Thursday, October 5, 2006

You can always spot the Kelley Proxmire room in a show house. It's the one with the crisp, tailored look featuring just one or two colors combined with white.

"I love color. But limiting the colors helps me edit," says Proxmire, who decorated the house's sunroom in lime green and aquamarine contrasted with crisp white walls and curtains. "Some people want to put everything they own in a room. Keeping things to two colors helps you to limit and choose only the really good things. It makes for a bolder and cleaner look."

The Bethesda designer's past color schemes for the NSO event have included red, black and white on a porch, blue and white in bedrooms, and cocoa brown and white in a bathroom.

The inspiration for her Palm Beach-y look was a fabric by Designers Guild called Grand Paradiso Esperanza, a white orchid print with aqua and green. "It was a strong fabric, so I knew I would use it sparingly," says Proxmire, who limited it to two French-style chairs and two pillows. It was the inspiration for an aqua cotton sofa and a lime green chenille club chair.

To show it all off, she covered the walls in grass cloth and painted them in C2's Sheer. "The paint is so white, I had trouble finding fabrics that matched up to how white it was," says Proxmire. A clear glass container of washed blue and green sea glass and a cluster of neon green plants complete the look.

Does she keep to her two-color philosophy at home? "As a matter of fact," says Proxmire, "yes, I do." There, it's yellow and blue.

Jura Koncius