Olive Kelly: The Emperor's New Apartment

I have a new apartment which is, in fact, invisible.

I am moving back to New York City any day now and have been dealing with the nightmare of coop boards and sellers who are unwilling to let my contractor in for even a millisecond.

What is keeping me calm as I prepare to start a new job with nowhere to live in the foreseeable future? DESIGN BLOGS giving me all sorts of ideas for design inspiration that I cannot afford.

FIRST, came the paint color. My Miami apartment was a series of Blues—Cumberland Fog by Behr in the living area and Behr Bleached denim in the bedroom and a blue even lighter than Cumberland Fog (the name of which I cannot recall) for the bathroom. I started out thinking that I wanted to go the direction of blue once again and so began the mission that drove my family crazy for days.

I started painting virtual rooms on behr.com, homedepot.com and benjamin moore.com. From that point on, the paint colors consumed all of my free moments.

From Behr blues (light french gray seemed too green-ish, other blues too baby blue—it is not, after all, a boy's nursery but a bachelorette apartment) to benjamin moore grays with a slight bluish tint, I finally settled on pale smoke (benjamin moore) for the living area and gibraltar cliffs for the kitchen. I had seen pale smoke years ago when Domino magazine (may it rest in peace) featured Katie Lee's (formerly Joel) West Village home designed by Nate Berkus where he used Benjamin moore pale smoke and cliffside gray. I always loved the entire look of that home but I did not want to settle just because I liked that one room so I took to every design blog i could find, back issues of Domino magazine, design books, Nate Berkus's website, pictures of Sasha Adler's home, Gwyneth Paltrow's homes, and Molly Sims Soho apartment. I discovered the joys of ApartmentTherapy.com and the La Dolce Vita blog as well as Elements of Style. I also read through the archives of Matchbook Magazine (see Andy and Kate Spade's home) and Lonny Magazine (an online interior design magazine reminiscent of domino) and in the end decided that Pale Smoke was indeed best for the main space!

So if the coop issues are ever resolved, hopefully I will be posting pictures of this new space—until then, I will leave you with some pictures of my old Miami condo, Katie Lee's West Village town home and a few of the other highlights of my paint color search for my hopefully beautiful (if, for the moment, nonexistent) apartment.