Alongside a lush Technicolor garden, an alfresco hangout spot can look a little lackluster. Not so this open-sided extension on a house in Suffern, NY, where beadboard walls are striped up and down with unexpected color.
“The house is very traditional, and the contemporariness of the stripes adds some freshness,” says designer Thomas Jayne, author of the recently published Classical Principles of Modern Design. Jayne matched the colors to hues used inside the home for a seamless transition between indoors and out, and tasked Manhattan-based painter Chuck Hettinger with brightening the beadboard in Roman stripes—irregular in width, with colors randomly repeating. “It’s much more lyrical when the stripes are different sizes; it might be a little penal otherwise,” Jayne says. “It’s a simple thing to do, and adds a lot of style.”
To pull off the project, Hettinger painted all 60 linear feet of beadboard by hand without taping, over an existing white base coat. “The stripes were done in one coat, with the paint put on artfully, so it’s sometimes brushstroke-y or sheer,” says Hettinger, who improvised the repeat as he worked. His number-one tip for creating this particular scheme on your own? Have a painting party, so it goes quickly—and the process is as much fun as the finished product.
The walls of this outdoor space provide a colorful counterpoint to the garden, even when its flowers’ bloom time has passed.
Paint: Benjamin Moore’s Chantilly Lace, Bronze Tone, Calypso Blue, Eye of the Tiger, Lehigh Green, Pale Oats, Saybrook Sage, Soft Cranberry, and Van Courtland Blue