Solid ivory curtains? Not for Aisner. “Orange is one of my favorite colors, so the drapes were our splurge,” she says. “I had my heart set on them.” To accent that choice, Goldfarb and Brous opted for lighter pieces with modern silhouettes, like a custom cerused oak card table.
Tour This Texas Home Filled With Cheery Hues And Timeless Style
Outside: A lush greenbelt. Inside: An array of bright colors. Result: The perfect place for a young Dallas family.
Joanna is a home editor and writer, which means she’s spent more than 15 years touring, interviewing designers, and writing about fabulous homes across the nation for publications like Southern Living, Better Homes & Gardens, and Sunset. She’s also overseen the design of two showhouses, appeared on live TV as an expert on indoor/outdoor décor, and spent a professional “gap year” with a custom drapery company in Nashville. Her favorite question to ask designers is “Who is your favorite artist?”
Updated on September 23, 2023
Friends don’t let friends decorate with gray—at least not if you’re Kerri Goldfarb and Mia Brous (the designers behind the hit home boutique Madre in Dallas) and your friend is Katie Aisner.
“I love color. It makes me happy, and it’s family friendly,” Aisner says. Good thing: She and her husband, David, have four young kids, and they aren’t shy about brights. When they lucked into the neighborhood of their dreams—the 1931 brick home sits on a lush greenbelt—Aisner called on Goldfarb and Brous to modernize the choppy layout and turn the dial up on the decor.
“Because she’s a friend, we knew how to capture what works for her family,” Brous says. Mostly, that meant adding more ways to enjoy the outdoors, including installing the steel-and-glass doors at the back entrance for easier access and to let in more of the view. Seven wide archways between the ground-floor rooms capitalize on natural light.
Color was the key to linking the spaces. The designers set a bold sage-based scheme in the formal living room, layering aubergine, gold, hot pink, and cobalt on top. They remixed it in the kitchen, where cornflower blue steps up as the star with green accents. And so it went throughout the lower level. It might have overwhelmed if not for the way they alternated rooms with white walls and those with vibrant tones or patterns.
That balance means the family never tires of the rich palette. In fact, during the pressure test of the COVID-19 lockdown, Aisner made a point to text Goldfarb and Brous: “I’m so, so happy with my house!”
Piling it on takes a deft touch. Thankfully, Goldfarb and Brous spilled their secrets for filling a home with cheery hues.
Make A Power Play
The small front entrance (originally the back door) prompted Goldfarb and Brous to pull out all the stops to give it a memorable identity. Whimsical botanical wallpaper (Woodland Carpet by Trustworth Studios) delivered. “The entry paper captures most of the colors in the home,” Brous says. They plucked a seafoam green from the design to coat the baseboards and molding for an extra layer of polish.
Dive Into The Details
“We layer a lot, and it shows in the living room,” Goldfarb says. “Wallpaper is one layer; color, texture, and scale of patterns are others.” In that quest for more, they rely on small gestures: the shift in textures between the grass cloth wall and velvet sofa, the sage grosgrain-ribbon trim topped with nailheads outlining the aubergine armchairs, and the contrasting pillow welts. The goal isn’t a rigid palette but unexpected combos with zip. “Think of the color wheel and what hues complement each other,” Goldfarb says. “If you’re looking at lavender, orange might make it come to life.”
Botanicals are a classic back-pocket art choice to fill a blank wall. Aisner describes her style as slightly traditional; the antique dresser and the grid formation of the floral display above it are nods to that.
This Woman’s Bright Tiny Home Is a Plant-Filled Haven
This charming tiny house is filled with plants, plants, and more plants—plus one cat.
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- Cornell University
Kimberley Mok is a former architect who has been covering architecture and the arts for Treehugger since 2007.
Updated June 6, 2021 04:40PM EDT
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Haley Mast is a freelance writer, fact-checker, and small organic farmer in the Columbia River Gorge. She enjoys gardening, reporting on environmental topics, and spending her time outside snowboarding or foraging. Topics of expertise and interest include agriculture, conservation, ecology, and climate science.
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One of the biggest draws about the tiny house lifestyle is its flexibility, and the possibility of creating a home that is perfectly tailored to one’s needs, desires, and hobbies—whether it might be making a space suitable for balancing life and work, accessibility issues, or accommodating activities like stargazing or mountain climbing.
For self-professed plant-lover and cat-owner Rebekah, her newly constructed tiny house is one step toward financial freedom, as well as a way to encapsulate all of her passions under one roof. Rebekah has only been living in her tiny home for a little less than a year in Florida, but she is clearly content with her decision to live tiny.
The interior of the house is packed with a lot of Rebekah’s own touches and a variety of space-maximizing ideas, and we get to take a peek into her bright, plant-filled abode in this video tour from Alternative House:
Rebekah’s tiny house was built by Missouri-based tiny house builder Mini Mansion Tiny Homes. She says she went ahead with this particular company because they were willing to work closely with her to help her realize her design ideas, from collaborating on the customized stairs to designing around particular pieces of space-saving furniture that she wanted to include in her home.
The exterior of the house is clad with gray metal siding, which is softened up by Rebekah’s army of various plants—some of them sitting on shelving, others placed in planters or climbing up a metal trellis.
A mini-shed has been installed at the rear of the tiny house, containing the tankless water heater and the propane tank, while at the front of the home there are more plants and a rainwater harvesting barrel.
Rebekah’s layout has the living room at one end of the tiny house, which is configured around her compact but comfortable sectional sofa. This cozy lounge is surrounded by large windows and faces a large television on the wall. According to Rebekah, this sofa is a popular model among tiny housers as it not only has storage hidden underneath, but it also has a pull-out portion that allows it to transform into a double-sized guest bed.
There’s a coffee table here that has a height-adjustable top, which transforms it into more of a desk-like set-up. Like the other areas of the house, the living room has plenty of greenery on the corner shelf or hanging from the ceiling.
Next to the living room, we have a table that can either function as a side table, or when fully extended, a dining table for eating a big meal or for entertaining guests.
Right beside the table, we also have a portable ladder hanging on the wall, which serves as access to the guest loft.
The stairs are customized to incorporate a space to hide the cat’s litter box.
In addition, the stairs are designed to hold this enormous closet.
. as well as this vertical slide-out pantry, microwave and an apartment-sized refrigerator.
The kitchen has a lot of storage drawers, and a large double sink for doing the dishes.
At the very end of the kitchen counter, there is another flip-up extension that offers more space for eating or preparing food.
Above the kitchen is the massive sleeping loft, which is big enough to fit a queen-sized bed — and of course, more plants.
Underneath the master bedroom is the relatively large bathroom, which includes a full-sized vanity and sink, toilet, yet another closet, and a 4-foot-long bathtub.
For Rebekah, the prospect of owning her own home, as well as the flexibility that comes with tiny living are the biggest advantages to this lifestyle:
“What attracts me [about] living tiny is the financial freedom it provides. It’s a more minimal lifestyle, which is something I really wanted to live. I wanted to be in a place where I could be more mindful and grounded. I love the flexibility it provides. In the future, I want to buy a piece of land, so the fact that I’m able to pack and go and to [move my] entire tiny house onto it — I love that about it.”
To see more, visit Rebekah’s Instagram.
