Making a Big Scene in Small Space : Compact Costa Mesa Apartment Can’t Contain the Imaginations of Tamara and Jeff Beardsley, Who Use Bits of Ribbon, Lots of Paint for Whimsical Interior
Space is a driving force behind decorating and living. The less space, the harder it is to fit in everything you need (and don’t need) to live.
Consider a family of three residing in a 700-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment. Where does the crib go? Or the dining set? How about space fillers such as a file cabinet, end tables or a rocking chair?
How do you keep the place from resembling a storage shed? Give it some personality when it is one of 700 nearly identical units in a sprawling apartment complex and all changes need to be reversible when you move?
After years of letting those considerations stand in their way, Tamara and Jeff Beardsley of Costa Mesa let their imaginations run wild.
Through uninhibited use of color and detail, they turned their production-style apartment into an environment that is part tropical fairy tale, part Victorian fantasy, part jewelry box.
“People think when you live in a small space you’re limited. But it’s what you make of it,” Tamara said.
“For a long while I thought I couldn’t do anything because I didn’t have a house, but . . . ,” she stops mid-sentence, looking around the living room of the mini-dream home she and Jeff have created in a whirlwind six months.
The couple, who celebrated their sixth anniversary this month, have lived in the apartment since they married. A year and half ago, daughter Ellis was born, bringing the population of the small apartment to three. But, as they edge closer to their goal of purchasing a house, Tamara confided that she’s no longer in such a rush to leave their tiny home.
For one, the apartment has become a showcase for her highly whimsical art. Tamara makes jewelry, box purses, card holders and picture frames with colorful faux gems and white pearls clumped together with glitter-filled glue or wrapped with wire. Her signature accessories have appeared in fashion magazines internationally.
Necklaces of varying lengths hang here and there, integrated as part of the decor. On the entrance hallway wall hang several pieces from her garish silver and pearl collection; the jewelry looks like something a sexy B-movie space alien would wear. Dozens of jeweled strands have been piled on a dress form painted gold and standing in a living room corner.
“Because I design jewelry, I didn’t see relegating it to a drawer,” she said.
Her wildly decorated box purses and frames--with themes of the circus, dinosaurs and the sea--are exhibited throughout the house. And Tamara applied the technique to trim otherwise dull furniture, such as two short metal folding tables, found in the bathroom and bedroom, trimmed with clusters of pearls of all sizes.
The “bar” in the living room, however, is the couple’s star piece. Three years in the making, the cabinet has been altered from its original, “horrible, brown veneer finish” with a rainbow of paints, faux jewels and miniatures.
The body is painted with floating polka dots of various sizes, some grouped into grapes, others as the centers of sunflowers. The entire piece was washed in yellow paint, then orange. It’s finished with a light layer of gold fabric glitter. Large earrings and pendants from Tamara’s collection pepper the doors and serve as knobs.
The bar top is a kid’s fantasy featuring a mini-train set that goes through a colorfully jeweled tunnel, cows drinking out of troughs filled with pearls and tiny plastic people going about their business in a world crammed with multicolored gems, pearls, white Christmas lights and jellybeans sealed in resin and all embedded in hardened glitter goop.
With such eclectic pieces throughout the apartment, decorating had “to be a collaboration,” Tamara said. “It’s hardly subdued, so it can’t get by unnoticed.”
A running joke between the couple, she said, is that her ideas are not always grounded in reality. She said that Jeff, who is a golf course superintendent, always finds a way to bring her vision into the real world--even if it means reworking the original idea some. “It’s definitely trial and error,” she said.
For example, the dining set was finally moved to the covered balcony and surrounded by a jungle of lush, leafy house trees and plants. “This is Southern California. Sitting out there just makes a meal more of an event,” she said.
“I really feel a home should be a sanctuary, so within a small environment we had to answer several needs.”
Foremost, the apartment had to be child-proof to accommodate Ellis. The couch and chairs are covered in canvas that can be easily removed and popped into the laundry. Ellis’ bright wooden toys and rag dolls intentionally fit the setting.
“I’m so obsessive that things look a certain way. So I really had to do things she could be a part of,” Tamara said.
