Right as you walk into our house, is our entryway (fitting, right?). Well, it’s more like a long hallway than a room of sorts. Our entryway measures 6’-0” wide by 25’-0” long which makes for a pretty awkward space to design. As you walk in from our front door, you are greeted by an opening to our guest bedrooms on your left and a long and empty wall on the right. Currently, all that is in this area of the house is a rug runner and that is it. It took a bit of time to figure out how we used the home and what purpose our entryway needed to serve for us.
After living in the home for 8 months, we figured out that we needed the following purposes right as we got home.
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A place to store the mail that needed to be filed
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A place to keep keys and wallets for the next day
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A place to hang a purse
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Hooks for jackets
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Pictures of Travis and I
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Some sort of accent piece to liven up this long and narrow area
Currently, items 1-4 on the list reside on our dining room table, so that is another problem we are looking to find a resolution to by transforming this area.
To start, the first thing we need to do is focus on item #6. We were thinking that this accent piece would be a wainscot wall. Wainscot walls seem to be all the rage right now to add a feature to a wall, but there are so many ways to design a wainscot wall (if you’re confused as to what a wainscot wall is, check out my blog post ‘6 Ways to Add Character to a Spec Home’ in the ‘Design Tips & Tricks’ section). In our entryway, we have 9’-0” ceilings, so proportionally, it makes sense to add a wainscot up to 6’-0” and paint an accent paint color on the 3'-0" above. Below is a rough mockup is a first pass of what the wainscot would look like.
Starting from the bottom… (I’ll let you sing the rest), the base of the wainscot will be a 1x6 or 1x8 piece of mdf to create a stable base for the vertical pieces to rest on. The verticals of the wainscot would then be 1x4s that are evenly spaced along the wall the entire length of 25’-0”. In between each vertical piece of the wainscot will be a solid piece of mdf to hide the texture on our walls. Our walls have a dense orange peel texture on them, so we thought it would be best to cover this texture to create a more clean look and matched the aesthetic we wanted. Lastly, right above the vertical slats would be (2) 1x2s with a fluted piece of wood moulding sandwiched in the center. The 1x6 / 1x8 piece at the base, the vertical slats and the mdf between the vertical slats would all be painted a neutral white color. Our entryway does not have a lot of natural light flooding into it, so we wanted to keep this space as light as possible. The 1x2s and the fluted moulding however will be stained a medium wood tone that is similar to our flooring color. This way, the wall coordinates with the flooring making it feel consistent and purposeful.
For the design of the 3’-0” above the wainscot however will be an accent color of some sort. Our entryway is oriented in such a way that you can see the living room from the entryway and vice versa. Because this is the way our home is designed, we want to make sure we have a cohesive color story between these rooms. For further clarification, since we used the deep green color on our living room wall, we want to choose a color for the entryway that compliments this color.
Once the wainscot is done, next is the fun part of designing this space. The first item we need is a solid design base, like a console table or a sideboard. Once I saw the Norre Media Console by West Elm, I fell in love with it for this space. Yes, it’s a media console, but the color and style just felt right for the space.
So anyways, this media console is a piece that I am hung up on for this room. The media console would be the base of the space. Inside the media console would house the mail that needed to be filed and on top of the console would be a tray or bowl to place our keys and wallets in and on the opposite side of the console would be a vase with stems to add a decorative feature to the space. Above the console would be a black circular mirror for last minute touch-ups and to give vertical height to the space. The mirror would overlap between the accent color at the top of the wall and the wainscot.
The last couple of finishing touches for this space would be to add coat hooks on either side of the console table that would be wall mounted to the vertical pieces of the wainscot. These coat hooks would be spaced out evenly on each side of the table. Lastly would be square pictures of Travis and I that would hang on either side of the mirror and would be evenly spaced on each side.
This room is not a room we spend a vast amount of time. It’s more of just an ‘in-passing’ room, but it is the first room we enter into after we get home from work or from a trip or it’s the first room visitors see when they enter our home. We want this space to feel like home and we want the space to feel welcoming for visitors.
