Dwell-magazine fitness/perfection marathon.

Maybe.

But more likely, I would paint the walls one by one, and I would slowly drag home more and more antiques and kooky thrift-store paintings. My curly red hair would never adjust to a sleek ponytail, and I would abandon the early-morning runs for very late nights in bed with my motley stack of reading materials and scraps of paper with poems and the beginnings of novels on them. The grocery shopping would not be done, and I would have to fall back on my famous "something from nothing" pasta dishes. The dog would come back, because we love him...and he would shed. The laundry would be clean, but not stain-free.

The rooms would not transform me...I would transform them. That's just the way it is.


top three pics via Elle Decor, bottom two Kelly Wearstler for Maison 140 Beverly Hills