A Pink Paradise

The nursery Michelle Cross Fenty created for the baby she is expecting is a confection of pale pink. Then the guys of the Fenty house -- D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and 8-year-old twins Matthew and Andrew -- added a touch of burgundy and gold. Nestled in the crib with an army of pink bunnies and lambs is a bear in a Redskins sweat shirt that Matthew slipped in.

"What can I say?" says Michelle Fenty, whose baby is due any day now. "This is the first girl in the Fenty family for three generations. My in-laws were so excited."

Fenty, who was born and raised in London, loves to decorate, but she had only a few months to pull this room together. By late summer, doctors finally had convinced the 38-year-old lawyer at Perkins Coie that she was having a girl. "At first, I told Adrian that I was sure the doctors had made a mistake. I didn't dare buy anything pink until July," she says.

She began designing in the middle of the night, because her days as a working mom and mayor's wife are long and hectic. Fenty trolled favorite Web sites, including PoshTots (http://www.poshtots.com) and Pottery Barn Kids (http://www.potterybarnkids.com). She ripped pages out of Home & Design, Florida Design and Architectural Digest. And she tuned in to makeover shows such as Candice Olson's "Divine Design" on HGTV. Soon she was sketching out a French-themed plan to remake the small home office upstairs in the family's 1958 split-level in the Crestwood neighborhood.

"When I do my rooms, I don't like everything matching," Fenty says. She learned her lesson selecting furnishings for the boys' bedrooms that didn't look right as they grew older. "I think those rooms were too baby-focused, and we had to keep changing them," she says.

She brought in her own home team to implement her ideas: her parents, Annett and Charley Cross. The Crosses come to Washington from their home in New York most weekends to help with their grandchildren.

Fenty's plan for the nursery started with a chair she already owned. No clunky gliders for her. She will feed the baby in an elegant cream-and-beige French bergere chair from the Kreiss Collection. Her mother stitched curtains from a bolt of champagne-colored dupioni silk Fenty had bought years ago. They picked up lengths of inexpensive pearls at the A.C. Moore craft store to loop around as tiebacks. Online, she found her antique-white Stanley Young America crib, chest and armoire.

Charley Cross painted the room in Ralph Lauren's Hallard Barn pink and then created wide stripes on the walls using Lauren's Candlelight topcoat. "It's very incandescent and looks different all during the day," says Fenty, who picked out the paints. The chandelier from Annapolis Lighting was glue-gunned with pink rosettes and trims. The baby's initials (A.F.) are up on the wall, but at press time her name was still under wraps.

Baby Girl Fenty has an impressive wardrobe. In the closet and armoire are rows of tiny dresses and sweaters given to her at five baby showers. There is also a pint-size baseball glove, which she will need to keep up with the sports-minded family she's joining. The final touch, a pink-and-white rug from Pottery Barn Kids, has just arrived.

Now, every time Fenty walks by the nursery, she's relieved to know it's ready. "Secretly, I did it for myself. What woman wouldn't want a pale-pink room?" says the mayor's wife, admitting she was better at designing for a girl than for the boys. "I wanted it to be a room I could relax in, too. I'm going to be spending a lot of time in here."