One Room Challenge Spring 2025

I’m be tackling a bedroom in an 1800s home my partner and I are renovating top-to-bottom for a short-term rental. It’s the first time I’ve renovated, furnished, and styled an entire house all at once. It’s also the first STR either of us have tackled. 

While I have a background in both hospitality and residential construction, combining those skills has been much more challenging than I imagined… especially since we’re both doing this project in stolen time on nights and weekends around our 9-5’s.

A New Kind of Challenge

This renovation has been different from the jump:

• It’s an investment property — To add another layer of pressure: I don’t actually own this house—my partner does. So every design decision carries financial weight. That’s made it harder than usual to find my footing creatively. Normally, I walk into a space and instantly know what it needs, but the financial pressure has me interrogating every decision.
  
• It’s our first short-term rental — which means I’m learning how to blend design, hospitality, branding, and marketing in real-time. Luckily, there’s a wealth of STR content out there, and I’ve been soaking up everything I can —usually via podcast, with a paintbrush in hand. I’ve dropped some of my go-to sources at the bottom of this post.
  
• It’s a full-house renovation — three bedrooms and (soon) two bathrooms, all getting DIYed from the ground up. It’s a big lift, even for a seasoned carpenter—even more so when it has to fit into nights, weekends, and whatever’s left in the tank after our day jobs.

The ORC as a Creative Reset

If there’s one thing I learned as a former cake designer, it’s that creative limitations and a deadline can be a lifesaver. So, I gave myself both.

I decided to commit to the Spring 2025 One Room Challenge as a way to focus on one room, and one room only. Just as I was about to let the idea go, I got an email announcing that this year’s challenge would allow participants to join a week later than usual. It felt like a bit of a cosmic nudge. So here I am! 

The Color Pallette:
To anchor the design, I pulled from Benjamin Moore’s 2025 Color Palette, which is filled with bold, earthy hues that feel both grounded and a little dramatic—perfect for the moody elegance of an 1800s home.

That gave me a base. A throughline. And finally, a little creative traction.

The Deadline:
I learned last year during my first One Room Challenge that the biannual format is the perfect hack for building momentum. There’s a built-in sense of community, and the shared deadline makes it easier to keep moving when your motivation stalls. Seeing others create alongside you is energizing—and also helps remind you that progress over perfection is the goal.

The Room: Where It All (Almost) Fell Apart

To make the most of the deadline, I chose to focus on the room that’s been giving me the biggest creative block: a narrow, northwest-facing bedroom with a tricky floor plan and limited natural light.

I initially painted it in Benjamin Moore Paris Rain, a soft sagey-gray-green I’ve loved in other rooms. But in this one, the light flattened it completely. The color lost all its charm—and I lost my sense of direction.

A Feature Wall Saves the Day

That’s when I turned to one of the top STR design tips I’ve heard on repeat:
“Create a scroll-stopping feature wall behind every bed.”

I started experimenting with wallpaper mockups, drawing inspiration from STR designers like Brianna Michele Interiors, Somerled Designs, and Hannah Reid Interiors—all of whom excel at creating location-specific, playful, but still elevated spaces. 

But even with great references, my concepts weren’t quite clicking…

Until the final week of ORC registration, when I stumbled across grisaille murals—those tone-on-tone, scenic, dreamlike landscapes. Not new. But new to me. So, as creatives do, I immediately fell down a rabbit hole of painting tutorials and inspo images, and emerged on the other side with the delusional confidence that I could hand-paint one myself.

Grisaille mural at Martha Stewart’s Turkey Hill home

The Layout Problem—and Solution

Back to the layout issue, this room has a wall jog right at the entry, making furniture placement a puzzle. We needed to fit a queen bed (because no adult wants to sleep in a twin), plus a small chair, floor-length mirror, and dresser or desk.

Here’s how I thought through it:

• Headboard of the Far wall? No room for other furniture.
  
• Daybed layout on that far wall? Weird overlap with the wall jog.
  
• Headboard under the window? Close, but still awkward.
  
• Bed along the entry wall, daybed-style? This works.
  

It allows for balanced furniture placement and creates a natural focal for my mural experiment. Function and drama? We love to see it.

What Comes Next

At this point, I’ve absorbed all the tactical advice I can about short-term rental design and branding. Now I’m just trying to enjoy the process again.

At the end of the day, that’s why I got into home improvement in the first place: the joy of creating beautiful, cozy, creative spaces that people love being in.

So we’ll see how it all unfolds. Maybe I pivot again. Maybe it all works. Either way, I’m just happy to be back in the creative flow.