Because Ellis’ crib has been incorporated into the living room, the bedding coordinates with the rest of the living room, she said, “so it doesn’t look like a secondary area.”
Cost was another consideration. The Beardsleys have built, painted, sewn and stapled practically everything in their apartment themselves, using mostly inexpensive items in unconventional ways.
Dozens of throw pillows in greens and blues were stitched out of napkins and embellished with vintage-looking appliques of fruit and flowers. Cheap ceramic pots have been painted in purple, blue and green and speckled with glitter. Jeff constructed the hallway table out of found wood, then washed it in green, purple and pink shades that seem to melt into each other.
Around the outside of the fireplace, Tamara used hot glue to tack individual “tiles” made of gold painted corrugated cardboard. Attached to the cardboard are fabric appliques of parrots, wild flowers and fruit. A light coat of varnish gives them an antique look. Around that is another frame Jeff built of thick timber topped with a mantle, both left natural and rough and bolted to the original frame. Topping it off is a 6-by-3-foot mirror with a frame fashioned out of faux gems, some wire wrapped, some whole pieces of jewelry.
The temporary nature of the fireplace facade reflects another important consideration in the changes made by the Beardsleys: The basic architecture of the apartment could not be altered.
Not permitted to paint over the dark wood cabinets in the bathroom, Tamara softened the space by stapling rose, mauve and white netting at the border of the large mirror and along the top of the bath.
She added an antique-looking wall shelf and a large sterling silver tray on the counter; both are filled with glass bottles she partially covered with gold leaf. In them she keeps shampoo, conditioner and other toiletries. Candles and romantic pictures round out the setting. “I think baths are an important ritual. It’s one of the few vices we don’t have to feel guilty about,” she said.
The easiest and most dramatic change to a house is painting the walls,” Tamara said. “You get immediate gratification.” They opted for an effect created with sponges and rags. The living room walls are colored with bars of rich brights that fade into each other and the ceiling hints at a sky with swirled strokes of light blue. The bedroom walls have been sponged lightly with a lavender-rose shade, the white base showing through.
The color was added in thin layers of acrylic paint so the walls will be easy to repaint to their original color when the Beardsleys move.
The plain, beige carpet could not be changed, so it is instead scattered with inexpensive throw rugs. Although they didn’t start with a particular vision, Tamara said she designed each area as a story. “I think of design in different layers,” she said. First there are colors on the wall. She then hung a burlap drape on a corner window (another layer), then placed leafy tropical trees and a small walnut table before it (another). The final “layer” consists of the potted plants and knickknacks on the table.
The layering process includes texturing furniture. A file cabinet received a rough coat of plaster, followed by several coats and colors of paint. The large entertainment-home office-bookcase Jeff designed got the same treatment.
A paper blind in the window between the kitchen and living room has been decoupaged with a collage of tropical images ripped from fashion magazines. The pages were crumpled to break up the fibers, then soaked in Modge Podge and applied, each overlapping the other.
Other images throughout the house are Polaroids of everyday life, which Tamara changes monthly. Either alone or lined up on long ribbons, they stick to the wall with pins. “I think it’s so important to document daily life,” she said. “It should be considered art.”
Photographs of Tamara and Jeff’s life before and after they met are framed in wood and silver on a bedroom wall. The pictures hang on top of white fringed shawls, along with woodwork pieces carved by Jeff’s grandparents, dried flowers bent into a heart and tied together into a bouquet, Tamara’s antique garter from the wedding, a sterling silver jingle bell and her violin from third grade.
In contrast to the rest of the apartment, the bedroom soothes the senses in a different style.
The centerpiece is the bed Jeff made from six-inch square cut timber. Inspired by his New England roots, the wood was left natural and the naked canopy frames were fashioned from eucalyptus branches. A tulip-patterned quilt in pastels covers the queen-size bed crowned with large pillows of crisp, white Battenburg lace. Several of Tamara and Ellis’ straw Sunday hats cover the head wall.
Jeff also built the corner bookshelf nearby that holds all of Tamara’s books. But don’t expect to find any on decorating.
“I don’t look at those books,” Tamara said. “I get frustrated because (the books say) there’s a right way and a wrong way. You can be exposed to a technique, just don’t get locked into the rules.”
