But it was really important to me to try and have her nursery, and even my bedroom, kind of dialed in in a way that felt like, “Okay, I’m not going to the hospital. I’m going to be here, and this is the space that I’m bringing my daughter into the world, so I want everything to really feel safe and calm for me.” Luckily, my mom and my sisters and my partner and everyone really rallied the couple of weeks leading up to when she was born to really help get our house ready.
You and your partner are both creatives. How much of the design for the nursery was bringing that creativity in for her?
I felt like my aesthetic was kind of Wes Anderson by way of Havana, with a little bit of whimsy. I didn’t want it to be overly girly, because that’s not really who I am. I’m not a frilly person, though my daughter might end up being that way at some point. I just wanted to work with a lot of color because it’s not something I normally do. A lot of the rest of my house is really beautiful, neutral tones, but I wanted her room to have just a sense of fun and wonder and almost like you’re being transported to this different world. My partner was on tour while I was pregnant and found this beautiful little guitar that he named Baby, so we wanted that for her to bring in pieces of music.
This incredible artist, Selena, made that really cool funky painting that’s in there. I’m a huge fan of collage walls. There’s drawings that my little sister Tallulah did on the nursery collage wall. There’s a photo of us from my baby shower. I want to keep adding more to it, even. There’s a painting of my sister Scout, and so there’s all these different pieces of her lineage as a female in our family.
Could you talk about the specific furniture pieces you chose? What drew you to them?
The Jenny Lind crib was the first thing that I saw that I loved because it has a sense of whimsy without being too girly. I thought even if you had a little boy and you just dressed it in a different way that you could still use it. I also wanted to be able to use the room really functionally because the nursery also functions as our guest room. I wanted to be able to put a queen bed in there, which magically fit and it came in the same spindles, and there’s a bookcase, too, that matches.
I think far and away my favorite is the big chair in the corner. I love it because I love the idea of having a place that can really grow with her, where she can sit, even at six months old, maybe she could start sitting on the back because it’s so structured, and then she could sit with her friends on there too. I totally got all sentimental and thought about this idea of when she’s a little bit older and is able to read books there. She’s got all her stuffies in her bookshelf right next to it. It also reminds me a lot of my dad. My dad was all about the big, big furniture and oversized things, and I’ve definitely taken a lot after my dad. But I just like this idea of also playing with size in the room, like you have this big chair that almost looks like it could be for a giant or something, bringing in kind of a sense of whimsy for a child.
