I’ve spent most of the last few days at home with a sick boy.  My youngest has strep throat, poor little guy.  He’s on antibiotics now, though, and is finally on the upswing. Several days at home, away from the studio, squeezing work in where it fits, doesn’t get me very good blog material.  Fortunately, I still have pictures of The Retreat to share. In case you missed my initial post about it, The Retreat is a manor house in Virginia that was built in 1799.  We did a photo shoot there for our second look book and it was an absolute dream day. It’s hard to even call this space a “foyer” with a straight face.  You would at least have to use the fancy pronunciation.  It’s basically a room all on its own with a grand staircase and magnificent woodwork. I’ve never see the inside of a front door

You would think that selecting a wall color would be really simple.  Right?  Well, if you’ve ever strolled into a paint store and picked a color based on a little chip and spent a day painting, only to realize that the color was much brighter, darker, bluer, greener, pinker, whatever-er than you thought it was in the store, then you know it’s not as simple as one would think. I’ve gone through the scenario described above enough times to know that it’s worth taking my time when selecting a paint color. Start off by going to a paint store and pulling as many chips as you want that are in your desired color palette.  (Since I qualify as a “designer”, I have paint decks from several major paint stores, so I just pull those out.)   Even if you’re just painting the walls white, get lots of paint chips, because there