Design: A Dining Room Blue Streak – Charlotte Magazine

As co-founder  and principal designer of Dipped Interiors, Vicky Little regularly infuses bland spaces with bold colors, vibrant patterns, and unique textures. Her client’s Baxter Village dining room needed all three. Little transformed the forgettable light-blue space into a colorful entertaining hub with a wallpapered ceiling that makes guests want to look around—and up. “She asked us to gently push her out of her comfort zone but still blend it with the rest of the home,” Little says. “She was good with the darker, moody wall color, but that wallpaper was the gentle push. She put all of her trust in us, and she was so excited with the result.”

A DARKER SHADE OF BLUE

The homeowner wanted to use the custom wood table and bench she’d recently purchased, so Little designed the dining room around those anchors. She painted the pale-blue walls and white baseboards in Sherwin-Williams’ Bunglehouse Blue and installed a Phillip Jeffries wallpaper mural on the ceiling. “I already knew about that pattern, and when we first walked through her house, I went straight to that in my head,” Little says. “We were designing around the table, but we designed it around this wallpaper as well. It has a watercolor feel, and the texture is like seagrass.”

SHIMMER AND SHINE

Little grounded the space with a shimmery rug from West Elm and completed the table seating with upholstered chairs from Bassett Furniture. “I love their performance fabric,” she says. “You could spill wine on those chairs and get it out with little effort.” She chose a white sideboard from Made Goods with a shagreen texture and hung a brass starburst mirror from Crate & Barrel above it. “That had to go in here—I love how it worked with the dark walls,” she says. “It was heavy as hell, though. We had dents in our arms after hanging it.”

ALL DRESSED UP

The room already had sturdy plantation shutters, so Little softened them with white linen, floor-to-ceiling drapes. The brass curtain rods complement the Kate Spade chandelier, which has the tailored, sophisticated look Little wanted. “I loved the white enamel and brass mixed together,” she says. “It made its own statement without taking away from the wallpaper.” She added a few pops of green with the fig tree in the corner and the plant on the sideboard, and she commissioned the painting from local artist Kelly Ivey. “I just love that layered, textured look,” Little says. “What really tied this space together was pulling the colors and textures from the large floral mural down the walls and balancing it around the room.”